What are hygiene initiatives?
TL;DRHygiene initiatives clean up noisy errors, warnings, logs and data errors so remaining ones are meaningful, with the aim of reaching zero errors and blocking new ones before submission.
This is not about BO. That's what you're referring to. But hygiene is a collection of initiatives related to cleaning up errors, logs, and in general, just reports we get from the game engine that can signify errors or not. So if anybody's ever opened a console in Star Citizen, you probably think, whoa, what the hell is going on? Because there's tons of messages going through, all kinds of stuff. Well, that's what hygiene is meant to clean up in a way. Now, these things will take us a long time to clean up, arguably. But we do have the same problem of signal-to-noise ratio in other areas. So when environment artists are working in the editor, they get level warnings. Well, there's a ton of those warnings that are either irrelevant...
Asserts.
Asserts, warnings and errors. And so the issue is a level artist is going to get some warning. It's like, can I do anything about this? Oh, there's 50,000 of them. Probably I don't have to worry about this. The reality is one of those is actually an issue. And so the hygiene initiatives is like a collection of things that we need to change in how we build the game to clean up these things so that the errors are meaningful. We have the same thing on the DataCore side. So for those who don't know, the game data, so all the records we use to configure the components or all the game data, is just stored in a database called DataCore. There's a ton of errors in DataCore that are reported, schema violations, things like that. They're not fatal errors, but they're still there. And we allow them to be there. And that's historical. And so the hygiene initiative is a means for us to reach zero errors in those areas so that we can then prevent them from even being submitted in the first place. So hygiene is basically pre-submit verification on things and concerted efforts to solve these things so that we can be in a clean house. It's like we want to clean the house so that we can do better.
Somebody in the chat was saying errors that should be warnings, warnings that should be infos.
Yeah. Bad classifications of things. So we even have now systems put in place in the assert dialogues that pop up so that you can report a bad error. Literally, now we get reports for bad errors so that devs can go in and fix the wording or change the severity or things like this.