• geopilot (unregistered)

    As a flight sim magazine providerpublisher during this period I can say that I used to wish all flight sims and battle sims had stand alone cool cam modes so they could be run as screen savers.

    I always wished the AI could fight BOTH sides of the battle and sometimes I could just turn on the action cams (as they were called in other sims) and just sit back and watch the most incredible aerial actions never caught on real aircraft gun cameras.

    www.vivzizi.com the stuff of life

  • Drinkingbird (unregistered) in reply to durnurd
    durnurd:
    That really was a hilarious writeup. Now why don't people who work on F/OSS get it that design is important? They have professions for it! Is it just that F/OSS is a programmer-centric sort of thing that designers don't really get into?

    Now, why don't people stop running around spouting this particular nugget of bullshit.

    Commercial software and FOSS both have examples of very good design, very bad design, and everything in between in roughly the same proportion.

    Go dribble somewhere else.

  • Jimbo (unregistered)

    This is probably the first story I've read on here that has a happy ending.

    I also enjoyed the crap out of playing some of those MicroProse games.

  • sburnap (unregistered)

    The nazis changing sides sounds very much like a bug I ran into in the PS3 version of Oblivion just a couple weeks ago. I was sneaking around a castle, got seen by a guard, putting them into combat mode. For some reason the countess's bodyguard got confused and suddenly started attacking the countess as she ran around yelling for said bodyguard to help her. Since she was a "quest" character, she couldn't die...instead, she'd get "knocked unconcious" at which point the bodyguard would go to standing around. A few minutes, she'd wake and he'd knock the crap out of her again.

  • nonchalant (unregistered)

    This is one of the best WTF's I've ever read.

    Enough said :)

  • tecxx (unregistered) in reply to KattMan
    KattMan:
    Another one (sorry can't recall the name or manufacturer) was a car racing game that allowed you to build your own tracks. Just create one with a nice long straight track so you could get up to 220 MPH then a slight hill off to the side of the track would cause you to spiral-flip wildly hundreds or even thousands of feet into the air ending an a spectacular crash. Oh you had to have damage turned off for this to happen, but I spent more time flying cars then racing them in that game.

    it was called "Stunts". awesome game!

  • (cs) in reply to sburnap
    sburnap:
    The nazis changing sides sounds very much like a bug I ran into in the PS3 version of Oblivion just a couple weeks ago.
    If you've played Oblivion for long you'll realize the I in AI doesn't actually stand for "Intelligence"
  • Rawr (unregistered) in reply to Spikeles
    Spikeles:
    sburnap:
    The nazis changing sides sounds very much like a bug I ran into in the PS3 version of Oblivion just a couple weeks ago.
    If you've played Oblivion for long you'll realize the I in AI doesn't actually stand for "Intelligence"

    Guess it means Incompetence then...

  • (cs)

    I love this "Tim" dude...

    "What bugs? Yeah whatever. Look at this here; I call it the cool cam!"

  • Darien H (unregistered)

    Starseige: Tribes

    Every map was essentially a rectangle that was tiled maybe 10-20 times to make the appearance of endless terrain around the battlefield (and generally, it worked well).

    At some point, the terrain ended. At two side (North, west? I forget) jumping off the knife-edge of teh terrain shell let you fall into space forever, accelerating constantly. (You could use your jetpack curve around and "punch through" the ground from below and back to safety.)

    However, at the opposite sides, gravity reversed once you crossed over the edge of the world, and you would fall upwards at similar acceleration.

  • Julian (unregistered) in reply to Kemp

    Man, Carmageddon. I had the 5-minute timed demo that came with some magazine CD, which drew fast and had a gritty, rough looking environment and I thought it was the best demo ever. Then I played the actual game and they'd changed the whole rendering engine to something full of shiny polygons and my old PC couldn't handle it. I went back to playing the demo and seeing how much damage I could cause in 5 minutes!

  • (cs) in reply to Drinkingbird
    Drinkingbird:
    Now, why don't people stop running around spouting this particular nugget of bullshit.

    Commercial software and FOSS both have examples of very good design, very bad design, and everything in between in roughly the same proportion.

    Go dribble somewhere else.

    Awesome! A troll! But seriously, there is a largely disproportionate amount of bad design with good functionality, comparatively.

  • Andy Goth (unregistered)

    I work on an F-18 simulator which used to occasionally launch the pilot into space. It's fixed now, of course, but I kinda miss flying above the sky dome.

    The (third party) image generator component uses a version of Boeing's CIGI library that has thread-unsafe global scratch variables for byte swapping. Occasionally the image generator does byte swaps in two threads simultaneously, corrupting the results. And occasionally those results are height-of-terrain data requested by the simulator. Thus the ground sometimes spikes up trillions of meters above sea level, carrying the F-18 with it. Fun stuff, I tell you.

