"stopped vampires from pinning their crimes on babies and children"
November 25, 2014 4:04 PM   Subscribe

 
This is great!
posted by brundlefly at 4:20 PM on November 25, 2014


Shooting a crate creates a duplicate crate

Oooh, that must have been fun.
posted by AlonzoMosleyFBI at 4:32 PM on November 25, 2014


This is better than horse_ebooks.
posted by bile and syntax at 4:34 PM on November 25, 2014 [1 favorite]


These are hilarious!

"rutabagas would dash repeatedly at you, either killing you instantly or locking the game"

Heh.
posted by misha at 4:34 PM on November 25, 2014 [3 favorites]


It's sort of sad that I immediately recognized every note from Ultima Online, mostly because - as a lonely, misguided teenager - knowing which house-breakin glitches had been fixed gave me hints on what new avenues might be opened up by said fix...
posted by Ryvar at 4:40 PM on November 25, 2014 [2 favorites]


Oh Secret World, it's filth all the way down and you know it.
posted by angerbot at 4:47 PM on November 25, 2014


Drinking Eggplant Juice no longer produces a false memory of maximizing a skill

Please fix this in real life.
posted by ernielundquist at 4:49 PM on November 25, 2014 [29 favorites]


I enjoy reading the Dwarf Fortress updates (several, including this post's title, represented in the link) over a glass of wine. It just had a major release so there's a lot of fun updates being done.

Of course, understanding the full grand and dry absurdity of some updates depends on being familiar with the depth of Dwarf Fortress, a physics and alcoholic dwarf simulation rendered in ASCII.

Today saw the addition of an oft-requested feature -- the ability to geld! We stayed away from new parts, but there's a body part tag for it on appropriate male critters, as well as a job and so on. The job takes place at the farmer's workshop after the animal is designated in a way similar to slaughtering. The process is modeled with a wound within the existing framework.

I cleaned up some crashes today. One of them involved a night creature that had wandered into a shop and killed the owner... the creature then somehow got assigned as the owner. The crash happened when the night creature tried to come up with things to say to potential shoppers, since it didn't have a civilization as a frame of reference.

The purpose of this release is to make stress from long-term separation due to goblin snatching less severe and to stop attackers from always winning in post-world-generation non-player battles.

Made cultures that oppose intruders more lax when in places controlled by less wary groups (one cause of marketplace knifefights)

made random creatures only spit liquid spittle

Stopped stress reactions from being applied to unintelligent critters

'Cause the emu were getting too emu.
posted by tychotesla at 5:02 PM on November 25, 2014 [17 favorites]


Stopped zombies from interrupting your sleep to ask if they can help you with something
My copy of Real LifeTM got this patch last week and frankly it makes things a lot less interesting.
posted by Western Infidels at 5:14 PM on November 25, 2014 [3 favorites]


All byzantine emperors will now have clothes regardless of what DLCs are enabled.

I am now imagining Justinian trying to calm the Nika Riots....
posted by GenjiandProust at 5:25 PM on November 25, 2014 [2 favorites]


Sort of related previous FPP about patch notes for The Sims.
posted by mhum at 5:41 PM on November 25, 2014


I once read a great quote that I'll probably butcher in the paraphrasing, but someone said that video game debugging is the process of removing magic from an imaginary world until it's as boring as the real world.
posted by zixyer at 5:56 PM on November 25, 2014 [13 favorites]


I would like to see someone design a browser-based application that selects 3-5 of these at random, parse them for word/letter count, and then have them displayed as headlines, subheads, and decks on one of those old spinny newspaper animations* from the 40s. Refresh the page and you get another spinny newspaper with a different set of bug fixes.

*A bit like this demo, but more detailed and complex.
posted by chambers at 6:06 PM on November 25, 2014 [7 favorites]


Well, someone has to say it...

Metafilter: various ocelot spawning problems, again.
posted by Bunny Boneyology at 6:12 PM on November 25, 2014 [7 favorites]


SWTOR's had some amusing bits in patch notes... a few from more recent ones (just realized I posted some in the Sims patch notes thread too):

Lord Modo has taken remedial Sith Lord classes and has learned a new ability!

After an extensive summit meeting, a council of Dark Side elders has decreed that silent theatrical mediums are no longer considered “inherently not dark” and players with Dark Side alignment can now use “Emote: Mime.”

In keeping with Dread Palace fire code, the platform in the Dread Master Raptus encounter once again has a ramp leading up to it.

Hailstorm Survivalists on Hoth will have a greater chance of surviving as they are now correctly equipped with a melee weapon.

Lord Zash has been given pronoun training such that she no longer refers to male players as female when speaking German.
posted by kmz at 6:14 PM on November 25, 2014 [2 favorites]


I enjoy reading the Dwarf Fortress updates [...] over a glass of wine.

