Tweet
by Ben Reeves (from Game Informer)
Jack's Pet Landshark
"In Dead to Rights: Retribution, ammo is at a premium, and its not uncommon for Jack to run out. Fortunately, Shadow, Jack's AI dog buddy, can spot when this happens and help out. Unfortunately, early on he was so eager to help that he would run and fetch live grenades and place them obediently at your feet. Another bug often occurred while Jack and Shadow were fighting enemies on a wooden walkway above the streets. During this section, Shadow would randomly sink into the walkway in a way that left only his ears and snout visible. As enemies would come after Jack, Shadow would take them down, pulling them halfway through the walkway. Because of the random sinking and the vicious way he would pull the enemies into the walkway surface as they thrashed about, Shadow resembled a shark - with his ears being the dorsal fin."
Scotty, Beam Down the Entire Ship
"It was a little frustrating, because in our game your character can be both a ship and a captain, but there were times when, under great stress, the code would get confused and it wasn't sure when you were supposed to be your ship and when you were supposed to be your captain. People would beam out into space thinking that they were going to their starship and they'd end up as a [ship-sized] person floating around in space. Sometimes the opposite would happen too - they'd be a ship and beam down to a space station only to find that they were still a [person-sized] ship flying around the station."
Girls Mature Faster Than Boys
"During Marvel: Ultimate Alliance 2, we saw all sorts of bugs, though we found visual bugs were often the funniest. Late in the game, we discovered that the Thing's facial structure and voice were getting mapped to other characters during conversations. The most memorable instance of this happening was when Ms. Marvel began channeling the Thing, and her brow, nose, and mouth stretched out to the shape of the Thing's. Coupled with the Thing's voice, it made for an unnerving experience."
How Did We Win the Space Race
"Way back in the day when Vicious Visions ws developing the PC game Terminus, we ran into some very strange bugs. In one case, every time you tried to fire a missile, your spaceship would spontaneously blow up. We had worked to model the game with incredible accuracy, and we just could not figure out why the ships were exploding. It took a long time to figure out the root cause - it turned out that the diameter of the missile was slightly larger than the weapons bay port it was getting shot out from, so every time it hit the port, it exploded and took the player's ship with it. Also in Terminus, we had a particular ship that would fly out of the space dock and immediately all controls would go dead. The joystick wouldn't work, no keyboard input, etc. It turned out that we had modeled inefficient radiation shielding on the ship. So the moment the ship took off, radiation from the engine's core would kill the pilot."
Our Flowers Will Bolt Out of the Sun
"At one point, the flower that grows at the end of each level of Flower was affected by the number of petals that you collected during the level. Of course, before the game was balanced, when we were just testing out mechanics, we'd create such large swarms of petals that the final flower grew to epic proportions. We ended up calling it the Flower Mothership. It looked like it would inhale the entire valley, and it cracked me up every time."
Send Your Enemies into Orbit
"One of our achievements, in The Maw, hinged on the player feeding the maw every single creature in the game. As we got close to the end of the development, it seemed like we were running into all these cases where we couldn't find the last creature or two in a level even though we visited all their locations. It soon became apparent that the Yums were disappearing somehow. We were at a loss. Finally, by chance, one of us happened to be passing by one of the territorial Gastros as it defended its zone against a Yum. It grabbed the Yum in its mouth, shook it vigorously, and tossed it at a mountain. The Yum hit it and then suddenly went rocketing into the air like a Smash Bros. character. It turned out that if a creature was small enough and got shoved too far into an indentation in the terrain, our physics library helpfully resolved the situation by firing the creature into the air at near-infinite velocity. I thought it'd be fine to just tell players to wait a couple of days for the Yums to fall back to the ground, but the designers made us fix the bug instead. "
A Corrupt Prison System
"During Oblivion, our new Radiant AI system - which would let all the NPC's in the world think and act on their own - led to some of the best bugs. My favorite was a quest where you had to talk to a prisoner in jail. Sometimes, when play testing, we would find him locked in his cell, dead. It took us forever to figure out why. Turns out, the guards in the jail could run out of food and get hungry. They would then go down and kill the prisoner to take his food. All this happened when the player wasn't there. I still don't remember how we figured it out. But the solution was easy: more guard food!"
Epic Disaster Narrowly Avoided
"Leading up to the E3 press conference we had a texture streaming bug in Uncharted 2 that would strike without warning, turning every texture on screen into a purplish mess. It was one of those insidious kind of bugs that happened rarely enough that it was very difficult to track down, but happened frequently enough that the idea of giving a live demo on stage in front of thousands of people had me scared s***less. We did everything we could to fix the bug before the big day, but simply could not guarantee that it had been eliminated. Since the demonstration had to be live, we needed some sort of backup plan. While I was playing the game live on stage, we had our producer from Sony playing along back stage keeping perfect pace with my progress. If the bug struck, we were going to switch the screen on stage to his feed so that the demo could continue without the corrupted textures. Thankfully the demo went off without a hitch and we didn't need to pull the trigger on the backup plan."
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Just thought some of you might enjoy these.