  • (cs)

    A WTF with a happy ending. Great stuff. Reminds me of back in the day developing a 3d rendering engine. I was having troubles with animations exported from 3ds max (ended up writing my own custom file format export plugin) and went weeks with no progress. The boss was getting impatient, my animations were still screwy so instead I spent the week finishing the lighting and texture routines. Next time I showed the wonky animations there they were in all their textured, lit glory, getting the pressure off and giving me the time to write the plugin and fix the anims. Often the illusion of large progress is better than incremental improvements.

  • (cs) in reply to durnurd
    durnurd:
    That really was a hilarious writeup. Now why don't people who work on F/OSS get it that design is important? They have professions for it! Is it just that F/OSS is a programmer-centric sort of thing that designers don't really get into?

    That's an interesting thing. I think we get desensitized to people who contribute design advice, because there tend to be a lot of them. My experience is that about 4 of 5 people who want to contribute to an open source project are artists of some stripe who want to design icons, change fonts, move user interface elements or align things with other things.

    It's not bad, and it's nice to have interest, but it definitely blends into a sort of noise after you hear it enough, especially when a lot of things are obviously and seriously broken.

    Actually, if I could point to one thing being a factor it's that it's difficult to set up a version control system with different access levels and rich controls. It'd be nice to mark out resource files as more public (having fewer restrictions on commit access), or have some more traditional editorial control on them. It should be easy for artist types to change artwork without programmer help, and do things like quietly convert data formats and fix things like file name case. No source control system I know of does this well.

    SVN post commit scripts are basically useless for it.

    Perforce can do fine-grained permissions, but doesn't have a rich merge interface for sticky stuff like artwork.

    Alienbrain, for those who remember the dog that it was, could be made to do the right kind of editorial control, but unfortunately ran like a constipated snail who just ate a block of cheese.

    Maybe somebody should make a nice-looking web app that knows about types of artwork and prose that can be plugged into programs?

  • (cs) in reply to dubbreak
    dubbreak:
    As I said, bad analogy. The game software isn't life or death, however if the software were medical imaging software and you were distracting from the 1 in 10 radiation overdoses with the "amazing 3d imaging that can be rotated in 6 axis in real time!!" then you need to quite your life as a developer and get into marketing.

    What was the point I was trying to make again...?

    Was it that you missed the point of the story? :-)

    Seriously, the story was not about adding gloss to hide a flawed system for release. The point was to improve morale and the executives' interest enough to get a chance to fix the bugs before release, instead of having the project cancelled.

  • Sylvain (unregistered) in reply to Patrick
    Patrick:
    Where is the WTF? It's an industry that thrives on the look and feel of the product, not necessarily how well it's coded or how stable it is.
    On the contrary. It's an industry that pushes the hardware quite far and that needs to run on a lot of different hardware (gpu and sound), hardware whose drivers often has bugs (mostly with direct sound hardware acceleration, no wonder it's being dropped in Vista). And still it has to be stable ; and fast.

    From my experience, that's an industry where good coding practice and stability are much more important than other fields. Despite the old labels from the 80ies.

  • Michael Geary (unregistered) in reply to nigel

    Amen, brother!

    To the skeptics: It's not a WTF, it's a truly inspiring story for any programmer with a creative streak.

    (Captcha: Why, do I smell?)

  • Michael Geary (unregistered) in reply to Michael Geary

    Oh great. It doesn't show what I was replying to. So, my comment makes little sense. I suppose you can click the link, but who does that?

    (Captcha: alarm. How appropriate!)

  • Raw (unregistered) in reply to Kemp
    Kemp:
    I've seen lots of games with similar bugs. Carmageddon (all versions iirc) comes to mind, there were certain bits of scenery that if hit at the right angle would launch you into space having sustained the maximum damage possible. Eventually you would land, repair, and drive off (in the first game at least, this could easily kill you outright in the second). The affected bits of scenery were identical to those around them, often a particular (small) piece of a building wall around the 2nd-3rd floor, we usually found them by doing a jump off the crest of a hill and hitting the building. Didn't happen every time, but it was always particular areas.

    Ah, Carmageddon! That game improved my real life driving a lot, and teached me the proper attitude towards pedestrians.

    The bug you are talking about happened when you hit a solid object that only hit about half the front of the car. Once you learned that, it wasn't so annoying, in fact, it was great fun shoving opponents into such situations.

  • Joel (unregistered) in reply to ZSB
    ZSB:
    Cool story. I don't even see it as a WTF on the executives' part. With all the neverending bugs, I'm sure it was easy to overlook what the game did right, particularly if no one was showing off the positives to them.

