AndreasHelke:I wonder if they ever heard of object oriented programming.
Yes they have and WGT uses ActionScript 3 to program the game and it is OOP. But using object oriented programming is not a cure-all.
PhiEaglesFan: There are others, besides myself, who have said, "I don't have those problems." Therefore, by knowing only that it means the problems are not systemic. <snip> If the problem is not systemic, you immediately look to the user.
That's a bad assumption on which to base your conclusion. The disconnect problems are primarily match play and alt shot related. Your activities and stats show you haven't played either AS or Match Play this past month. Moreover, in the 5 years you've been a member you've only played 119 AS and 100 Match Play games. You are overwhelmingly a single player stroke play guy. I don't see disconnects or white/blue screens in single player games either. But I do experience and witness lots of discos in AS and MP games. You should try them again.
So what's different in my PC or connection between single play stroke and AS or MP? Nothing other than WGT's code on my PC or on the server.
From reading the forum and my memory and my personal experience, my impression of the disco/crash problems of late status per game type are IMO:
Single play stroke: No disco/crash problems
CTTH: No disco/crash problems
Blitz: No disco/crash problems
Multi-player stroke: No disco/crash problems
Skins: Yes, problems
Match Play: Yes, problems
Alt Shot: Yes, problems
Not to say there aren't the occasional disco/crash in all game types, those are my impressions of a significant increase in problems in the last few months. Perhaps this post will provide more input on all game types.
Since AS was introduced in December 2010 there have always been the occasional disconnect/reconnect. And normally it was a single specific player with the problem. And mostly the games completed. This latest rash of discos can be different players during a game. A green team and a gold team player have disconnected at least once during the game. (There can be so many, its easy to lose track of which team is on the verge of forfeiting on the next disco)
But my point is, this used to work pretty well in the original design. If you read up on Exit Games Neutron you'd learn there is custom interface code on both sides, WGT to Neutron and Neutron to WGT. It used to work quite well. Are the original designers on both sides still around to maintain it? Unfortunately on WGT's side none of the original programmers are still around. I would think new features like commentary, unlocking the putting grid or scrolling thru camera views while in a multi-player game would require some interface changes.
PhiEaglesFan: The words "simply" and "error in the code"
are generally never used in the same sentence. It isn't a matter of
fixing one line. It's matter of debugging thousands (possibly tens of
thousands) lines of complex code that you, most likely, didn't write
yourself.
That's an over generalization so I have to ask: "How many lines of
code have you written?" Of course there are many simple fixes. As
there are many complex fixes. Simple fixes happen early in development
and feature testing. Feature interactions found during integration
testing and release testing are the complex fixes. If you didn't write
the code yourself, feature interactions are hard to define up front and
fix down the road. So I agree fixes are harder if you didn't write the
code. Been there, done both having written 10s of thousands of lines of
code myself back in the day.
The problem here on WGT is too many obvious feature bugs and feature interaction bugs get through the QA testing.