[flagged]
Telling a 3d engine programmer not to have opinions on data formats? Good luck with that.
How a 20 year old bug in GTA San Andreas surfaced in Windows 11 24H2
101–110 of 315 posts
Re: How a 20 year old bug in GTA San Andreas surfaced in Windows 11 24H2
#102My takeaway, speaking as someone who leans towards functional programming and immutability, is "this is yet another example of a mutability problem that could never happen in a functional context" (so, for example, this bug would have never been created by Rust unless it was deeply misused)
Rust protects you from external file data you read being incorrect? That's one hell of a language!
Of course not, but this here was a memory access error and rust would have prevented this.
Re: How a 20 year old bug in GTA San Andreas surfaced in Windows 11 24H2
#103IMHO, if something isn’t part of the contract, it should be randomized. Eg if iteration order of maps isn’t guaranteed in your language, then your language should go out of its way to randomize it. Otherwise, you end up with brittle code: code that works fine until it doesn’t.
iirc, Go intentionally randomizes map ordering for just this reason.
Re: How a 20 year old bug in GTA San Andreas surfaced in Windows 11 24H2
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
Before game companies earned all their profit through selling cosmetics and premium currency nobody cared if you cheated at your single player game and nobody SHOULD care if you want to give yourself extra money. It's only now that single player progress is profitable to sell that video games have taken save game encryption to be default. It's so stupid.
The trouble is that if some weirdness happens because of the edit, you've got to handle it even if you say it would be reasonable to assume that it's outside of being supported. Maybe you spend a bit more time defensive coding around what inputs it reads from the file, maybe a certain proportion of users doing the save edit see bugs in an apparently unrelated part of the game and seek support (and their bug report mi…
>The trouble is that if some weirdness happens because of the edit, you've got to handle it even if you say it would be reasonable to assume that it's outside of being supported.
What? No. What even are you suggesting? Hell, games with OFFICIAL MODDING SUPPORT still require you submit bug reports with no mods running.
Editing game files has always been "you are on your own", even editing standard Unreal config files is something you wont get support for, and they are trivial human readable files with well known standards.
>One of the anecdotes from Titan Quest
Any actual support for this anecdote? Lots of games have anti-piracy features that sneakily cause problems, and even could fire accidentally. None of those games get a reputation for being buggy. Games like Earthbound would make the game super hard and even delete your save game at the very end. Batman games would nerf your gliding ability. Game Dev Tycoon would kill your business due to piracy.
None of these affected the broad reputation of the game. Most of them are pretty good marketing in fact.
Re: How a 20 year old bug in GTA San Andreas surfaced in Windows 11 24H2
#105My takeaway, speaking as someone who leans towards functional programming and immutability, is "this is yet another example of a mutability problem that could never happen in a functional context" (so, for example, this bug would have never been created by Rust unless it was deeply misused)
I'd actually say that Rust is a third option between "everything is immutable" and "mutable soup". Rust is more of "one mutator at a time". Because, Rust really embraces being able to mutate stuff (so not functional in that sense), it just makes sure that it's in a controlled way.
Re: How a 20 year old bug in GTA San Andreas surfaced in Windows 11 24H2
#106> all these findings prove that the bug is NOT an issue with Windows 11 24H2, as things like the way the stack is used by internal WinAPI functions are not contractual and they may change at any time, with no prior notice. The real issue here is the game relying on undefined behavior (uninitialized local variables), and to be honest, I’m shocked that the game didn’t hit this bug on so many OS versions, although as I…
Other than C#, there is no reason to use those other languages for game dev. Unless the game is fairly simple, or you want to risk a fairly long project by employing a language that hasn't been proven in tge space yet (Rust). No shade at any of those languages, I don't even like C#, just being pragmatic.
Re: How a 20 year old bug in GTA San Andreas surfaced in Windows 11 24H2
#107My takeaway, speaking as someone who leans towards functional programming and immutability, is "this is yet another example of a mutability problem that could never happen in a functional context" (so, for example, this bug would have never been created by Rust unless it was deeply misused)
Rust protects you from external file data you read being incorrect? That's one hell of a language!
Most popular languages would prevent this. In this case it’s as simple as having more sensible reader API than sscanf in standard library and forcing variables to be initialized.
Re: How a 20 year old bug in GTA San Andreas surfaced in Windows 11 24H2
#10820 years and still nobody has realized what the back of this sign is about. IYKYK. https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/gta-myths/images/f/f1/Egg_...
fixed link (the above did not work for me) https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/gta-myths/images/f/f1/Egg_...
Re: How a 20 year old bug in GTA San Andreas surfaced in Windows 11 24H2
#10920 years and still nobody has realized what the back of this sign is about. IYKYK. https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/gta-myths/images/f/f1/Egg_...
And if I don't know?
Re: How a 20 year old bug in GTA San Andreas surfaced in Windows 11 24H2
#110> Not ignore the compilation warnings – this code most likely threw a warning in the original code that was either ignored or disabled! What compiler error would you expect here? Maybe not checking the return value from scanf to make sure it matches the number of parameters? Otherwise this seems like a data file error that the compiler would have no clue about.
Undefined behavior to access the uninitialized memory. A sanitizer would have flagged that.