Thread by @dsmart

Of all my industry peers, friends and colleagues, I am the one voted most likely to be fearlessly opining about industry shenanigans because anonymity isn't a luxury that I enjoy.

Of course we all have our biases, but I'm known to be very loyal.

But...

....farking hell, I have no idea what's going on at Bethesda but not a week goes by whereby another Fallout 76 fiasco isn't making waves. And it's almost as if they're not even trying anymore. The latest fiasco is as hilarious as it is alarming.

Get this..

Bethesda is apparently banning gamers & Youtubers for showing a defect in Fallout 76.

I wish I was kidding.

I just had a lengthy DM exchange with one of my friends, and I seriously couldn't stop laughing.

It's all true; but the reasoning makes sense - for the most part.

What's even more hilarious? Apparently they've known about this latest - major - bug for months now; as it was obscure enough to go undetected for the most part.

For the record, I haven't played Fallout 76 yet; but now I want to because clearly I am missing out on the lols 🤣

As game devs, we all have our horror stories of crazy and hilarious bugs; some of which may still lurk - unfixed - in shipped games.

I remember one of mine which is still in one of my games and which I dare not patch.

It goes like this..

AI troops deployed from a space ship to the planet below, do NOT have pre-computed paths which allow them to navigate around obstacles and such in 3D world space.

They do it dynamically and in real-time because I wrote that code decades ago and wanted to simulate human behavior

This ofc was a significant toll on CPU cycles because imagine deploying 16 NPC troops to a hostile base, then the base deploys a reaction force at a 2:1 ratio. All of them thinking & dynamically plotting paths, actions & such in real-time.

Here's the bug...

If you deploy your alter-ego using a transporter (from a cap ship) alongside your team, give the leader an attack order on a target that's BVR (their awareness range is 100m, radar is 25km), he will stop thinking & generating a route...

....instead making a beeline for the farthest extent of the planet, while walking straight ahead, through everything,.as he tries to figure out the location the target he basically just ran past 🤣

The planet is procedurallly generated and has no 'edge' 🤣

So you could literally follow him until one of you dies of hunger and/or thirst (both of which are modeled in his AI) because he gets into a 'fixated' state that he can't get out of.

And if you bring him back to the ship, either by transporter or a shuttle, only when his life factor is below 10 (he dies at 0), he will head straight for the galley, and consume everything until the supplies go negative. Everyone on the ship eventually starves to death. 🤣

I haven't fixed it because I wrote that AI code decades ago, back when it was in TASM before I ported it to C++, and I am too scared to mess with it because it would literally break everything - and then I would be tempted to implement modern day precomputed pathfinding logic.

My reasoning is that it's OK for NPC units to go insane. You know, just like their creators 🤣