Originally Posted by Raymac
Admittedly, I don't know much about programming, but it would make sense that making improvements to the existing game would take less time than starting from scratch. I always figured for PS2, all they really needed to do was clean up the lag and give it a new coat of paint and you'd be pretty ready to go.
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Sadly improving code is much harder than creating new code, especialy if you didnt create the code in the first place.
To put it simple, there are two kinds of code:
1. Nice, clean code with a big documentation, easy for everyone to come along, understand what was done, and change/improve stuff. This is pretty much the goal of every programmer, but rare to find. Creating "good" code takes alot of time, because sometimes you spend days doing something, just to completly start over in order to improve it. If people would do that at all times, games would just get 10 times more expensive to create.
2. What you see quite more often, and the Planetsides code looks that way, is a big clusterfu** of lines of code without a documentation. Mostly only the guy who wrote it in the first place really understands it, and can make changes. Planetides orginal devs left, and took their knowlege, as well as quite some handy tools, with them. Joel and the crew had a hard time creating new stuff because of that. In fact, they couldnt make changes to the base layouts because they lacked the tools.
The only wise thing SOE could have done With PSN is a complete recode, starting from scratch. And im pretty sure they did that, because the game is a new game anyway, and improving the old code without letting improving the live game is just dumb.
