‘Not A Villain’ Webcomic – Page 790

Danni may or may not be convinced.

19 Comments

It takes skill to be speaking in two conversations at the same time.

So, just kick him until he shuts up?

Danni’ll feel a lot better once she kicks Bandit in the face 😀

I’m sure Danni will understand why Bandit’s quadriple-agentimg here once she meets Kim and Dr. Grace.

It would certainly help, but to get the full picture she’d also need to know Kat’s origin story and I don’t think either Kat or Jake trust her enough to reveal that info.

Kick him Danni, you’ll feel better. >:-}

Danni is convinced…that Bandit is a jack*ss.

That is quite a talent to speak aloud and whisper at the same time.

I suspect the top players all have a lot of practice at that.
Good thing even Tenka doesn’t have access to the text logs.

Which is really weird when you think about it.
I guess they lost a lot more than they’re letting on when everything went crazy, like the source files and all the people that could easily access that portion of the code.
Sure, Tenka had programmers left, but not the true experts of the game, who were very busy trying to keep things together and didn’t have the months it would take to dig through terrabytes of spaghetti code written by somebody elses thought processes.
Skilled programmers each have their own distinctive style to coding which is recognizable. Someone who just follows scripting for dummies or something equivalent just doesn’t. If you are up to the level I’m sure Kat’s parents were probably at, there are going to be entire blocks of programming that make no sense to anyone else as they were inspired pieces of dense and totally obscure code that is based more on their own minds though processes than any rational “method” of programming procedure.
Then if you take into account that the texting subsystem could be rife for abuse by others, they probably put extra protection to both hide it and prevent others from messing with it at all. Kind of annoying to send sweet nothings to the love of your life if someone else reads them, and it would also make it difficult to plan the rabid skunk pit for your bosses character to fall into if they can just read your messages. As well as being sabotaged by someone faking it as you or your team.

Ok, I’ve babbled more than enough. Laters! 😉

Well, while in our world I believe it’s humanly impossible to create and manage a game this complex with obscure spaghetti code, I’ve long since stopped trying to understand NAV programming, because it’s very different from our world. The same goes for pretty much any science fiction medium that includes programming btw.
E.g. when hackers attack a system the opposing party can commonly see how far the hackers have gotten and maybe even what they’ve stolen so far and the dramatic tension rises, because “will they manage to break the final fire wall?”. XD

As far as programming is concerned, I’m giving pretty much unlimited benefit of the doubt.

“Spaghetti code” is a side effect of having MORE then enough storage space to not need endless rounds of optimizing. Or… a side effect of creating a programming “language” from scratch for a groundbreaking project that has no current equivalent. Or both!

“The Game” appears to have been created by a TINY design team. Think Minecraft, not some AAA release. Its entirely possible the game was merely in Alpha when the world ended too. (And got popular because of a lack of alternatives)

But… it also appears to be occupying the only functional internet server in the world. A server they can not physically access to wipe it and put something else on! Which would make sense if it was located in space. Especially because only a space-based communication system would still be functional after the level of disruption and sabotage this world has seen.

This discussion about spaghetti code on a server in space made me think of something else – it’s possible they don’t have the source code, and their programmers might instead have to deal with assembly or machine code.

Now can they write a decompiler and work on source code from there? Possibly, but given the work needed to go through it, it would explain why they aren’t modifying a lot of the game and giving people private servers for the game – and why they don’t spend a lot of time optimizing the essential codebases.

Reading through all the decompiler output of your life support mechanisms in an underwater colony? Or just rebooting it when it goes wrong, and relying on “Super Programmers” who have access to backdoors to “Sudo Reboot” them when necessary?

If I knew the underwater colony I lived on relied on code I didn’t even have original source code with comments on it – I’d probably go with the later, even realizing that’s not sustainable.

That last panel is a total look of “you really will say anything…”
😀