Guild Wars 2

From the patch notes:

Fixed a client crash that occurred when players stopped spectating rangers in PvP.

So now i get why everyone hates rangers! o.O
Even the game hates them.

But on a more serious note, how happens a bug like this?

Velarian.6290:

But on a more serious note, how happens a bug like this?

I know enough about programming to know that this sort of bug arises when something completely unrelated was fixed.

I remember years ago in WoW, some bug made Orc shoulders smaller than normal, and fixing it ended up completely shutting down the mail system and auction house for like a week.

Well, talking abt weird things – think of the hair kit bug. I had a moment of panic believing I somehow turned into a hacker or built a time machine to get hairstyles in the future…
Some bugs are just weird.

computers are weird :o

Captain Unusual.9163:

I know enough about programming to know that this sort of bug arises when something completely unrelated was fixed.

Uhhhmm… maybe if the code is spaghetti, but otherwise, they tend to be the exception rather than the rule. It can be something that seems unrelated but actually isn’t, as well, though. It can also be a new feature or improvement that doesn’t work properly in some situations.

For instance – and I’m just making this up here – imagine if they recently added a tweak for observer mode that, when you’re spectating a Ranger, tries to line the camera up to get the pet in the field of vision too. They might have added an additional class somewhere in there to take care of the details of that. When you switch to something else that isn’t a Ranger, that class is no longer needed so it gets de-allocated… well, say that the de-allocation isn’t done properly and it causes memory corruption. Then you can get a crash. But it’ll only happen when switching away from spectating a Ranger.

There are probably a hundred other ways you could have these sorts of crashes that coincidentally only apply to spectating a specific profession as well… programs of the size of GW2 get very very complex.

I’ve had the opportunity to browse through the source code of a few games now since they went open source and yes, all of them are a horrible mishmash of cobbled together code and random workaround fixes that are a nightmare to follow. I was forced to take courses on software design by my employer since the company did write commercial business software that could not tolerate the mass of bugs we see in games.

I’ve often wondered what the result would come about if games were designed like business software using the techniques I had to learn… and I concluded that even with a tyrant lead programmer vigorously enforcing the code style rules, it would end up taking 3 to 5 times as long to produce the relatively bullet-proof code to make a game. There is always someone who would resist being told how to write “his” code and chaff at the restrictions needed to stay within the set of code assets available to use.