actually a character wearing a train model as a hat

February 16, 2018 12:33 PM

A Twitter thread on video game development hacks
posted by griphus (11 comments total)

This is my favorite. I just love the thought of millions of invisible spellcasting bunnies.
posted by jonnay at 12:40 PM on February 16, 2018 [7 favorites]

Now I'll be suspicious of all games with an goodbye message on the command prompt.
posted by lmfsilva at 1:00 PM on February 16, 2018 [1 favorite]

I've always loved these hacks. One of my favorites is the dev team who exploited their own code to create buffer overflows via the EULA in order to patch their own game. Because they shipped without patch capability.

By the end, the hack looked like this:

1. Send oversized EULA
2. Overflow EULA buffer, miscellaneous data, callback handler pointer
3. Send packet to trigger handler
4. Game jumps to bootstrap code pointed to by handler
5. Bootstrap decodes payload data
6. Payload downloads and restores stomped miscellaneous data
7. Patch executes

Takeaways: Include patching code in your shipped game, and don't use unbounded strcpy.

posted by xyzzy at 1:05 PM on February 16, 2018 [18 favorites]

Previous with a mention of the train hat.
posted by Segundus at 1:20 PM on February 16, 2018

Insane weird hacks are kind of the staple of game mods. The best one I saw (but had nothing to do with) was one that implemented Tetris entirely with state machines running on each "pixel", a physical object in the game, because the game engine didn't support arrays or strings or any sort of datatype or object apart from integers and floats. It had to communicate using a "clock signal" by toggling a global variable back and forth, and somehow this implemented collision detection and clearing filled lines.

I never managed to untangle how the heck it worked.
posted by BungaDunga at 2:23 PM on February 16, 2018

the GIF of the super mario galaxy one viscerally upsets me

the only ones of these I knew about were Mario 1's sprite reuse and WoW's rest bonus

these are all amazing in general. I love, love, love reading about this kind of thing, I go hunting for it in places like The Cutting Room Floor or Boundary Break. another good more recent one is Game Hut, from Traveller's Tales founder Jon Burton, who describes a lot of stuff like this including the very satisfying explanation behind Sonic 3D Blast's bizarre level select trick
posted by Kybard at 2:37 PM on February 16, 2018 [4 favorites]

An ongoing joke / meme in the League of Legends community is how things are coded as minions. Minions are the NPC mobs in the game. But it's also the base class for a lot of other stuff, like wards and Jayce gates and various placeable objects. And so everything has health and a bunch of default interactions with the world that end up breaking in hilarious ways.
posted by Nelson at 4:22 PM on February 16, 2018 [2 favorites]

More WoW: riding a mount uses the same mechanics as swimming. Lag during dismount reveals it.
posted by Brocktoon at 7:44 PM on February 16, 2018 [2 favorites]

From an interview in Danny O'Dwyer's NoClip documentary on the Witcher 3, it turns out a traveling merchant secretly holds tons of bug fixes because he is always present no matter the state of the world.
posted by davejh at 8:23 PM on February 16, 2018 [1 favorite]

Now I'll be suspicious of all games with an goodbye message on the command prompt.

I love that one because there was some game in my youth that would crash on exit, and the developers just figured that wasn't really a problem. Changing the error text is a great solution!
posted by yellowbinder at 9:36 PM on February 16, 2018 [2 favorites]

More WoW: riding a mount uses the same mechanics as swimming. Lag during dismount reveals it.

This also happens when for some reason summoning your flying mount succeeds but loading the model doesn't, and you're just swimming across the skies at high speeds.
posted by Pope Guilty at 4:49 AM on February 17, 2018