The Outer Worlds: Fixing the “game thinks my companion is dead” bug

https://twitter.com/_taylorswope/status/1205252714680045568

by pkilgore • 7 years ago

676 183 7 years ago

twitter.com

pkilgore• 7 years ago

Don't skip the gif at the end!

doublement2• 7 years ago

I don't play video games, but if someone created one that was entirely glitches like this, I might start.

drewrv• 7 years ago

Check out Goat Simulator: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goat_Simulator

"The game, initially developed as a joke prototype from an internal game jam and shown in an early alpha state in YouTube videos, was met with excitement and attention, prompting the studio to build the game into a releasable state while still retaining various non-breaking bugs and glitches to maintain the game's entertainment value."

Groxx• 7 years ago

It's full of awkward physics, I sort of love it. E.g. goats go up ladders by walking straight into them and continuing to walk with absolutely no other changes... so of course the body physics get a bit excited http://i.imgur.com/lNfzaDj.gif

swsieber2• 7 years ago

Skate 3 has tons of glitches, or at least a few good glitches that keep on giving: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UaUR6u8nHoM

You can launch yourself into the air (100s of feet), run inside a dumpster to move it, drop through the floor to start falling from the sky, booby-trap a trashcan so it flies out of no-where and hit you upside the head, walk up an invisible ramp... it's fun.

doublement2• 7 years ago

Wow that was exactly what I hoped existed! I especially liked the one where you end up beneath reality, hurtling sideways past yourself into a never-ending void.

91edec• 7 years ago

Playing any Bethesda game on release is a gold mine.

russdill• 7 years ago

Ending up in the ground a little bit causes a small bounce. Ending up in the ground a lot causes a large bounce. Combine that with poor collision code in tunnels...and well...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FMp-pzlwzlE

ranger207• 7 years ago

You might enjoy speedrunning, especially older games like those for the Nintendo 64 or the original Playstation.

In addition, there's the Super Mario 64 0x A Button challenge, an effort to beat the game while avoiding the use of its main mechanic. It's not a speedrun, but the themes of exploiting every glitch possible is the same. It's also the source of the infamous "0.5x A Presses" video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kpk2tdsPh0A

NoodleIncident2• 7 years ago

Several of his videos are about doing the same star with 0 A presses using a faster strat, although that might be only for the sake of the people TAS-ing the strats

zf00002• 7 years ago

Check out Star Citizen, it's all terrible glitches and it's also unlikely to ever be a finished, playable game.

driverdan2• 7 years ago

You might enjoy this reddit sub dedicated to game bugs: https://www.reddit.com/r/GamePhysics/

Also this sub that highlights small, easy to overlook game details: https://www.reddit.com/r/GamingDetails/

scrollaway• 7 years ago

You'll probably enjoy The Stanley Parable then. If you haven't heard of it, I recommend you buy it and avoid actually reading about what it is. If you don't enjoy it I'll refund you myself ;)

cerberusss• 7 years ago

Fallout 4, which has many mods, comes pretty close. My favorite example is WeirdistBuilds, who completed the game without killing a single enemy:

https://kotaku.com/guy-beats-fallout-4-without-killing-anyon...

floatingatoll• 7 years ago

This is an excellent post-mortem, thanks for posting it.

theshrike79• 7 years ago

Readable format: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1205252714680045568.html

fernandopj• 7 years ago

That'a well-worth read to everyone that enjoy reading about QA finding bugs, even if not interested in games Finding quest-related bugs is a nightmare in open-ended games...

remarkEon3• 7 years ago

Funny read.

The Outer Worlds is an unexpected joy, too. Definitely an open-world game I had no idea I needed. If you haven’t, check it out. It’s basically Fallout 4 but in space.

thrownblown• 7 years ago

...basically Fallout New Vegas in space... (obsidian made that)

remarkEon3• 7 years ago

Ah, yes. This is the better comparison.