    Tim showed them that there was a baby worth keeping in there with all that bathwater. I'm curious if Tim planned than all along or if he was just lucky.

    Vision comes in many forms.

    I am working on a software project currently (doing project management but also some coding when I get a chance) and neat, unexpected, and sometimes even flashy (albeit trivial) features can inspire more confidence in the success of a software project than 25 bug fixes in one week.

    Executive types take bug-fixes for granted poo-poo them as issues that shouldn't have existed in the first place. But novel features and slick interfaces make them ooh and aah because they know that the average user of the program will be impressed by them.

    And as someone said earlier, perception IS reality.

  • M Cassidy (unregistered)

    Red Storm Rising.

    'Nuff said ;)

  • (cs)

    Nice one :-) Solving a problem by not solving the problem at all.

  • (cs)
    Well, uhh, a little known thing about Nazi technology developed in World War I...
    It is apparently a little known thing that the Nazis had little to do with WW I?
  • Jens (unregistered) in reply to Mark
    Mark:
    durnurd:
    That really was a hilarious writeup. Now why don't people who work on F/OSS get it that design is important? They have professions for it! Is it just that F/OSS is a programmer-centric sort of thing that designers don't really get into?

    The problem is that F/OSS design tends to degenerate into design by committee.

    I'm completely convinced that what made Firefox a mainstream breakthrough is the cool recognizable logo, the name and the icon theme (in that order). Even if Mozilla-of-old would have been polished to total feature parity with Firefox I'm sure it's userbase would still be a fraction of that of Firefox.

    This is also why OpenOffice.org is a completely failure, and will continue to be. In a lead developers words "And, honestly: do you really believe people prefer MS Office over OOo because of the icons? Get serious, please." (source).

  • MiklosHollender (unregistered)

    As I'm typing this into Firefox, it pretty much seems to me FLOSS is quite capable of slick designs sometimes. Compare to Firefox, the UI of IE7 and Opera looks like the result of a teenager's hobby project to me. Safari on Windows is polished, but not nearly as readable and usable.

  • MiklosHollender (unregistered)

    The OOo lead developer is clearly wrong. At work upgrading to MSOffice2007 was forced down my throat and I tried to resist it as it's slow and not nearly as productive as 203 but now I'm starting to LOVE it, because of the pretty, slick UI. Sometimes even usability is less important than the coolness factor i.e. how do you feel using it. Using Office2007 feels like being invited into some elite club with mahogany tables and silver utensils. I feel... honoured. Even though I get less stuff done with it. And it's not features or programming, it's just a bunch of graphics and a nice font, dammit... Think about it, OOo folks... all you need to do is get the guy who designed the slick, juicy KDE icons to work for you.

  • MrTickle (unregistered)
    The WTFs that video games developers suffer through are really fascinating.

    Trust me. It's not half as bad as (graphics) driver writers go through.

    Now why don't people who work on F/OSS get it that design is important?

    As has been pointed out, some do, some don't. The major problem is that (IME) F/OSS people are developers and developers suck at design.

  • Badger (unregistered) in reply to unklegwar

    Yeah, this is Better Than Success!

  • (cs) in reply to MiklosHollender
    MiklosHollender:
    The OOo lead developer is clearly wrong. At work upgrading to MSOffice2007 was forced down my throat and I tried to resist it as it's slow and not nearly as productive as 203 but now I'm starting to LOVE it, because of the pretty, slick UI. Sometimes even usability is less important than the coolness factor i.e. how do you feel using it. Using Office2007 feels like being invited into some elite club with mahogany tables and silver utensils. I feel... honoured. Even though I get less stuff done with it. And it's not features or programming, it's just a bunch of graphics and a nice font, dammit... Think about it, OOo folks... all you need to do is get the guy who designed the slick, juicy KDE icons to work for you.
    OpenOffice already can use KDE's Crystal icon set: http://img169.imageshack.us/img169/3696/oocrystalzl1.png. See this.
  • MeteoriK (unregistered) in reply to rbowes

    Depends on the rate of the bounce. It may be the physics engine hitting some drastic floating point error and miscalculating the bounce (I've written physics code before, and you have to put kludge after kludge in to get around stuff like that).

  • Anonymous Jerk (unregistered) in reply to jergosh
    jergosh:
    Well, uhh, a little known thing about Nazi technology developed in World War I...
    It is apparently a little known thing that the Nazis had little to do with WW I?
    That's precisely why it's so little known, comrade.
  • dazKind (unregistered)

    Lovely Story! Enjoyed it a lot!

    My theory on the fire-guns-rip-wings-off-bug is that the projectiles were spawned too close to the plane's wing, thus causing a friendly fire issue.

