Arkham Quixote (2020)

<i>&quot;A young computer engineer, known to be one of the most skillful in Westborough’s basement, said he had a fantasy about a better job than his. In it, he goes to work as a janitor for a computer company whose designs leave much to be desired. There, at night, disguised by mop and broom, he sneaks into the offices of the company’s engineers and corrects the designs on their blackboards and desks.”</i><p>― Tracy Kidder, The Soul of A New Machine

&quot;I argue a lot for craftsmanship-for-craftsmanship’s-sake, and I realize how that usually doesn’t make financial sense, but in this case a little attention and care could have saved the publisher millions of dollars in actual costs, and only god-knows-how-much in reputation and goodwill. Sloppy engineering has a cost, good craftsmanship has actual value, and the next time someone is allowed to ship something this terrible we might not be lucky enough to be able to develop such a fix.&quot;

Well done, for finding the problem with analysis tools and especially lots of experience and even fixing it without source code.<p>It&#x27;s puzzling why the studio couldn&#x27;t do this. The problem itself is easy to spot by a performance engineer, and avoided in the first place by an experienced developer. Did all the leads leave after implementing the prototype? Did management fire the whole team after the release? Were sales good enough that nobody really cared?

(2020)<p>I don&#x27;t see it having been discussed here before, so be sure to check out the followup or contemporaneous reddit discussion:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;pcgaming&#x2F;comments&#x2F;ffhimn&#x2F;a_fix_for_arkham_knights_stuttering_framerate&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;pcgaming&#x2F;comments&#x2F;ffhimn&#x2F;a_fix_for_...</a>

Not a graphics guy so I have nothing beyond that Tracy is cool, but I think this is a good argument for open sourcing games when they&#x27;ve reached a certain age.<p>I&#x27;m 20, so not that old, and I do load up and old game just to be a bit nostalgic sometimes, will I be able to do that when I&#x27;m 40 or 50? It&#x27;s easy to think that the answer is yes because you can get emulators for games from the past, but games now have so many moving parts (and DRM unfortunately).

I love seeing this kind thing. It reminds me vividly of the GTA5 loading reverse engineering that was finally patched after discovery.

This is super cool hackery of the highest order.

Apparently the author of this blog post criticized another person who also did a breakdown of the same game, because their website was crappy.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;SheriefFYI&#x2F;status&#x2F;1468650249426128899?s=20" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;SheriefFYI&#x2F;status&#x2F;1468650249426128899?s=...</a><p>It&#x27;s funny because I like the idea of a niche group of programmers all working to increase the fps of Arkham and getting competitive with each other.

This is a cool hack, but I&#x27;m so, so, so sick of the entitled attitude in our community. I see it every single day, somebody finds an obscure bug in some software and there&#x27;s a whole load of Twitter assholes going &quot;I can&#x27;t believe those MORONS would ship something this DUMB, I hope somebody got fired for this&quot;, etc., like the &#x27;Genius at Work&#x27; from the Simpsons.<p>Stuff is hard. Most people are overworked and underpaid. Ease off. If you ever, ever root for somebody to lose their job, you&#x27;re not on our side.