Aromasin• 7 years ago

It very much nostalgically brought me back to the beginning of the decade, when fantastic "open-world" single-player RPG's like Mass Effect 2, Skyrim, Fallout: New Vegas, Witcher 2, Dragon Age: Origins etc were being realised in quick succession. For me personally, that was a golden era. It's great to have something like The Outer Words fulfilling that itch that has been present for so long. If you like any of the games mentioned, I also recommend checking it out.

oneepic• 7 years ago

Lots of Bioshock vibes too.

sdfin• 7 years ago

The combats quickly become too easy. The world and story are fine. I liked about New Vegas that it had a very elaborate world and the fights were more challenging.

dharmab• 7 years ago

I'm waiting for rebalance mods before continuing my playthrough. Great characters and dialog, trivially easy combat.

lordleft• 7 years ago

CRPGs are my favorite genre of video game, and the complex interactions they feature make them both super fun and especially prone to glitches.

I will say that TOW was very stable for an Obsidian Game. I don't think I've experienced a bug yet.

INTPenis• 7 years ago

I haven't bought this game but I watched a 12 minute speedrun of it with two devs commentating and got the feeling that QA didn't perform as well as they could have on this project.

First of all the fact that the game could be finished in 12 minutes was a surprise to both devs.

And at several points during the video dev#1 expressed surprise over a shortcut the player was taking, while dev#2 said he did that in testing all the time.

Seems like a lack of both QA and communication.

Projects are often rushed to completion for shipping, and open world games can't be the easiest thing to test. You're balancing player freedom and bug hunting. It's a challenge I can only imagine.

schoen• 7 years ago

On the other hand, if you watch speedrun records on YouTube or watch the Summoning Salt documentaries about them, expert speedruns (especially those that allow glitches) are often 10% or less the time that an ordinarily skilled player might take to finish the game. For example, the Super Mario Bros. record is under five minutes, while the Castlevania record is under 11.5 minutes.

I don't think the fact that developers are surprised by speedrun times means that a game is necessarily bad! (And even many of the most extraordinarily beloved games have glitches, often because realistic physics simulation is hard.)

I think I saw a video of Bennett Foddy in which he noted that other people could complete "Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy" considerably faster than he could, and maybe faster than he imagined anyone would be able to.

bipolar_lisper4• 7 years ago

programming quality and program quality are two very separate things. a great game can have terrible programming. and an awful game can have exceptional programming.

jbattle• 7 years ago

Speed runs frequently rely on glitches. There was one for Oblivion where you could glitch through some geometry in the starting area and end up on the other side of the wall that was supposed to be inaccessible until the ending cut scene. The game was 'over' in like 5 minutes

ajuc• 7 years ago

I liked the glitch in Two Worlds - if you don't talk with the fist questgiver (who is a disguised end boss) and instead attack him and get him to hit some villager npc in nearby village with fireball splash damage - all the villagers attack him in revange and kill him quite quickly - and the credits roll :) It's like 3 minutes and it (unintentionally) makes a great statement - normal people don't need heroes, we just need to work as a team and we can win by ourselves ;)

saagarjha• 7 years ago

You can speedrun Ocarina in Time in under half an hour. That doesn’t mean it’s a bad game…

bipolar_lisper4• 7 years ago

he never said the game was bad

swsieber2• 7 years ago

My favorite game to watch speedruns of is a game called Antichamber. It's a great first person puzzle game. But it has funky rules, is non-linear and is pretty flexible. It gradually exposes you to the mechanics and gradually teaches you. I finished the game and watched a speed-run and was blown away. It mostly made sense what was done, but it was all combined in unexpected ways.

deorder• 7 years ago

Do you have a link to that specific speedrun?

glacials• 7 years ago

All complex software has bugs.

In good software, the bugs don't cause user-facing issues. QA teams aim to make software good by finding them.

Speedrunners aren't users or QA. Speedrunners find bugs no matter what. From the developer's perspective it really doesn't matter if you can save 20 hours beating a game by clipping through the wall next to the boss, if that clip is so immensely complicated to perform that no user would ever encounter it naturally. The devs can be surprised, or not surprised, to hear their game was beaten much faster than they anticipated by speedrunners; either way it does not make their game worse or rushed or a product of bad communication.

