This isn't usually an issue because of rolling compiles (Destiny)

by Kahzgul, Thursday, January 14, 2016, 02:56 (3476 days ago) @ CruelLEGACEY

Everywhere I worked in the past had "rolling compiles." Basically there was a system (or two, or three, or four...) that did nothing but take the latest versions of everything and compile them. Then it would run a monkey code (just a bot that randomly simulated button presses) to make sure the build was stable. If it was, it would push the compiled code to the server, and that's what everyone would work from. There would always be several builds available on the server: Latest compile (regardless of if it crashed or not), latest stable (monkey) compile (which was the most recent build the monkey thought was good), latest stable (verified) compile (which was the latest build a human being had confirmed was stable, usually my job), and latest test push (which was the most recent version that we'd distributed to the test team en masse).

The point is that there was always a build to look at. The only time that you were backlogged waiting for a compile would be just before release when you were squashing one major bug at a time (and even then there were rolling builds because person A would have a fix and then person B would have their fix, etc.. just in case fix A didn't work...).

My understanding of Destiny's bottleneck was that it wasn't the compile that was the issue, but rather opening a map to edit with, which can't be pre-done because you're constantly switching between maps, and have to save a file and then push it to the compiler in order to make your changes available to everyone. Which falls into the category of bad tools design in my book. If saving and re-opening a map to make an edit takes 12 hours, my producer would have the tools team working 24 hour shifts in order to get something that didn't cost me half a day of artist time for every little change. Honestly, that kind of thing simply would not fly anywhere I've worked, and it shocked me to read about in Kotaku (though it does gel with my observations of the snail's pace at which Destiny adapts to change).