DreamScene RTM dated July 19, Microsoft: what took so long?
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As reported by a bunch of shops, Duke Nukem Forever Dreamscene was finally delivered to consumers who shelled out mega bucks for the ultimate operating system offered by Microsoft.
Having been an Ultimate (Extras) Tester and somewhat attuned to certain aspects of Microsoft’s inner workings, I found it crazy that between March 22 and today, very little work was done on Dreamscene.
I backed up a copy of Dreamscene’s core component, Dreamscene.dll, before upgrading for comparison purposes. (Gut feeling). The preview build had a build number of 16455. The final build has a build number of 16504. Hmm…
The latest preview build of Dreamscene was released around February 28. Are you telling me someone has been actively pounding coding for 209 days and only managed to build 49 times? Oh, but wait. 209 days is not accurate. The final Dreamscene build we have in our laps appears to have been put together July 19, 2007, according to the timestamp in the PE header (and build string — thanks Long) of the library. Our count goes down to 141 days.
For those that are numerically challenged (or just lazy), here’s a picture a whipped up at one in the morn’.
Assuming the PE timestamp is not some freak accident, it is unclear what was going on between mid-July and mid-September. Had Microsoft just released Dreamscene then, and patched it later (like Vista), they wouldn’t be in this mess.
Update: Long had the genius idea of looking at the digital certificate date, backing up my claims. I think the same amount (or class?) of people that read EULAs top to bottom, look at digital certificate timestamps…
