Over the past week I've been fielding countless discussions with people regarding our use of the FPS Template and dealing with the asset flip accusations with Burst The Game. I want to set the record straight on a few things regarding Burst The Game and where we stand today. First of all. Brieyla is the lead developer on Burst The Game is part of the staff and is a helper with the FPS Template team. If you do not believe me then join their discord channel. https://discord.gg/36FCQGq You will see that Brieyla is listed as a dev in 'red' along side the developer of the template Fluppi393.
Brieyla has been advising people not to use the template all week because of the bugs we've encountered launching Burst. The original developer of the template is now saying the template should only be used for educational purposes because it was not developed to be used in a release. I'm the senior developer on the Burst dev team. I joined the team very late but I have already corrected most of the issues and bugs the template had. I've done so much work with the template over the past 2 weeks that I now consider it more my own than anyone else. What was wrong with the template? Well most of the issues I've encountered have been relating to null checking. The code was written without the same discipline as I have with the need to null check everything. Especially in a multiplayer environment. The lack of null checking means that empty pointers crash the game client and servers. Along with null checks the template never supported dedicated servers properly. Simple dedicated checks in the code were sometimes all that was required to fix issues. In many cases code was allowed to run without checking Role Authority or whether it was running on dedicated or not. The code was incomplete or not valid. These issues sometimes required a rewrite of the offending routine. Thankfully before the game was launched I developed a bug tracking software. This software collects crash reports from the game client as it crashes. When we launched we had over 3000 crashes logged. Since I released patch '20170901-12356-271' last week the game has had 5 recorded crashes.
There were more than 36 different fixes that were required to stabilize this template code and I now consider this working code mine. When I joined the team I had Perforce setup since the project never used a repository system before my joining the team. Our Perforce log shows that we've had over 100 revisions to the code base correcting crashes and bugs related to using the template.
So the FPS Template sucked out of the box. After many sleepless nights and plenty of help from the Steam community I can now say our build is stable. I've reworked so much of this template that I also now consider it mine. This post is my first step in addressing the asset flip commentary. The comments regarding the use of the NYC map and other content are also justified but these assets are mostly temporary. I won't say I won't be using any of the, Further from the truth. The reality is these assets allow me to build the game functionality without spending alot of time and money on building artwork. Most AAA games that ship have really big budgets and spend years making assets. As our game develops the assets will change. I am now working on addressing the SteamOS and Linux communities issues and will hopefully have a patch with those issues fixed very shortly. Thank you for reading! And keep playing Burst!