#Bug fixing

[askagamedev]

War Stories: The Shaking Weapon

Some years ago, while crunching on the final road to release a AAA FPS game, the testers came across a cinematic bug.

There was a cutscene that was occurred when the player reached the top floor of a crumbling building that was full of construction equipment (it was being repaired) where he battled a cinematic villain in hand to hand combat. The scene was supposed to end when the player grabbed a nearby weapon (a nail gun) and shot the villain. The bug was that when the player reached for the gun in the cutscene, the gun would be wiggling and wobbling everywhere. 

Being the in-game-cutscene guru, I was tasked with fixing it. The interesting thing is that I checked all of the code, and things all appeared to be working properly. Further investigation limited it to this one single instance of problems as well - the other cutscenes with objects the player character had to manipulate were fine. So what was the cause of it?

It turns out that it was because of the way our animation system stored its data for that particular scene. The animation data had a relative location and orientation for each frame, but in this particular cutscene the characters were all very far away from their base positions, mostly because we didn't have anything to anchor it to (building was crumbling). It's like the laser pointer effect - the further away you are from the base, the more the error gets magnified. When you're a meter away, you'll be off by millimeters, maybe. When you're dozens of meters away, however, that error becomes much more magnified and visible. Since our characters and animations were all quite a distance from their base, that effect was coming back to haunt us. It was ok seeing the characters in motion since that helped mask the jitter, but we couldn't fix the unmoving gun because the error was baked into the animation data compression. 

So how did I fix it? I didn't. Any code solution would probably have caused a bunch of problems for other cutscenes using the same code, and we were already forbidden from messing with the level data (the base location) or the animation data if we could help it. So instead, since it was fairly late at night, I added a strategic camera shake to the scene at the right moment to cover up the shaking weapon. The building was already shaking, so shake of the camera went unnoticed. It's a lot harder to distinguish a single object is shaking strangely when your entire reference is also shaking, so I don't think anybody noticed.

[infamous-if]

bio and pinned change time!! woohoo!

YAY

[genesis-project-news]

TGP Multiplayer not working? Try these 4 simple fixes!

Does your multiplayer not work anymore? Have you been tearing your hair out for over an hour? Got a friend over to play but TGP didn’t work for you and now they’re avoiding you? Please try one of these fixes:

Create a new account on the official website. This fix in particular should work if you’re using an account created during version 0.4.8 or earlier.

Read our Multiplayer Guide for Assholes, which will guide you through port forwarding and firewall bypassing. This fix works if the game is telling you that UDP punching has failed, etc.

Go to our Discord and ask others for help in the #helpline channel. This fix works if your computer is possessed/drenched in slime/full of various horse parts/just plain weird.

Cry. Then try steps 1-3 again. Then maybe cry again, because your Internet is probably being weird and bad.

[cutlerish]

You know those times?

Hey web developers,

You know those times where there’s a really annoying bug that you can’t reproduce, but you can surely see the evidence for? The one where you spend days trying to figure out a way to repeat it, or else re-read all your code to figure out where, in the name of all that is good and decent in this world, a tiny subset of users (on totally different browsers) could be experiencing something going wrong?

You know those times where you guess at the root cause of an issue and apply a completely blind fix that really shouldn’t make any difference and find that the errors stop overnight?

I fucking hate that. I mean, sure, I’m happy I fixed the problem. I have a general idea why the fix worked. If I’m going to be honest, though, the fix worked because the language I was coding in (Javascript) is inherently inconsistent. Mostly, I hate that I fixed it blindly with no way to test.

I don’t like coding in the dark.

[obesericewrites]

Hey, I was playing your game, and every instance my MC's name comes up, (Primrose) it just says $name. Thought I should let you know.

Ah, I will check out that issue the second my class ends!! Thank you for bringing this to my attention^^

[intimidatingpuffinstudios]

There's a bug so I can even get past the wine, ale or juice choice without it causing an error

Yes, I am aware, though there really shouldn’t be a bug there, seeing as everything worked fine in the demo... But anyway, I have contacted CoG about it.

For now, I suggest taking the other route, meaning the route where you find out about Dorlas having a bounty on you, in order to progress through the story. And once this bug is fixed, I’ll let you guys know!

[unicornsoftware-blog]

Bug or Feature? Download PVS-Studio and find out!

https://www.viva64.com/en/pvs-studio-download/?win

[missing-e]

Does your Chrome version of 'Missing e' stop working OFTEN? Then I need your help!

A small subset of users sometimes find that the Chrome version of Missing e periodically stops working for no apparent reason. You can tell when it isn't running if there is no e. icon beside the Tumblr logout button on your dashboard.

Normally, this can be fixed by disabling and re-enabling Missing e. However, I want to get to the bottom of this problem.

If you are willing to do a bit of back-and-forth debugging (and respond quickly and often, strong computer skills are a plus) and your Missing e on Chrome:

stops working often (two times a month or more), and

has done so recently (in the last two weeks)

please contact me to help out!

