assume, assert, enforce, @safe

[Bruno Medeiros via Digitalmars-d]

On 23/09/2014 19:35, H. S. Teoh via Digitalmars-d wrote:
>> >it game will crash on ANY bug, it will contain alot less bugs.  'cause
>> >even the dumbiest QA full of monkeys will not let the game which
>> >crashes once in a ten seconds to go out of the door.

When doing QA, that's a whole different thing than when playing normally.

> +1. When the game blatantly crashes on every little thing, there is
> pressure on the coders to actually fix the problem. Ignored errors ==
> convenient excuse for coders to evade work ("it's*only*  a minor display
> glitch!", "the deadline's tomorrow, we don't have time to fix this",
> "it's 5pm, I need to go home and feed my goldfish", "besides, it still
> works anyway, more or less", etc.).

I would invite you to buy a *retail copy* of Elder Scrolls 3 : Morrowind 
for PC and try playing that. The game did exactly what Walter and you 
guys suggested: when an assertion tripped, it would crash straight away 
to the desktop, with only a message dialog saying that an assertion had 
failed (with info on the source and line of the assertion, and an extra 
message).
I couldn't play that game, it would crash too often. And saving wasn't 
quick enough that I could in practice be manually saving every 15 min. 
or so.
Only when several iterations of patches game out, several months after 
release, did the game become stable enough to be played enjoyably.
(in fairness, if the assertions where about core game logic, I too would 
prefer a crash rather then possible corruption of game state. But IIRC 
there was a few assertions crashes that seemed related to textures, 
directx, or shader stuff - for that I could have lived without a game crash)

Sometimes even with known bugs the game is shipped, because of 
management pressure and/or huge delays already. (especially with 
pressures to do multi-platform releases).

-- 
Bruno Medeiros
https://twitter.com/brunodomedeiros