Dirty Coding Tricks
Posted Wednesday, 9 September, 2009 - 09:39 by the FiddlerYou know an article is going to be good when it starts with those lines:
When the schedule is shot and a game needs to ship, programmers may employ some dirty coding tricks to get the game out the door. In an article originally published in Gamasutra sister publication Game Developer magazine earlier this year, here are nine real-life examples of just that.
Not only are the stories good, the comments below are pure gold:
Back on Wing Commander 1 we were getting an exception from our EMM386 memory manager when we exited the game. We'd clear the screen and a single line would print out, something like "EMM386 Memory manager error. Blah blah blah." We had to ship ASAP. So I hex edited the error in the memory manager itself to read "Thank you for playing Wing Commander."
I still remember that line when you exited the game! :-)
Read the whole article at Gamasutra.
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Comments
Re: Dirty Coding Tricks
The love the "programming antihero" trick.
Re: Dirty Coding Tricks
That was pure genius and very, very evil. Respect!
Re: Dirty Coding Tricks
Ahh great read ;)
I fancied this one:
.. about the 3d game where "Damp" (the main character) kept falling through the floor because of round-off-problems in the geometry (a title converted from PC with high-precision floating points to PS1 with low-precision fixed point).
Re: Dirty Coding Tricks
Heheh nice find! I recommend reading this as a reminder for great coding practices, too.
Re: Dirty Coding Tricks
2Inertia: thanks, I had lolrof reading this blog:)