Patches, what can be done?

[Delthayre]

I've seen a lot of cries for patches recently, some measured and balance, others fiery and foolish. I wholeheartedly agree that a patch is warranted and make no issue of most of the points brought up (provided those points are mentioned in a calm and reasonable manner). My quandry regards the usefullness and capability of patches.

Just how much can be done with a patch? What limits (both coded and financial) are there on patching?

Anyone with programming experience out there is particularly welcome to comment.

P.S. Once this is done, I suggest we prepare a detailed and relistic list of patch suggestions followed by a coordinated e-mailing campaign. Enough letters and we should get a few on the next "ask the civ team" if they intend to continue that.

P.S.S. Let us avoid the issues of multiplayer and the missing editor functions for now. It is well established that they can be added to the game relatively easily and in the case of editor are almost guaranteed to be implemented (officially, that is).

 

[buju]

I'm a programmer, not games, but I've had to do my share of patches to software. There really is no limit to the coding they can do, the limit is how many resources they want to allocate to fixing this game. I would think they'd do as much as possible. They have the ability to rewrite any parts of the game. But it will require testing for balance, etc.
You'll notice that a lot of patches just replace the .exe file, this is where most of the code for the application is; unless there are changes that need to be made in any DLLs, but these could also be rolled out with a patch.

 

[droo]

A big factor that tends to affect a lot of games is whether a saved version of a pre-patched game can be loaded into a patched version. Obviously this depends on the nature of the changes in the patch.

At best, I'd imagine that wonder movies would be an optional download since they could be quite a few MB to download. I'm guessing that if the demand is loud enough, we'd see them in an x-pack.

As buju said, the real issue is the financial one. How much time and person-hours is Firaxis/Infogrames willing to dedicate to fixes/improvements? That remains to be seen I guess.