No it's not. There are so many hardware/software configurations out there these days that it's impossible to test for all bugs on them. The only way to catch these potential conflicts is to release the game and deal with the various problems as they come up, through the release of patches. Computer systems are simply too varied, there's no such thing as a standard to test from, like there is with consoles.
Why Firaxis hold back Civ5 info?
- Thread starter hclass
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No it's not. There are so many hardware/software configurations out there these days that it's impossible to test for all bugs on them. The only way to catch these potential conflicts is to release the game and deal with the various problems as they come up, through the release of patches. Computer systems are simply too varied, there's no such thing as a standard to test from, like there is with consoles.
All other kind of software are facing the same huge variety of hardware setup. They are as flourishing as PC games nowadays... I don't see nor foresee any sign of decline.
Delivery of game full of bugs can't be a global norm in the game industry, even if it is now, it won't last long.
Btw, I don't see good future for console, no matter how good their current market is. Just like watch, where its sole function is now become a sub-function in many other electronic device... its market is shrinking, no matter how.
I currently have more than 120 software installed on my PC. That include: games, utilities, business applications, programing tools etc. All are major bugs free.
I don't believe that can't include Civ5... even with its initial release.
For software development, there isn't a huge number of cases where we need to have different set of codes due to hardware setup variants. Somehow, very few people code in assembly language nowadays... In layman term, I mean there seldom be a need for programmer to deal with hardware directly...
Don't worry, the world is still safe, it won't ended that soon...
Exactly! No matter how, the future does not belong to console, if it is alone.
r_rolo1
King of myself
As long as it takes more time to acess things in the cloud world than on a nice HD, there will always be necessity for a desktop ( or laptop ) PC, atleast for the more exigent apps ( that is ... 99% of the times, games
) 
Not mentioning that clould computing is only a decent idea in spots where the net acess is fast and reliable, a thing that probably excludes 90% of the planet surface And someone somewhere using the same software on a different configuration might be running into some problems. Just because things have been working on your system doesn't mean it will work perfectly on someone else's. You seem to have completely missed the point I was trying to make.
That will never happen. There's all sorts of reasons why people will prefer to use their own systems. While cloud computing might fill a few niches here and there, the bulk of computing will always take place on dedicated systems.
A good programmer makes 1 mistake in 10 lines of code.
It's really supprising, that most of the software runs without major bugs, and that not everyday a nuclear power plant explodes.
Bug free is somehow a dream.
Ha! I have not.
Just because "someone somewhere using the same software on a different configuration might be running into some problems", it doesn't means it is a software major bug.
and remember,
even that someone is using different hardware from mine and he/she encounter a bug, still it could be a logical/software bug... nothing to do with hardware.
You seem to have completely forgotten about what is all these originated, it is from my statement saying:
See? I have emphasize the word "major" right from the very beginning.hclass said:
It is not too difficult to avoid major bugs with good programming habit, much less saying to discover them (if they do exist in a software) with proper quality control.
Btw, it has been years (a long time) that I haven't encounter a software bug that is purely hardware related...
A good programmer makes 1 mistake in 10 lines of code.
It's really supprising, that most of the software runs without major bugs, and that not everyday a nuclear power plant explodes.
Bug free is somehow a dream.
I think it should be:
A good programmer makes few mistakes in a block of codes and because he/she is good, normally the mistakes are rectified before he/she move on to code the next block.
Believe it or not, I have experience doing debuging in my dream.
It is to the person encountering the bug.
Why yes, and that's exactly the point I was making. It's impossible to identify a potential software bug if someone is using a setup that's different than any used by the beta-testers. They only have so many people testing them with a limited variation of equipment/software. So a problem won't be revealed until the software reaches the general population and interacts with some obscure setup.
Most titles are released without any "major" bugs. They run just fine on the majority of systems. If they weren't then the company releasing it would be out of business in no time. I'm rather confused as to your defintion of "major" frankly.
Then you haven't used too many programs in the last few years. One minor example. In Oblivion, Nvidia users can't set their shadow map resolution to 256, the game default. Doing so can cause a crash in the game. It has to be set to 512 or higher. It runs flawlessly when that one setting is changed however, and ATI users have no problems at all with the default setting. Also, when running Vista, you can't open the console if you have an infrared scanner attached to your system. Using one with XP causes no problems though.
Except that games are pressing the PC a lot harder than the vast majority of the software out there (especially the GPU). A lot of the cutting edge games have problems with incompatible video cards or drivers. It's not uncommon to have to use different video card drivers with different games.
The programming involved in producing a game tends to be a lot more complex than regular productivity applications as well. There's alot more things that can go wrong. It's pointless trying to compare something like Civ 4 to a simple text editor for example.
I have never played Oblivion. I don't even know what is it.
Vista is an O/S and should not be classified as normal software... OK,OK, softwares are dancers and O/S is the stage for them to dance on it. You can't treat stage instability the same with dancers get sick, right?
that would be nice, but it's sure a dream.You mean nightmare, not dream.
Technically both is the same, only the impact is different.
But video card driver is driver, it is the link between O/S and the hardware... I mean you shouldn't count driver problem as software bugs.
Yes you can, that's exactly the point I've been trying to make. Just because software functions flawlessly using the configuration that the programmer/testers did doesn't mean that it's going to work as well on some other setup. A slight variation can introduce a problem with underlying code and make some part of the programming not work as it should. Usually that shows up as some minor glitch, but sometimes it can cause some serious issues. It's a real problem these days since we now have people using 3 different versions of an OS on the PC side, never mind Mac and Linux. Then there's all sorts of variations in hardware setups. It's simply impossible to produce a program that is going to work flawlessly under all those environments, and there's too many potential configurations to fully test for all of them.
What do you think that drivers are? They're software, nothing more. If the software of a program is not interacting properly with the software of the hardware being used, that's a bug. Honestly, you obviously know very little about how computers work if you can make a statement like that.
PS: You seem to have some misconceptions on how computers work. It appears you think that the program you are running is somehow seperate from the OS, and in turn the drivers that make your hardware work. That's not the case. All programs draw from software routines used by the OS. Once you run a game, or any other program, it becomes just an extension of your OS, doing things that are somewhat different but still relying on the underlying code. In the PC environment at least, DirectX is a good example of this. It's a number of routines built into the OS that all games have to call up. They simply wouldn't work without them. Those same routines are also what makes things like video drivers work. All the software parts in a system work together as a whole whenever you run a program. If one area has any sort of error then you get a bug. At no point in your CPU does it differentiate between the program you're running, the OS or the hardware drivers. It's all just code that it has to process, and they all have to work together smoothly.
It would certainly be unfair to blame the developer for driver issues (though I suspect a lot of customers will do it anyway), but it would still keep me from playing the game.
So, yes, I guess I agree that the game could (in theory) come out without major bugs. It might still be unplayable for a lot of people, though.
Another thing is that the game is almost certain to come out with major exploits. It's happened on every release I've seen so far: The first patch usually nerfs a bunch of overpowered features that the players have exploited, and renders all your saved games useless in the process.
I still say it makes a lot of sense to wait for the first patch.