The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker came out in 2002 and sold 4.6 million copies. In July of this year, a new bug was discovered by dedicated minds, not randomly but after nearly two decades of hard work, that saved two hours on the speedrun by clipping through a barrier that was supposed to be unpassable. Does it really matter from a quality standpoint if this bug exists or not? Would your original rating of The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker be lessened 17 years later because this bug was found by people who perhaps spent more hours trying to find it than you've spent playing video games in your entire life?

swivelmaster• 7 years ago

There are countless great games that have glitches that speedrunners take advantage of. The "any%" category of speed running is all about that. If you're saying that any game with glitches like that had bad QA and poor communication, then either

A: That is true for all games

B: You're holding everybody to too high a standard.

Some recent examples: There's a glitch in Zelda: Breath of the Wild where if you shield surf onto an enemy while it's taking damage while you're in slow-mo because of shooting an arrow while falling, you'll bounce off of them about a mile into the sky. In DOOM (2016), there's a physics bug that lets you rocket into the sky by standing on a railing and then... standing up. You can also glitch through doors by triggering a specific take-down animation on zombies.

Those are incredible games, and relatively bug-free.

WrtCdEvrydy• 7 years ago

The 12 minute speedrun is an outlier because you can easily get the 'bad' ending by just being a dick.

The game can be a 30 hour game if you hussle or as far as 200 if you don't.

viraptor• 7 years ago

For all the flak people usually give the telemetry systems, this bug sounds like it could be made trivial if devs could push custom reporting to users. "When the companion dies, send me last few events and a minimal world-state". Having ready data collection/reporting when things go weird is super helpful, whether it's an own, server side software, or a remote client.

aaronbrethorst• 7 years ago

It doesn't sound like that would've worked here.

One reason it was so hard to pin down is that it was impossible to tell when the bug actually happened -- all of the cases we had were essentially "hey something bad happened in the last ten hours and now my quest is broken" (5/18)

cjbprime• 7 years ago

But they knew that the proximate cause of the quest failure was a dead companion, so adding logging around companion death would have figured it out.

SkyPuncher• 7 years ago

They knew what to observe for, but they couldn't figure out how to reproduce that.

madrox• 7 years ago

This is why it's important to log everything and keep it around forever!

CDSlice• 7 years ago

Do people really get worked up over that kind of telemetry? I know I wouldn't. I would even be OK with much more telemetry around most actions in the game as long as it doesn't snoop on anything outside of what I do in the game.

MereInterest• 7 years ago

Yes. I don't know what is being sent back, or what information it has gathered. If a program does not require internet access for its basic functionality, and it then accesses the internet without explicitly asking me for permission, it should be viewed with extreme suspicion.

reificator2• 7 years ago

I'm a fan of pure gameplay telemetry, pure error telemetry, etc... I specifically remember being amazed at the heatmaps that Bungie shared about data in Halo 2 and thinking that I needed to learn how to do that, and it was going to change how development was done forever.

But it's difficult to police good telemetry and easy to change silently. Bad actors have continually given justifiable reasons for data collection, sometimes even with a pinky-swear that they'll not use it for evil. But the terms can be updated by the party collecting the data at any time they desire, with little recourse for the user other than to stop using that product or service.

So no, I'm not worked up over that kind of telemetry, but I'm still going to block it. It doesn't make sense not to.

e1ven• 7 years ago

This was my favorite game of 2019, and if it had mandatory telemetry like that I would not have played it.

If it were opt-in, it could be used well however, similar to what the Telltale games had done.

65% of people made choice A. 35% of people made choice B.

They have a sort of proxy for that with Achievements however.

deogeo• 7 years ago

No need for telemetry. Keep a local log (of what you would be sending via telemetry), and when the player decides to file a bug, inform them that'll include sending the log, with the option to cancel/file bug without a log.

Many bug reporting systems already work this way, such as the one used by Firefox, I think.

