06-19-2003, 05:59 PM
It's virtually impossible to code a program of a decent size without making any mistakes, even if you do know a lot about software engineering.
It is also virtually impossible to find all the bugs in a program before releasing it, so pathces are made later.
And that's just the "pure bugs", add to it errors done in design, balancing, etc. and the need for patches becomes obvious.
The main reason there are no patches for console games could be that not everyone has a DVD+R drive. It's also a bit easier to code since you know exactly what kind of hardware/software the user will be running (e.g. a PS2) and thus compatibility becomes much less of an issue. What happens if the user has chip-modded his console isn't really the programmers problem.
With PCs you have to work hard to find two individual systems that have the exact same pieces of hardware and software, thus the code gets more complicated.
It is also virtually impossible to find all the bugs in a program before releasing it, so pathces are made later.
And that's just the "pure bugs", add to it errors done in design, balancing, etc. and the need for patches becomes obvious.
The main reason there are no patches for console games could be that not everyone has a DVD+R drive. It's also a bit easier to code since you know exactly what kind of hardware/software the user will be running (e.g. a PS2) and thus compatibility becomes much less of an issue. What happens if the user has chip-modded his console isn't really the programmers problem.
With PCs you have to work hard to find two individual systems that have the exact same pieces of hardware and software, thus the code gets more complicated.