Seriously, DF can't be beat for the release notes that read like a postmodern novel gone awry. And lately Toady One seems to be consciously embracing the pleasurable absurdity of the release notes — the official DF Twitter has been rivaling the parodic .txt account with gems like the below (sorry for any duplication, I think these bear repeating):

Less animal vengeance, better stress

Stepladders for fruit, emotion rewrite
Misery amortized over the life of the dwarf

Better hospitals+prisons, mean minotaurs
Scaring a bird weeks ago no longer alarms drunks

Failing to wrestle elephant now less instructive

posted by RogerB at 6:21 PM on November 25, 2014 [5 favorites]


The closest to non-pedestrian that my commit messages ever get is during frustrated runs when they're just strings of obscenities, but those typically get squashed before they ever make it to a remote, so this makes me really happy.
posted by invitapriore at 6:21 PM on November 25, 2014


Oh, I even forgot to mention my very favorite Dwarf Fortress release note ever: babies no longer born strapped with knives.
posted by RogerB at 6:24 PM on November 25, 2014 [22 favorites]


Fixed a bug that sometimes caused doors to float away into infinity

I am laughing so hard at these.
posted by DingoMutt at 6:42 PM on November 25, 2014 [2 favorites]


"You can now skin humans"

o_O which game is this?
posted by Jacqueline at 6:48 PM on November 25, 2014 [1 favorite]


I just came in to mention the Sims patch logs, but someone else beat me to it. They're the best patch logs because their actions are so mundane that they end up being even more surreal. Some of my favorites:

Pianists will no longer continue playing pianos that have been detonated.
Toddlers can no longer get fleas.
Sims can no longer "Try for Baby" with the Grim Reaper.
"Become Enemies with Child" wish no longer appears.
posted by dinty_moore at 7:21 PM on November 25, 2014 [8 favorites]


I rarely know what games these are from, but it's always an entertaining feed. Just the right random to make your day better.
posted by jb at 8:31 PM on November 25, 2014


eldritch transformation cannot be interrupted.
posted by erlking at 8:34 PM on November 25, 2014 [2 favorites]


The Steam forum thread titles for Crusader Kings 2 are pretty amazing in a similar way.

"Need help with dumb son-in-law."
"I executed the Pope and nothing much happened."
posted by straight at 9:38 PM on November 25, 2014 [1 favorite]


This is better than horse_ebooks.

Lots of things are, now that we know it was mostly a sham.
posted by JHarris at 9:52 PM on November 25, 2014


"You can now skin humans"

o_O which game is this?


(Apologies for the long answer, but the context will help a bit)

It's most likely the recent update to the alpha standalone version (standalone as in 'no longer a mod') of the zombie survival game DayZ which just added cannibalism a week or so ago.

Back in the height of the mod's success there was a mod of the mod that had this, um, "feature," but the developer of the original/main version was hesitant to add it for two reasons:

1) That really wasn't the direction he wanted to take the game . To survive against the elements, the apocalyptic scenario, and the decisions to join up with or go up against the other players was far more interesting to him.

2) Around that time he was in talks with Bohemia Interactive (creators of ArmA, that DayZ was a mod of) to license the concept and join up with them to create a standalone version of the game. Adding cannibalism would attract undue negative press in a few countries like Germany and Australia that have (as I understand it) laws/restrictions about games that contain things like 'corpse desecration,' and they would have a field day with parading around the fact that this is a game where you can, if you really wanted to, hunt other players to kill, butcher, cook, and eat them. However, this grisly feature had its risks and penalties - in the mod, eating people would heavily affect your 'humanity' a stat often used to differentiate the good players from the evil players. Humanity as a stat no longer exists in the standalone version, but the risks I spoke of earlier were in the mod(s), and will be added to the SA version - if you're not careful (by thorough cooking) or just unlucky, you'll get a prion-like brain disease from consuming humans. There's very little need to do this in the game, but if your starving and that's your only choice, in a way, having to make that choice is part of the game.

Now after 2.5 million players forked out $30 for a game that hasn't even left the alpha stage yet and is distributed digitally by Steam so IIRC it doesn't have the same restrictions as selling boxed game in some countries, adding it now seems like less of a big deal. That sounds weird to say, but out of the vast multitude of things that you can do or have happen to you in that game, this aspect is a very small peripheral element.
posted by chambers at 10:06 PM on November 25, 2014 [4 favorites]


The dev notes for one of my favorite games in development, RimWorld, are frequently great:
More apparel generation refinements: Avoid generating coats without shirts underneath.
Raw potatoes, berries, meat, and herbal medicine will rot and can be refrigerated to prevent rotting.
Added deer.
Bed is now made of wood.
Restricted hairdos by faction. No more pirates or tribals in pigtails.
One of the best games I've ever backed on Kickstarter. Not "final" yet and I've spent hours on it.
posted by fifteen schnitzengruben is my limit at 10:14 PM on November 25, 2014 [3 favorites]


