Whose Bug Is This Anyway? 241
An anonymous reader writes "Patrick Wyatt, one of the developers behind the original Warcraft and StarCraft games, as well as Diablo and Guild Wars, has a post about some of the bug hunting he's done throughout his career. He covers familiar topics — crunch time leading to stupid mistakes and finding bugs in compilers rather than game code — and shares a story about finding a way to diagnose hardware failure for players of Guild Wars. Quoting: '[Mike O'Brien] wrote a module ("OsStress") which would allocate a block of memory, perform calculations in that memory block, and then compare the results of the calculation to a table of known answers. He encoded this stress-test into the main game loop so that the computer would perform this verification step about 30-50 times per second. On a properly functioning computer this stress test should never fail, but surprisingly we discovered that on about 1% of the computers being used to play Guild Wars it did fail! One percent might not sound like a big deal, but when one million gamers play the game on any given day that means 10,000 would have at least one crash bug. Our programming team could spend weeks researching the bugs for just one day at that rate!'"
Wait its possible?! (Score:5, Funny)
You mean all those times when my code was 'fine' and i gave up it really could have been the compiler or a memory problem
shit i'm a much better programmer than i realized
Caution: (Score:5, Funny)
Re:stress test (Score:5, Funny)
In my field, I have a bunch of grass, a few shrubs and even a small tree. Lots of rodents and birds. If a computer can survive two weeks sitting in my field and still power on, you have a damned good system. If not, you're left with people wondering why you left your computer in my field for two weeks.
Re:stress test (Score:5, Funny)
He didn't say anything about a computer: "In my field, if YOU can survive"... scary...
Compilers (Score:5, Funny)
For being a skilled developer, I can't believe he would not think that Dev/Test/Prod build environments not running the same version of the compiler was not an issue (Obviously, until it was an issue).
That's Development Cycle 101.
Even better! (Score:5, Funny)
the compiler had done exactly what it should according to the standard...
That's even better - it means that you've found a bug in the standard! ;-)