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posted by Dopefish on Thursday February 20 2014, @01:30PM   Printer-friendly
from the stop-shipping-beta-quality-code dept.

combatserver writes:

"The folks over at Dark Side of Gaming are reporting an interesting development in the game modding community--a recently released modification for the blockbuster game from Bethesda, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (PC version). A long-running issue with the game since release has been recurring CTDs (crashes to desktop) and infinite loading screens that often bring the game to a grinding halt after just a few minutes of play, especially when heavily modded. Bethesda has tried to resolve the issue with several patches, to no avail.

Sheson, a member of the Skyrim modding community, fixed Skyrim. According to many user reports--thousands, in fact--Sheson's relatively minor adjustment to memory allocation has solved the vast majority of stability issues. The improvements have increased game performance far beyond what anyone had expected. Players are now merging mods to get around the hard-coded cap of 256 mods that Skyrim can load at any given time, effectively packing more content into the game. The fix also allows for Skyrim to run on lower-end PCs, widening the market for a game that has already sold over 20 million copies.

Since Sheson's patch released, the fix has been repackaged by other community members as a mod for Skyrim to make it even more accessible. Skyrim players who use the script-extender SKSE will be pleased to hear that the patch will be included in the next build."

[ED Note: Bottom line -- Bethesda shouldn't be packaging poorly written and untested code for sale, then requiring gamers to pay to play as beta testers. Kudos to Sheson for his hard work and effort.]

 
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  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by jcd on Thursday February 20 2014, @05:31PM

    by jcd (883) on Thursday February 20 2014, @05:31PM (#3582)

    This really is the key. And this is a huge problem in the video game industry, especially ones that allow modding. Somehow the community has become responsible for fixing poorly coded games, allowing [insert studio here] to charge huge amounts of money for a game that still needs to be fixed by someone who's not getting paid. Way to save on those debugging and troubleshooting costs.

    --
    "What good's an honest soldier if he can be ordered to behave like a terrorist?"
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  • (Score: 1) by darinbob on Friday February 21 2014, @03:28AM

    by darinbob (2593) on Friday February 21 2014, @03:28AM (#4040)

    On the other hand there are many games which have glaring bugs and no easy way to fix them. Those that allow modding did so to allow "modding" as their only goal; the fact that players used tools to fix bugs was a side effect. I really don't think any game maker decided to ship a buggy game knowing that someone external would fix it later.

    As for this particular fix; it was done without a normal mod that overrides data files. It's actually an external DLL used to shadow and override executable code. It's only a "mod" in the sense that it is external file used to modify the game.