Patch notes for Goat Simulator are a thing of beauty.
posted by yellowbinder at 10:53 PM on November 25, 2014 [4 favorites]


Wait, the one Dwarf Fortress one is a parody? It seems real, though that may be because the actual release notes are so insane.
posted by DoctorFedora at 12:20 AM on November 26, 2014 [1 favorite]


"You can now skin humans"

You guys might be disappointed to learn that "skinning" means to customize one's appearance. Sorry for the bringdown.
posted by rlk at 5:13 AM on November 26, 2014 [1 favorite]


The dev notes for one of my favorite games in development, RimWorld, are frequently great:

Oh, you fucker. I was going to try and accomplish stuff this weekend. That's all shot now.
posted by Caduceus at 5:53 AM on November 26, 2014 [1 favorite]


You guys might be disappointed to learn that "skinning" means to customize one's appearance. Sorry for the bringdown.

It can mean just changes appearances, but in this case, the newest version of the DayZ experimental branch, v0.51.125686 (under 'new'), the new option to go all 'Soylent' on people is what that tweet was about.
posted by chambers at 6:29 AM on November 26, 2014 [1 favorite]


Wait, the one Dwarf Fortress one is a parody? It seems real

Happily it turns out I was wrong about that! I had never actually checked to make sure my impression of dwarfort_txt was accurate, and a few minutes' Googling very much suggest not: it's apparently composed of 100% genuine Toady insanity.
posted by RogerB at 8:19 AM on November 26, 2014 [1 favorite]


Fixed a typo in the corwn of haterd.

I THINK NOT, BABY PUPPY
posted by glasseyes at 8:41 AM on November 26, 2014 [1 favorite]


Patch notes for Goat Simulator are a thing of beauty.

Contains a YT video of goat riding a guy riding a bike, to explain the change "Ride a bike with a human on your back."
posted by achrise at 9:58 AM on November 26, 2014 [2 favorites]


Anyone else have a distinct preference for the writers who not only use correct grammar but seem to appreciate the absurdity of the actions they are documenting?

I read, A whole day now take one hour, Meh, okay, I get it. But it just doesn't have the same poetry as Flying creatures stop flying, fall to the ground, and explode, you know?
posted by misha at 10:16 AM on November 26, 2014


Changelogs are awesome, but some real unseen magic happens in source control logs..

For the non-code-savvy: when you're part of a dev team, you usually have to "check in" any data you add or change using "source control" programs like Perforce or SVN or git, to avoid stomping over each other's edits. Each "check-in" lets you add a brief text description about what you're changing -- I became frustrated with my colleagues totally ignoring this field, so I started doing stuff like ASCII art, haiku, pasting in "GREETZ" text from old Amiga demos, etc.

Probably my best achievement was placing the lyrics of "OWNER OF A LONELY HEART" randomly over a 300kb XML file, so when you view a diff (a side-by-side comparison of highlighted differences, similar to "view history" on Wikipedia) you can click "NEXT CHANGE" over and over, and sing along with the song!

Also, in our bug-tracking system, whenever I got a duplicate or spurious request to fix something, instead of just responding curtly with "WILL NOT FIX / AS DESIGNED" I would just respond with this image attached. Thus, "burrito dogging" gradually became a verb "that bug? oh that was burrito dogged, dogg" (this only works because audio departments and QA departments tend to get along, since we're the only discipline who doesn't treat them like worthless peons)

When your artistic discipline is dead last in the content pipeline, you end up enjoying certain.. freedoms, is all I'm saying
posted by jake at 3:08 PM on November 26, 2014 [2 favorites]


example:
Revision: 17462 by JakeK

Oops, I broke the game
Needed shrek_burp_*2*.wav

 
     ,.       /                  \     /(  \; 
    /'\\     ,o.        ,ooooo.   \  ,'  `-') 
    )) )`. d8P"Y8.    ,8P"""""Y8.  `'  .--"' 
   (`-'   `Y'  `Y8    dP       `'     / 
    `----.(   __ `    ,' ,---.       ( 
           ),--.`.   (  ;,---.        ) 
          / \O_,' )   \  \O_,'        | 
         ;  `-- ,'       `---'        |    Test first ALWAYS, friends
         |    -'         `.           | 
        _;    ,            )          : 
     _.'|     `.:._   ,.::" `..       | 
  --'   |   .'     """         `      |`. 

posted by jake at 3:22 PM on November 26, 2014 [2 favorites]


The new changelog for Clockwork Empires contains some good ones:
correctly hooked up pumpkin pie icon
gunfire, explosions, and combat will now wake people up
balance: whether it is night or not now affects a lot of character jobs & behaviours
posted by fifteen schnitzengruben is my limit at 10:24 PM on December 3, 2014 [1 favorite]


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