Ole's Blog Update: "Is this a joke?"

Ole Herbjornsen, the Lead Designer of Age of Conan, has just posted a new blog entry. In this entry, we get to see the inner workings of bug reporting between QA and the Dev team. I want a Cactus Man!

Some of the feedback I got after the previous blog updates was that people would like to hear more dev-humour and a bit about the inner workings here at the offices. So I thought it would be fitting to introduce you all to Bugzilla. Bugzilla is a tool which is used by both QA and devteam. It allows you to spawn tasks which can then be viewed in a browser window, one can add file attachments (screenshots of bugs from QA being a prime example), track hours spent on the task, put in comments in the task or reassign to others for input or even hook up dependencies. Say you were to request a new monster, the best thing to do would be to generate a task for a concept artist, character artist, animator and designer, set milestones and hook them all up to a mastertask to track the progress of each task. As you probably understand by now Bugzilla is very central in our production environment. The total number of tasks for AoC is probably in the five digit range, maybe higher. Most of these tasks are rather straightforward but sometimes, sometimes, we get tasks which are a bit out of the ordinary:

Our story starts with QA reporting a bug, I have provided the comments in the bug below and added som explanations in parenthesis. This bug gets sent sent back and forth between members of QA and the devs:

You can read the entire blog entry over at Ole's Blog.