Support Incidents

From C4 Engine Wiki

A support incident is a documented request for paid support that is submitted through your registered account page. Each support incident currently costs $100. Submitting a support incident is necessary when asking for assistance that requires a significant amount of work, so much that it would be an unreasonable amount of effort for the free support provided on the C4 Engine forums.

Licensees of the Professional Edition of the C4 Engine receive two free support incidents per year, per user. (These do not accumulate if they are not used within the first year after they are issued.)

Support

Some examples of the kind of situations that would require a support incident are the following:

• You'd like us to look at your game's source code and figure out why a single feature isn't working the way you want it to.
• You'd like us to analyze a single feature in your game's source code and suggest optimizations or design changes.
• You have resource files (either before or after importing into C4) that you'd like us to examine for correctness.
• You want to use an undocumented function of C4 in a way that it may not have been designed to be used, and you need assistance understanding its internal workings.

Feature Requests

For Professional Edition licensees, a support incident can also be used to request a single minor feature to be implemented in the engine. A minor feature is defined as one that would take less than about half a day to implement, and it can't interfere with the correct operation of existing features in the engine. (Features implemented in response to a support incident are not exclusive to the requesting licensee.)

Bugs

It is possible that a support incident will uncover a bug in the engine. If a support incident was submitted because you couldn't get a particular feature to work correctly in your game code, and we determine that there was a bug in the engine causing the problem, then you will not be charged for the support incident.

We may sometimes ask that a support incident be submitted when a possible bug is reported. This is done in case the problem you are experiencing is not really a bug in the engine, and we spent a lot of time tracking down a seemingly strange behavior that is actually working properly according to design.

Rejection

Support incidents can be rejected under the following circumstances:

• Fulfilling the support request would require a large amount of work that we can't justify doing for the price of a single support incident. In this case, it is not possible to combine multiple support incidents. For large jobs, we can negotiate separate work contracts, however.
• The request does not involve C4 features in any way. For example, you've asked us to implement a feature in your game that does not depend on the engine.
• The support incident requests changes to a specific version of the engine (i.e., not the current version).
• A feature request was submitted, but you are not a Professional Edition licensee.

This list is not exhaustive. If a support incident is rejected, then you will not be charged.