Just because something can be done by violating user privacy, that doesn't mean it's the only way, or even that alternatives are difficult.

sdenton4• 7 years ago

Eh, that gets you things big enough that someone bothers to send a bug report. Startup performance, mis-clicks, etc, will be missed. Not to mention ragequits that don't produce a bug report...

The problem is that devs reeeeally need a mix of very specific data for debugging, and very aggregated data for prioritization... There's all kinds of cool differential privacy tools for doing things like this, but no way for users to know or trust that they do what's claimed on the tin.

boarnoah• 7 years ago

Subnautica did it really well [short GDC talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Urx7WQE6NY0 ].

I've been floating the idea of setting up some log shipper plugins for Unity/Unreal to make a turnkey solution you could drop in and self host.

choeger• 7 years ago

Brilliant. It shows how your code is never encapsulated enough. You think physics should apply to all agents in your game and you think climbing a ladder is trivial and then someone thinks they can easily stop all NPCs from starting new Interactions. Boom.

In that particular case, what would be your favorite fix. I tend to say that the second step of climbing a ladder should probably not count as a new interaction.

gpm3• 7 years ago

I'm not sure I understand why NPCs are prevented from interacting with the environment while you're talking... given that gameplay isn't stopped. Seems like an arbitrary decision that might lead to other surprising behavior too... e.g. talking to someone else to interrupt an NPC performing a scripted action.

lilyball• 7 years ago

Probably because interacting with the environment could cause environmental changes that might affect you.

For example, if you're standing in a doorway talking to someone and an NPC wants to close the door, it could close in between you and the NPC you're talking to.

jccooper• 7 years ago

At first I figured the physical solution, not being able to climb higher than the ladder in any case, would seem to be a reasonable one. And you probably want to do that. But that might somehow end up with characters stuck on a ladder if the dismount event never fires for some reason, so making the ladder a single event and\or exempting the dismount from the "blockable furniture actions" list, should also be done.

They should probably also consider adding fall damage as part of the considerations in invulnerable mode.

mjevans3• 7 years ago

Interactions should be atomic. Unexpected outcomes in a state machine should be rejected (and probably errors logged if in dev mode).

Edit (additionally):

If they can't be made atomic, make the transitions timed, with expiration, never allow deadlocks to occur and always branch to a fail-safe state. Players will tolerate things like the uncontrollable NPC getting pinched off screen and respawning, even with a comical animation if it's that kind of game; they hate a blind referee ruining things for no perceivable reason.

NoodleIncident2• 7 years ago

I don't know if "encapsulation" is the right word, but the "undamageable" state should definitely have included fall damage. No point in having more than one way to reduce health points, damage is damage.

vvanders2• 7 years ago

I think you're giving a bit too much credit to game logic codebases.

They generally move at a pretty fast pace and change often(due to the iterative nature of what's "fun"). I don't think I saw a single unit test until I was well out of the game industry.

pantalaimon• 7 years ago

But then your companion would still climb out of the map with no way to ever reach you again.

lazyjones2• 7 years ago

what would be your favorite fix

Not letting companions fall to their death, ever... Bethesda hasn't fixed these bugs in 5 years.

raldi4• 7 years ago

They weren’t companions at the time of their death, just regular NPCs.

What would you do instead?

ArchReaper• 7 years ago

I tend to say that the second step of climbing a ladder should probably not count as a new interaction.

That might make sense when you view it through this specific lens, but that design decision allowed them to save character positions on ladders and make 'getting on' and 'getting off' be separate 'things' - just off the top of my head.

The '2 interactions' method actually makes the most sense in the context of their game engine - it's the same way getting 'on' or 'off' a chair works.

Their fix of just allowing interactions is probably the most correct option. That is essentially toggling a setting, as opposed to re-engineering how ladder mechanics work.

Games are complicated.

Danieru5• 7 years ago

Good chance the dual "furniture" is because "sitting in furniture" triggers a separate animation cycle. Then through root-motion animation the NPCs are climbing. Getting on switches NPCs to the climb animation set. Getting off the later swaps NPCs back to regular animation set.