[lachlan-pitt-game-design]

NAS-Z Fixed reload. Finally made it reload after the animation played. Also wont shoot during the reload.

[askagamedev]

I am building my first game, and I have ran into a problem. Do you remember how in the original Zork you could move around the world? While the only way I can figure out how to allow the player to do that is by using goto statements to jump to different parts of the game depending on which direction you want to go, and storing each "room" as a variable in a 2 dimensional array. Would you know how to go about this without leaping around the software like the horse from chess?

I’m going to tell you something that you may not want to hear immediately, but will be incredibly important moving forward as a developer and programmer.

Separate your game’s data from your systems. Don’t use code to specify things that should be data. If you do, you’ll end up with stuff that’s both incredibly difficult to debug and incredibly difficult to add new content. The code should determine how something works. The data should be what the systems work on. Define the data separately, and have a set of generic systems to handle things like traversing your map.

If you continue along the path you’ve already started, you’re probably going to end up duplicating a lot of code and that’s incredibly prone to bugs. Imagine that you’ve got some block of code that does some task that you need done. You might copy and paste that code wherever you need to do the task because it’s easy. Let’s say, however, that you discover a bug in the way you handle the task and need to fix it. You now need to find and fix it in every single instance that you’ve copied and pasted that block of code. If you miss some of them, that means that sometimes you’ll get the correct results and others you won’t, and then you’ll have to spend even more time debugging. 

Don’t make it an elaborate system of gotos. Instead, think about creating a player object and storing the player’s position within that object. Create room objects, each having its own set of exits and contents, as well as its location. Each room should have a number of common attributes - some set of exits, contents, features. Then you can have individual (unique) rooms that all inherit the ability to have these common features. Once you build the individual rooms (the data), you can add identifiers to them and put them into a data structure that you can query. This way you can have the player object move independently of the rooms while keeping track of which room the player is currently inhabiting. Once you know that, you can go back to the structure that holds all of your rooms, and find the inhabited room, and then ask it where to possibly go. This makes it easier to build a maze out of individual instances of interconnected rooms without being limited to a two dimensional array. You can then build navigation into the player object itself, so that it becomes a series of requests.

Player wants to go east.

The game tells the player object “I want to go east”

Player object asks the room it is currently in “Can I go east?”

Room checks to see if there is an exit to the east. No, there isn’t.

Player object says “Nope, can’t go east.”

The game relays to the player that there is no eastern exit to this room.

This way you can limit what the player can do to a set number of tasks. This will make debugging a lot easier - if you can determine what a player can and cannot do, then you can easily recognize when the player tries to do something that shouldn’t be possible, and handle those cases gracefully. Keep your data separated from your systems. That way you can create new data fairly easily, and new code fairly easily, and one breaking won’t necessarily break the other.

[workmate]

New release: 22.11.2011

Hello everyone, we have good news today!

We've deployed a new version of Workmate today. Here is the small list of the update:

Realtime synchronization of the tasks;

New extension: Scrum reports (what is Scrum can be found on wikipedia);

New project's dashboard design;

Other small bug fixes and some improvements.

New updates, improvements and features are coming this sunday (27.11.2011). Here is a small list what's coming very soon:

New task tracker: assignments, comments, time estimation;

Project's dashboard improvements;

Platform notifications (yes, we'll let you know when the next maintenance is going to be).

Don't hesitate to join our group on VK, like us on Facebook, +1 on Google+, join our LinkedIn group, follow on Twitter.

Thanks, CreaDroid team.

[genesis-project-news]

Taking Out The Bugs

Merry Christmas, everyone!

With the current influx of bugs detected, we’ve created a simple form for anyone with bugs to fill up. It’s just up there in the header.

Thank you very much for helping us out.

-gristCollector

[a-crown-of-ash-if]

I think you have to enable scrollbars in the edit game page. Cant currently scroll down to read the story

It's cooked into the template I'm using for the game. It's hard coded in, and I'm still super new to coding. I looked through to find a solution to fix this, but the answer I found did not translate at all. I ended up not finding any clear coding I could remove or change.

So my solution here is going to be changing my template.

This will take me a bit of time to fix, as when I tested this before release, it worked without any issue. So I have no clue what changed there.

I'll start working on this now, my apologies.

[ailurinae]

Holy shit, they finally fixed the stuck "new posts" and "activity" indicators. Only took what, two, two and a half weeks?

[intimidatingpuffinstudios]

hey, if you're nb and choose to be pan, this appears and you can't choose the rom options: "..His skin is fair, and he is sporting a short beard. set sexuality "nb_pan""

BUG! Thanks for spotting that and letting me know! It’s now fixed! Chapter 2 is a rollercoaster, lolol.

I thought I had gotten everything in it by now, but apparently not😅😅😅😅

So thanks for the report!

[livinasimminlife]

Hey all, I'm having some issues with my KCLKF site. I took the site down temporarily. Hoping to fix the issue by today and make some edits while the content isn't "live." Thanks for your patience.