Aeolwind wrote on Jul 30
th, 2012 at 9:07am:
Biggest thing about DDO is it seems everything is hard coded, right down to what items are generated in chests.
It's so hardcoded that a friend with a rogue and an item that substract 30 SP ends up with a 64BitInt-30 SP pool ( potential as he in fact has 0 SP, but the value is downright funny to see on a rogue )
Auran wrote on Jul 30
th, 2012 at 11:13am:
I honestly don't think the game was ever designed to last more than 2 or 3 years, but here we are.
Probably true. IMHO it was probably in Atari's mind a spare wheel in case NWN2 failed ( which it did IMNSHO ) to keep people addicted while the next instance of NWN was developped.
Bill Z Bubb wrote on Jul 30
th, 2012 at 2:14pm:
All it takes is for a new way of thinking to take hold. All new code should be procedurized. Any code they have to modify should be procedurized when practical. Make sure that only experienced database coders are allowed to handle the tables/indexes and SQL statements. They just have to begin doing it in an incremental process because it's a sure bet the Pointy Haired Bosses will never accept a full blown rewrite.
It's probably all procedurized and object code.
As for the database... Trust me, it can go messy without the help of PHBs.
We have no idea of the real infrastructure at the backend ( server ) side.
We could have multiple SQL DBs spread on multiple servers all talking to a heavilly parallelized system where the instance number represent a physical server.
Or we could have a single virtual machine handling everything internally.
Or we could have a mainframe.
All in all we can know what happens client side, we can know what happens at protocol level between client and 'server' but we know shit about how things are handled server side.