Altogether an elegant solution for managing what is otherwise a special case.

rags2riches• 7 years ago

Bit of defensive programming would be a ceiling for the climbing action when it starts.

im3w1l• 7 years ago

My philosophy is that an important simple invariant shouldn't be maintained through the emergent behavior of a complex system.

If companions should be unkillable, then don't count on eliminating all sources of potential damage. Really make them unkillable. A ladder shouldn't ever take someone higher than the ladder goes so if some guy attempts to climb higher than the ladder goes, then freeze them in place or make them climb in place. Since these shouldn't trigger, crash the game if in dev mode, and if in prod mode check whether player allows telemetrics and if so phone home.

Those are the failsafe fixes.

Finally fix the root cause here by special casing that getting off a ladder during interaction is allowed.

lowbloodsugar• 7 years ago

If anyone is reading, can you guys fix the "There is no new game+" bug please? =)

nitwit005• 7 years ago

Some may remember Todd Howard's Quakecon interview where he talked about Bethesda failing to implement ladders due to AI problems: https://www.ign.com/articles/2010/08/14/why-there-are-no-lad...

AdmiralAsshat• 7 years ago

Should've called this bug "Stairway to Heaven".

iscrewyou• 7 years ago

But it ruins the story since that’s the punchline.

kevin_thibedeau• 7 years ago

I had the same problem in a hardware product using a legacy wired protocol that was sent over a ZigBee connection. People would complain that volume would uncontrollably go to 100% when operating a remote.

Reproducing it was hard but the culprit was WiFi interference. The protocol had separate on/off commands and no provision for lost packets since it wasn't natively designed for wireless. If the off command dropped out everything would act as if a button was still pressed.

AceJohnny2• 7 years ago

stateful volume control...

_<

CGamesPlay2• 7 years ago

Probably the design constraints here make this pretty necessary: you want the user to be able to hold the button down to adjust the volume by large amounts and release when it gets to a comfortable level; sending individual volume packets this quickly causes too much traffic over the slow connection; and the remote doesn't have any way to receive packets from the controlled device so it can't just send absolute volume levels.

ergothus2• 7 years ago

The real payoff to me is when someone asks why they didn't just try more ways of making companions unkillable without/before going through all that debugging. The response:

that was our fallback, but
-without actually knowing the cause, we couldn’t be sure that’d fix it
-whatever the cause of the problem is might be causing OTHER problems, so we should find it
-games near ship are fragile and it’s best to not make changes you don’t 100% understand

_THIS_ is someone that is practicing good software practices. I have no doubt this is why Outer Worlds is so much less buggy than, say, recent Bethesda _patches_. I saw a report this morning that the latest Fallout 76 patch causes some armors to degrade when a weapon reloads. This sounds exactly like the kind of bug you'd get from "fixing" something without understanding the actual cause, and thus just kicking up more emergent bugs because of your fix.

Complex interactions (like modern games), filled with shortcuts and assumptions (like modern games) means some bugs are inevitable. Requiring rigorous understanding before making changes can keep those bugs from multiplying.

...says someone with zero experience in coding games, but plenty of experience both fixing and generating bugs.

[Edit: fix formatting]

mattmanser• 7 years ago

I don't buy this at all.

This is the antithesis of defensive programming. It's a game-breaking bug that's allowed to happen because of two things:

1. They allowed companions to take damage because they marked them with the wrong property

2. They never checked if the companions went somewhere silly to warp them back to where they should be

That's not defensive, that's like calling an API without a defensive try/catch if something goes unexpectedly wrong.

If they'd have done either of these things (and sent back error reports when it happened), they'd have caught it way sooner.

I don't write games and appreciate the interactions can be very complex. While I can understand your delight in them finding the root cause, I can't understand your support for failing to put in some defensive measures when they couldn't recreate a frequently reported bug.

gdxhyrd• 7 years ago

Those defensive measures you describe are the kind of hacks that introduce more and more complexity.

