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How a 20 year old bug in GTA San Andreas surfaced in Windows 11 24H2

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Re: How a 20 year old bug in GTA San Andreas surfaced in Windows 11 24H2

#131

Post by debugnik »

mschuster91 wrote: post #4
db48x wrote: post #2

[flagged]

To u/db48x whose post got flagged and doesn't reappear despite me vouching for it as I think they have a point (at least for modern games): GTA San Andreas was released in 2004. Back then, YAML was in its infancy (2001) and JSON was only standardized informally in 2006, and XML wasn't something widely used outside of the Java world. On top of that, the hardware requirements (256MB of system RAM, and the PlayStation 2…

JSON didn't save them: This is the same studio that handrolled a JSON parser with accidentally quadratic time complexity, making most players wait 3 to 10 minutes to load GTA Online, for 7 years, until a player got tired and found the root cause.

https://nee.lv/2021/02/28/How-I-cut-GTA-Online-loading-times...

Re: How a 20 year old bug in GTA San Andreas surfaced in Windows 11 24H2

#132

Post by withinboredom »

roseway4 wrote: post #103
amenghra wrote: post #98

IMHO, 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.

Yep, and then you get crash reports you can’t reproduce.

Re: How a 20 year old bug in GTA San Andreas surfaced in Windows 11 24H2

#134

Post by ormax3 »

amenghra wrote: post #98

IMHO, 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.

one might argue that one of the advantages of languages like C is that you only pay for the features you choose to use, no unnecessary overhead like initializing unused variables

Re: How a 20 year old bug in GTA San Andreas surfaced in Windows 11 24H2

#135

Post by ajross »

gigatexal wrote: post #133

Use a debugger folks. A 10x dev cited this story to me about the ills of not using one.

Tools like valgrind/asan/msan would have flagged this instantly too. Just a unit test of that vehicle loader would have seen it.

Really this is more a story about poor development practice than it is an interesting bug.

Re: How a 20 year old bug in GTA San Andreas surfaced in Windows 11 24H2

#136

Post by khedoros1 »

db48x wrote: post #63
trinix912 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well-written 3rd party serialization libraries weren't exactly easy to come by 20 years ago, at least from what I can recall. Your best bet was using an XML library, but XML parsing was quite resource heavy. Many that seemed well designed turned out to be a security nightmare (Java serialization).

I disagree. JSON is 25 years old, and SAX parsers are 22. A SAX parser is the opposite of “resource heavy”, since it is event driven. The parser does not maintain complex state, although you might have to manage some state in order to correctly extract your objects from the XML. Granted, it wouldn’t have integrated nicely with C to generate the parser code from your struct definition back then, but the basics were th…

> JSON is 25 years old

And in 2004, didn't have a published specification, or much use outside of webdev (which hadn't eaten the world yet).

> and SAX parsers are 22

And, especially at the time, pretty much exclusive to Java, right?

Put another way, which are the high-quality open-source implementations of those formats that the developers should've considered while working on SA in 2003 and 2004? Or for that matter, in the 2001-2002 timeframe, when the parsing code was probably actually written for use in VC?

Re: How a 20 year old bug in GTA San Andreas surfaced in Windows 11 24H2

#137

Post by bombcar »

Discordian93 wrote: post #123
martinsnow wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Raymond is a wizard. Read his blogs for many years and love his style and knowledge.

He's a total legend, yet apparently he's never met Bill Gates in person from what he said in an interview in the Dave's Garage YouTube channel a few years ago. You'd think that someone who's been that prominent for so long in the company would have been invited to a company dinner where he was present or something.

Microsoft's a big company, and billg "stepped down" in 2000. Raymond is still working, so they overlap less than may appear.

Re: How a 20 year old bug in GTA San Andreas surfaced in Windows 11 24H2

#138

Post by Thaxll »

ajross wrote: post #135
gigatexal wrote: post #133

Use a debugger folks. A 10x dev cited this story to me about the ills of not using one.

Tools like valgrind/asan/msan would have flagged this instantly too. Just a unit test of that vehicle loader would have seen it. Really this is more a story about poor development practice than it is an interesting bug.

As if tools in early 2000's were any good...

Re: How a 20 year old bug in GTA San Andreas surfaced in Windows 11 24H2

#139

Post by Leherenn »

wat10000 wrote: post #127
nayuki wrote: post #71

> 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…

I would add: code defensively. Initialize your variables (either to a sensible value, or an outrageously wrong value) before passing pointers to them, even when you "know" that the value will be overwritten. Check for errors. Always consider what happens when things go wrong, not just when things go right. Any time you find yourself thinking, "condition X is guaranteed to hold, so I don't need to check for it" consid…

My only issue with defensive codding is that often it doesn't play nice with code coverage requirements. I've been in situations where I would like to add defensive coding just in case, but then the PR doesn't pass the coverage checks. The best is when you can ensure via th compiler (e.g. via the type system) that a case is impossible, but C++ (in my case) isn't perfect for this.

Re: How a 20 year old bug in GTA San Andreas surfaced in Windows 11 24H2

#140

Post by avidiax »

ajross wrote: post #135
gigatexal wrote: post #133

Use a debugger folks. A 10x dev cited this story to me about the ills of not using one.

Tools like valgrind/asan/msan would have flagged this instantly too. Just a unit test of that vehicle loader would have seen it. Really this is more a story about poor development practice than it is an interesting bug.

Problem with valgrind/asan/msan is that you have to start using these tools early in the development process. It can't be a "checklist" item before launch, or you'll have an insurmountable number of bugs, often with them baked in such that fixing the bug causes additional changes that introduce unrelated bugs.
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