Re: Rubywand's new award! Plus, a few Questions

[CUTjefbla@bconnex.net (Jeff Blakeney)]

On Fri, 27 Feb 1998 17:51:54 -0600, Rubywand <rubywand@swbell.net>
wrote:

>No fair! Tripping over mutilated, sliced-up half-wits is not the
>same as being shot down.

-= I =- take VERY personal offense at this statement.  I'm sure many
others do as well.  I happen to think that my points, which you never
bothered to address as far as I have seen, were very good, to the
point and filled with FACTS.

Basically, you just opened yourself up for flaming from a lot of
people.

>     You mean like a game that causes machines running the standard OS--
>the one all those other programs run on with no problem-- does not have
>a BUG? Perhaps it has escaped your notice that there is _no_ popular,
>installed OS under which the particular game will run without bombing
>some user systems.

What is your hang up with the "standard OS"?  What exactly does that
mean?  All the operating systems that I have ever used have had bugs
discovered and patches and new versions followed to fix those bugs.
If version 7.0 of GS/OS were to come out, this game would run fine
under it because it was written to follow the rules.  If the bug that
is being triggered is fixed in this new version, Wolf3D would work
fine with no modification necessary.

I'm curious to know, do you not have any of the publically available
patches for System 6.01 installed on your machine?  If not, you are
opening yourself up to a lot of problems and headaches that you could
avoid if you installed these patches to the "standard OS".  By the
way, there are many programs that don't work under "standard OS"
either because they were written for older versions of the OS and
didn't follow the rules or because they require add-ons to the
"standard OS" to operate (ie. Spectrum, The Manager and TransProg III
require the Heirarchic init or CDEV, Music Composer requires
Clays.MTools, TCP/IP programs require the Marinetti CDEV).

As far as I know, for Wolf 3D to crash your system you have to have
the Heirarchic INIT installed on your system.  It may have escaped
your notice but the Heirarchic INIT was upgraded (my version is 1.6.3
dated 18 June, 1997) and is now a CDEV.  Wolf 3D does not crash
machines that are using the new CDEV version, which is backwards
compatible with the INIT, so is it any wonder that only one playtester
was affected?

>     By the way, as you may recall, we worried about, identified, and
>discussed the bug for roughly a week on the world's largest Apple II
>newsgroup without getting a word of feedback from the creator.
>
>     At the time, this caused some bad feelings because practically
>everyone assumned that, of course, after posting the announcement on
>csa2 and releasing the game, the author word be monitoring csa2 for user
>responses.

Maybe because he doesn't usually read this group and just posted the
notice about the programs availability as a consideration for the
Apple II users here that don't read messages on Genie or Deplhi or
check his web pages regularly?

Maybe he was waiting for more reports of problems in case it was just
one or two people who could be helped individually.

Maybe he was sick and couldn't use the computer.

Maybe his ISP had system problems so he couldn't connect.

Maybe his keyboard broke from all the coding he did on Wolf.

There are any number of reasons that he took <sarcasm mode on> two
whole days <sarcasm mode off> to reply.  I really don't think Sheppy
should be blamed for not supporting his product because YOU are
impatient.  A lot of people don't read the newsgroups constantly.
Some only read them once a week.  This is a fact and has nothing to do
with the quality of his program or his support for it.

You also may have noticed in the Wolf 3D docs under the heading Help &
Technical Support, Sheppy states that the best place for assistance is
the Apple II Forum on Delphi.  For updates, news, utilities and stuff
go to his web page.  He also lists his e-mail address for support
questions.  Nowhere is there any mention of his intention to provide
support here in comp.sys.apple2.  The fact that he has is doing so
says more about his intentions to solve any problems than your
constant complaining about a problem that is NOT in his code.

It shouldn't surprise many of the long time readers here that many of
the Apple II developers gave up on this newgroup because of the abuse
they had to deal with.  Kind of reminds me of some of the messages
being posted lately.

>     That the CALL is risky does not necessarily make using it a bad
>idea. It may, in some cases, be a very clever idea. But, really, this is
>not the kind of thing you tack onto a major game just hours before
>release. There are too many things which can go wrong and no time to do
>the necessary testing.

You have been spewing this line all over the newsgroup.  Where exactly
did you get this information?  I was in chat on Delphi with Sheppy
when he discovered the problem with the RefreshDesktop call and he
decided to use the SetTSPtr call to make RefreshDesktop do what he
wanted.  This was at least one WEEK, if not two, before the program
was released and the testers did get to test this change.

There was a total of one out of ten playtesters that ran into this
problem and the error couldn't be reproduced by others so they figured
it was a rare setup that would cause the problem.  As it was not a
fatal or dangerous problem (didn't initialize disks or anything, just
makes you reboot) it wasn't that big of a concern.

Get a grip, relax and learn to be a little more patient.  You usually
won't get instantaneous responses in newsgroups.  You can report a bug
here but then it might take a week for you to get a response because
it has to make it to the person responsible, they need to verify it
and respond and then it has to get back to you.  Especially when the
documentation doesn't list this group as a place to get support.  I'm
surprised you don't seem to realize this.  You've been around a long
time.

The cool thing about all this is that the bug was discovered and being
worked on before you mentioned anything and has since been fixed.
Download GUPP v1.07 and the problem goes away and it won't be a
problem for any other program either.  Unless of course you don't want
to install a bug fix and want to continue using all the bugs that are
in the "standard OS" but that is your choice.  If you choose to go
that route, please stop complaining about bugs that appear on your
outdated system and let the rest of us continue to use programs bug
free on our updated systems.

By the way, this is the last that I'm going to add to this thread and
if you continue to stand by your, in my opinion, incorrect statements,
so be it.  If the overwhelming majority and the facts can't sway you,
then I certainly can't.

=== I've had enough SPAM.  Cut the obvious from my address to email me. ===