Defensive programming is not fixing bugs with more features, quite the opposite: it is failing hard when a condition does not hold.

shawnz• 7 years ago

I think you're right that it would have been a better design if it weren't possible for the companion to die in the first place. But I also agree with the parent that they were right to find the actual cause of their assumptions being violated before deciding how to implement the fix.

AaronFriel• 7 years ago

2. They never checked if the companions went somewhere silly to warp them back to where they should be

In a modern open-worldish game, this is pretty nontrivial.

dvt2• 7 years ago

Not sure why this is getting so aggressively downvoted. A coordinate sanity check on entities is trivial to do, and at the very least should be logged.

ergothus2• 7 years ago

I can't understand your support for failing to put in some defensive measures when they couldn't recreate a frequently reported bug

From the tweet series: "There were one or two cases before launch where this issue seemed to happen, but no one in QA ever managed to reproduce it and despite our best efforts we couldn't learn anything concrete about it"

Assuming this is true, before launch, it was NOT a frequently reported bug.

After launch, they dove in and figured out what was happening AND what triggered it.

Your complaint appears to be that they (1) had a bug, and (2) didn't resolve boundary checking in the production code. Given the number of "fall through the map" bugs in countless games, I assume #2 is, in fact, hard. Writing non-trivial code without bugs (to avoid #1) is also hard, based on...all the smart coders I've read.

Regardless of the source of the bugs, I'm cheering that they didn't just put in defensive measures and called it a day. To the point that defensive measures can be a source of bugs, consider how many "violent vibration" bugs we've seen in, say, Skyrim, Fallout, and GTA. (While I don't play, based on clips I've seen from GTA and Red Dead, those engine(s) spam duplicate entities when the boundary overlap is detected, where Skyrim/Fallout just vibrate and rattle). I find it very plausible that attempts to "warp" characters having positional bugs without understanding the source of those bugs will end up a source of new bugs.

LifeLiverTransp• 7 years ago

You are wrong, but not downvote worthy wrong. Lets put a artificial cube around the ship, that teleports npcs back to a safe start location (lets call it there bunk).

Now you created a whole zoo of new troubles, including a whole set of troubles you cant even predict, because you didnt know about them when you made this giant default behaviour case.

if (specific case){

} else (everything else that could ever happen, inlcuding all future edgcases){

// here be dragons

}

Examples? Leveldesigner adds elevator, that transports player and npc ocassionally outside of the teleport box.

Skybox entitys are npcs that live outside of the box- so space battle npcs, get telported to bunks..

etc. etc.

Handling the unknown - with any other paradigm then the fail early, fail loud - is the root of evil.

tasubotadas• 7 years ago

Judging how defensive programming worked out for PHP, I consider it an antipattern.

shultays2• 7 years ago

It would be a good software development practice if they fixed it in a couple days top. It is not really acceptible if such a bug survived so long.

adreamingsoul• 7 years ago

I disagree. Placing a time cap on finding , fixing, and documenting the root issue of a bug incentivies beating the clock over working the actual issue. However, this all depends on the buisness goals for a software development team. If long term stability is not that important, then I can understand why a time cap for fixing a bug is encouraged. Ideally though I would encourage developers to find organisations that allow developers to understand the root of an issue before fixing it.

CydeWeys• 7 years ago

You are underestimating how seriously difficult some bugs can be to diagnose. I've seen super difficult bugs in large complex systems take over a month of dedicated effort to solve, despite the eventual fix being only a few lines long. That's the kind of bug where you take dozens of pages of notes as you puzzle through figuring it out. And this is at Google, with smart engineers. As the old saying goes, it's knowing where the problem is that's hard.

_pmf_2• 7 years ago

_THIS_ is someone that is practicing good software practices.

There's nothing specific about software in there. My mechanic does the same type of reasoning.

ufmace3• 7 years ago

You must have a much better mechanic than usual. Most of the ones I've worked with tend to make a quick guess at what's broken, and just replace it. I call it "throwing parts at the problem" when it goes badly.