Jack's Pet Landshark
"In Dead to Rights: Retribution, ammo is at a premium, and its not uncommon for Jack to run out. Fortunately, Shadow, Jack's AI dog buddy, can spot when this happens and help out. Unfortunately, early on he was so eager to help that he would run and fetch live grenades and place them obediently at your feet. Another bug often occurred while Jack and Shadow were fighting enemies on a wooden walkway above the streets. During this section, Shadow would randomly sink into the walkway in a way that left only his ears and snout visible. As enemies would come after Jack, Shadow would take them down, pulling them halfway through the walkway. Because of the random sinking and the vicious way he would pull the enemies into the walkway surface as they thrashed about, Shadow resembled a shark - with his ears being the dorsal fin."
Scotty, Beam Down the Entire Ship
"It was a little frustrating, because in our game your character can be both a ship and a captain, but there were times when, under great stress, the code would get confused and it wasn't sure when you were supposed to be your ship and when you were supposed to be your captain. People would beam out into space thinking that they were going to their starship and they'd end up as a [ship-sized] person floating around in space. Sometimes the opposite would happen too - they'd be a ship and beam down to a space station only to find that they were still a [person-sized] ship flying around the station."
Girls Mature Faster Than Boys
"During Marvel: Ultimate Alliance 2, we saw all sorts of bugs, though we found visual bugs were often the funniest. Late in the game, we discovered that the Thing's facial structure and voice were getting mapped to other characters during conversations. The most memorable instance of this happening was when Ms. Marvel began channeling the Thing, and her brow, nose, and mouth stretched out to the shape of the Thing's. Coupled with the Thing's voice, it made for an unnerving experience."
How Did We Win the Space Race
"Way back in the day when Vicious Visions ws developing the PC game Terminus, we ran into some very strange bugs. In one case, every time you tried to fire a missile, your spaceship would spontaneously blow up. We had worked to model the game with incredible accuracy, and we just could not figure out why the ships were exploding. It took a long time to figure out the root cause - it turned out that the diameter of the missile was slightly larger than the weapons bay port it was getting shot out from, so every time it hit the port, it exploded and took the player's ship with it. Also in Terminus, we had a particular ship that would fly out of the space dock and immediately all controls would go dead. The joystick wouldn't work, no keyboard input, etc. It turned out that we had modeled inefficient radiation shielding on the ship. So the moment the ship took off, radiation from the engine's core would kill the pilot."
Our Flowers Will Bolt Out of the Sun
"At one point, the flower that grows at the end of each level of Flower was affected by the number of petals that you collected during the level. Of course, before the game was balanced, when we were just testing out mechanics, we'd create such large swarms of petals that the final flower grew to epic proportions. We ended up calling it the Flower Mothership. It looked like it would inhale the entire valley, and it cracked me up every time."
Send Your Enemies into Orbit
"One of our achievements, in The Maw, hinged on the player feeding the maw every single creature in the game. As we got close to the end of the development, it seemed like we were running into all these cases where we couldn't find the last creature or two in a level even though we visited all their locations. It soon became apparent that the Yums were disappearing somehow. We were at a loss. Finally, by chance, one of us happened to be passing by one of the territorial Gastros as it defended its zone against a Yum. It grabbed the Yum in its mouth, shook it vigorously, and tossed it at a mountain. The Yum hit it and then suddenly went rocketing into the air like a Smash Bros. character. It turned out that if a creature was small enough and got shoved too far into an indentation in the terrain, our physics library helpfully resolved the situation by firing the creature into the air at near-infinite velocity. I thought it'd be fine to just tell players to wait a couple of days for the Yums to fall back to the ground, but the designers made us fix the bug instead. "
A Corrupt Prison System
"During Oblivion, our new Radiant AI system - which would let all the NPC's in the world think and act on their own - led to some of the best bugs. My favorite was a quest where you had to talk to a prisoner in jail. Sometimes, when play testing, we would find him locked in his cell, dead. It took us forever to figure out why. Turns out, the guards in the jail could run out of food and get hungry. They would then go down and kill the prisoner to take his food. All this happened when the player wasn't there. I still don't remember how we figured it out. But the solution was easy: more guard food!"
Epic Disaster Narrowly Avoided
"Leading up to the E3 press conference we had a texture streaming bug in Uncharted 2 that would strike without warning, turning every texture on screen into a purplish mess. It was one of those insidious kind of bugs that happened rarely enough that it was very difficult to track down, but happened frequently enough that the idea of giving a live demo on stage in front of thousands of people had me scared s***less. We did everything we could to fix the bug before the big day, but simply could not guarantee that it had been eliminated. Since the demonstration had to be live, we needed some sort of backup plan. While I was playing the game live on stage, we had our producer from Sony playing along back stage keeping perfect pace with my progress. If the bug struck, we were going to switch the screen on stage to his feed so that the demo could continue without the corrupted textures. Thankfully the demo went off without a hitch and we didn't need to pull the trigger on the backup plan."
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Just thought some of you might enjoy these.
), Call of Juarez
Comment