[procarch2019]

As an OT systems architect I am totally floored. We design and plan for systems lifecycle on a ~20yr scale, with OT hardware (not the controls hardware, that’s closer to 10-20) lifecycle much shorter (~5 yr). Obvious on Earth we can afford luxuries of adopting new things, which actually shortens a total system lifecycle since new tech drives new designs.

I wish (and don’t) I could work on something that had a dependency of “design it once because it’s relatively inaccessible after its go live.” I’ll def check out the documentary.

[turtledragonfly]

Video games used to be like this. Once you built the "gold master" CD/DVD/cartridge/etc it was out of your hands. It was kinda nice to have a concrete end to the project [1]. Nowadays, everything is on the 'net, you can send patches, dlc, etc and the notion of a game being "done" is murky.

[1] There was, however, one game I worked on where they had to pull the boxes from stores (delivered, but not yet for sale) and swap out the disk in order to release a critical fix that was discovered too late. Fun times (:

[Pet_Ant]

Which resulted in the notorious release of Outpost [1]. I think owners of that would have happily accepted a large series of post release patches over that.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outpost_(1994_video_game)#Rece...

[qingcharles]

Especially when it was cartridge games. I remember when PC games started to get updates and you'd wait for next month's cover disc to get them. I seem to remember Frontier Elite having about a dozen...

I just checked the one commercial game I developed and there are two patches I can see released by Eidos for it.

[cazum]

I'm curious, what was the bug that was so critical the publisher decided it was best to perform such a (what I assume was) costly operation post-distribution?