Though in defense, most of them are good enough to guess right 90% of the time. And mechanics generally get paid by the task, not hour. Replacing the probably misbehaving X pays. Spending an extra half an hour making sure that X really is broken and replacement is the best solution doesn't pay. So they just replace the X and hope for the best, and then replace something else if it didn't work.

oniTony• 7 years ago

This reads a lot like the central premise in "You" by Austin Grossman -- unkillable NPCs are occasionally found to be dead and that bug is threatening the entire game studio.

db48x2• 7 years ago

Their QA should have been using a record-and-replay debugger. rr-project.org

alex7o• 7 years ago

I thought the same, but there might be a good reason they can't.

db48x2• 7 years ago

Yea, using rr would certainly require that they test on Linux. That doesn't seem like a very high hurdle though.

bitwize• 7 years ago

I imagined the MGS3 theme softly playing as the companion character climbed an invisible ladder off the map and into infinity.

MattyRad• 7 years ago

Only tangentially related, sorry: all of the the companions in The Outer Worlds were uninteresting, I found it much more satisfying (and challenging) to beat the game solo. Effectively, each companion was an ordinary human, with some arbitrary specialities, joining your crew because the current mission required it. That said, The Outer Worlds was a lot of fun (albeit short-lived).

francislavoie• 7 years ago

I wholeheartedly disagree. I loved the companion missions and the dive into the characters and their psychology. They all were interesting in different ways.

Notably, I found that the Vicar had a really interesting progression as a character and his relationship with religion. It lead to some interesting philosophical dialogue, especially if you bring him when you meet the Iconoclasts. He has a healthy debate with their leader and they both come to the conclusion "let's agree to disagree". It was great.

Danieru5• 7 years ago

This thread is speaking to how regular programing and game play programming vastly differ.

In regular programming scopes are small, small enough for programmers to accomodate all expected logic. In games interaction scope is unlimited, or atleast that is what the game designers want.

If you try to program every expected system interaction you would never finish. So instead game programming is about making systems flexible. For example, as far as the gameplay code is concerned the inside of players ship is just yet another level. The bounds of any level are defined by what the map designers have layed out, not any pre-planned "ship area".

There are no meetings where project managers request "more playable area for level 7".

Likewise the systems programmer who made the furniture system was not the script writer who created the ladders. The script writer likely thought it was brilliant and elegant to split the entrances and exits, because in game programming it was indeed brilliant. It allowed the save system's existing code to handling what would have otherwise been special handling. It allowed the existing combat logic to handling what would otherwise be special handling.

Of course regular programming is different. In regular applications if a user's data is being sent to a server there is no secondary system which needs to be allowed to kill this data. Nor is there any save system which needs to be able to save and restore an in-progress action.

Games programming is all about figuring out ways to allow more varied and more complex interactions without exploding the implementation exponentially.

tomerv• 7 years ago

Why is this a difference between "regular" programing and game play programming? Any kind of programming could have complex interactions between component. A few well known examples: OS kernel and drivers, VM manager, internet browser. The list is long, and there is a lot of programming of complicated products in the world - not everything is web development or CRUD apps.

Danieru5• 7 years ago

Regular programming and game programming have different constaints and goals.

Yes regular programming could indeed add a system where numbers might be animated. During the animation maybe you want another system to be able to change the number. Maybe the number disappears, make sure you're front end can handle not having the requested data arriving. Maybe you want systems which add extra fields to user data, maybe you want anytime a user attempts login that there is a 1% chance they receive a reward determined by their "user rank".

All these are "possible" but do not happen in regular programming. If a user attempted to log into your application, and instead a window popped up saying "you have died from starvation, please recreate your account and play again" rightly so your users would be angry, not impressed.

Different constraints and goals lead to different priorities. Games on a per screen basis have a lot more budget available. Imagine if your application's login screen took 2 months to program and required the full time effort of multiple artists.

jayd16• 7 years ago

In a game, you often want unexpected and whimsical emergent behavior. You want designers to build new and exciting things the programmer never expected. Game logic is about fun. Correctness is very low on the list of requirements.

This is not the same kind of thing as bank software.

konschubert• 7 years ago

This was an extreme insightful comment.

