2010-03-19, 02:19 AM
As people have said before, just because it's a lot of code doesn't excuse bugs and glitches staying around forever, and it certainly doesn't excuse abominable customer service.
The problem with the MapleStory code, as far as I can tell (as a professional programmer who's never actually seen any of the code) is that it's horribly designed. Or rather, lacking in design.
I don't know the actual history of the game's development, but the way it seems to me, it started out as a single-player rpg written by someone who knows some C but has no formal programming training - and thus knows nothing of data structures, algorithms, database normalization, design patterns, etc. He/she was just having fun with sprites.
Then it got expanded, first to peer-to-peer and later to a client-server model, but the amateurish design elements remained, making bugs inevitable, performance atrocious, and hacker-exploitable security holes plentiful.
It really needs to be rewritten from scratch. But who's got time for that? They don't even want to fix the smaller, easily fixable stuff (like those pirate sounds, or glitched hitboxes). Just slap another patch on, using the same crappy foundations, make a flashy ad, and rake in the money from new players.
The problem with the MapleStory code, as far as I can tell (as a professional programmer who's never actually seen any of the code) is that it's horribly designed. Or rather, lacking in design.
I don't know the actual history of the game's development, but the way it seems to me, it started out as a single-player rpg written by someone who knows some C but has no formal programming training - and thus knows nothing of data structures, algorithms, database normalization, design patterns, etc. He/she was just having fun with sprites.
Then it got expanded, first to peer-to-peer and later to a client-server model, but the amateurish design elements remained, making bugs inevitable, performance atrocious, and hacker-exploitable security holes plentiful.
It really needs to be rewritten from scratch. But who's got time for that? They don't even want to fix the smaller, easily fixable stuff (like those pirate sounds, or glitched hitboxes). Just slap another patch on, using the same crappy foundations, make a flashy ad, and rake in the money from new players.