Originally, when I read the article, I thought that the issues described may be a result of bad software design.

But maybe it’s because applications are about strictness, and games are about freedom.

In application programming, you should be in a defined state most of the time, and make state transitions short and atomic.

In guess that in games, you are really in one huge, never-ending state transition.

WORLD_ENDS_SOON• 7 years ago

I would also add to this that in my opinion often the best games (from a design perspective) are the ones that lean into this sort of freedom. This line of thinking has very much influenced game design trends, at least within certain genres. For example, simulation and survival games usually try to expose the game's systems to the player in a way that lets the player be creative in the game (Minecraft, Prison Architect, RimWorld, Factorio, etc). Even in games that aren't based on simulation or user generated content, designing the game's systems in this way gives the level creators freedom to do more without having to write code specific for every level.

vsareto2• 7 years ago

Plus let's not forget the game industry is not known for great working conditions and lax deadlines and perfect specs.

crimsonalucard• 7 years ago

It's not games that are the issue. Games like checkers or chess have less of this property.

The type of programs where things like this occur are called simulations.

Danieru5• 7 years ago

Rather checkers and chess are just simpler games.

Much of what player consider progress in games is the industries ability to add more complexity. If you look at the contemporary equivalent to chess that would be the spin-off of MOBAs: AutoChess.

AutoChess may bare a similar name to chess but it is a vastly more complex game. In theory AutoChess could have been created on the NES, but no one would have understood how to keep the implementation reasonable.

Instead it took a progress, from Chess we got turn based strategy games. From TBS we got real time strategy games. From the early RTS games, we got the story rich Warcraft. From Warcraft came extensive modding support and story based characters. With said mod tooling and characters a series of mods became what we now know as LoL and MOBAs. Another decade and another set of mod support brought AutoChess.

Yes simulations are complex games, but what used to be a defined genre is now an aspect of most big games. Western RPGs certainly try to push the boundary of coplexity, as to tycoon or simulation games. Still, all genres are tending towards more complex systems.

qznc• 7 years ago

Regular programming is not different. You mention the case of users data being sent to a server. There is so much which can go wrong there when authentication, load balancing, session management, data storage, and network latencies interact.

bipolar_lisper4• 7 years ago

While bugs in game programming are quite obscene, and the task of making a game quite arduous, all this tweet did was demonstrate how really bad code design will bite you in the ass if you're making games.

vsareto2• 7 years ago

What exactly indicates that The Outer Worlds has really bad code design?

gambiting• 7 years ago

So I work in games as well, and one thing you learn really quickly is that this "one weird bug that QA has seen once and no one has been ever able to reproduce or even come up with an idea of how it could happen" will be reported thousands of times and cause uproar on forums once you sell 10+ million copies. It's just a statistical inevitably.

loeg• 7 years ago

Ditto in enterprise, but that doesn't mean you're ever able to reproduce it in house before it ships. You do the best you can when you have a signal to follow. And there are probably other open bugs that impact more customers that deserve higher priority anyway.

bipolar_lisper4• 7 years ago

why is the most upvoted thing on hackernews right now a story about a bug that came about as the result of bad code

The only logical culprit was a bit of scripting that runs when a companion's health reaches zero: if they're in the party, it waits for combat to end and revives them; otherwise it marks them as dead "for real

The code should never have been written this way if the companion is not supposed to die. There should have been an `is_dead()` function that always returned false.

This site has declined dramatically and I think it's a result of the quality of programmers we have today vs what we had 10 years ago before the internet became mainstream.

None of these comments nor the tweets talk about how bad that code was, but instead kiss the guy's ass.

I expect to see more and more posts about games and other trivialities and less and less posts about important topics as the years fly by.

squar1sm• 7 years ago

Gamedev is full of interesting problems. The industry scares me because of a few friends. Fun to hack on, on the side and I’m jealous of the story and mystery this team got to chew on for a while. I know it’s hard but still jealous of these gems.

The Outer Worlds: Fixing the “game thinks my companion is dead” bug

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