  • BrandG (unregistered) in reply to dazKind

    My theory on the fire-guns-rip-wings-off-bug is that the projectiles were spawned too close to the plane's wing, thus causing a friendly fire issue.

    You are correct. I actually found that bug a while after this story took place. The damage bubbles on the wings were of a radius just slightly larger than the initial velocity of the bullets. Because we allowed for friendly fire, it was possible to shoot your own wings off.

    I changed the bullet "allegience" flag into a bullet "owner" flag (we were already using a byte to store the info, and the game had an upper limit of 256 planes, so it worked out fine).

    BTW, this was also a very important change later in the game, when we got to network play (if you want to know who fired the shot that killed you, for the scoreboard, this info was critical).

  • Spudley (unregistered) in reply to Patrick
    m delivered exactly what the execs were looking for, props to him.

    Turbo-props, even? ;)

  • Billin (unregistered)

    Not to go into super gushy mode, but this is one of the best articles I've ever read, and not just on WTF. It made me laugh out loud with the description of German "traitors", the wings falling off, the stratospheric bounce, etc., and it also illustrated an extremely valuable point that perception is reality, that sometimes to survive you can't focus on just knocking out the obvious problems but to go off on a different tack entirely.

    Well done!!

  • JAlexoid (unregistered)

    So you mean they REMOVED the bounce-into-outer-space and wings-fall-off-when-shooting features!?!?!?!?!?! WHYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY!!!!!!!!

  • Kuba (unregistered) in reply to yetihehe
    yetihehe:
    pauluskc:
    I have to say... Silent Service is still my all-time fave. 5.25" Yeah! Why do I need a DVD to play a game nowadays, dangit??
    You don't need. WinXP Minesweeper has only 117kb. Oh, you wanted 3d graphics, then maybe you'll like .kkrieger. But maybe you also want music and some better graphics, more monsters, more vehicles, multiplayer and cinematics? Then you really have to go by with dvd's, sorry

    Or, rather, you have to devise better procedural generation of textures and sounds. .kkrieger and the verein are all running on procedural textures, and the results are stunning.

  • Jason (unregistered)

    There are lots of fun physics bugs in the modern GTA games. I actually like oddities like this as long as they don't occur in places that disrupt normal gameplay.

    For example, in Vice City many of the taller buildings don't have collision models all the way up, so you can use a plane or helicopter to drop down the middle of them and wind up walking around a few feet underground.

  • (cs)

    Definitely the funniest and most uplifting WTF I've ever read, and one of the very few to make me laugh out loud.

    For more of the same, I have to recommend the Big Rigs article on Wikipedia. Also snort-tea-out-your-nose funny, and a perfect example of what happens when the project is neither fixed nor killed...

  • Alonzo Meatman (unregistered)

    Wow, what an awesome story. I love how initially Tim seems totally clueless, but turns out to save the day. I wonder if that was his plan all along, or if he was genuinely clueless and just stumbled onto a way to save the project.

  • Markku Uttula (unregistered) in reply to retnuh
    retnuh:
    Spartacus:
    rbowes:
    So is it just me, or is the whole "bouncing into space" thing probably just caused by the altitude falling below 0 and jumping up to INT_MAX?

    Most likely not, as at the point in the next refresh of the screen, the plane would be off the screen completely and appear to have disappeared. Also altitude was properly measured in signed floating point. My guess at the bug would be that for some reason the collision with the ground touched some very bad collision math and set the airplane's velocity to something large at a reflected angle.

    Oh you and your facts and logic.

    I don't know... for the record, I've never been too interested in games, not by playing and not by designing and/or implementing them. But if I were to design a system where we have an object that's supposed to move from somewhere to some other place, I'd set it up in a way that I tell it "where" it needs to go next, and let it handle "where" it is now and how to get to the next place. If the "next point" in this system got underflowed to max_int, I wouldn't be surprised if the object changed it's trajectory to manage to get to that assigned point somehow...

  • barfman (unregistered) in reply to stfu
    stfu:
    unklegwar:
    okay, exactly HOW is this Worse Than Failure (ugh)?

    It's not, dipshit.

    They're not trying to preserve some forced purity here, they're just giving us some daily content to keep us entertained for a few minutes out of the day. Whether or not it's a "real wtf" or whatever isn't really that important. As long as it fits under "curious perversions in IT" and is interesting, what's the difference?

    Word. I gotta say that was one of the best "curious perversions in IT" I've read in a while, and had me laughing real hard. Good stuff!!!

    And also a purposeful and wise article about communication between the world of development and the world of management.

  • (cs) in reply to arty
    arty:
    SVN post commit scripts are basically useless for it.
    I'm pretty sure you can do fine-grained rights by serving over HTTP with HTTP auth and using Apache to handle access right (e.g. via authz).

    I think it shouldn't be done for reading rights though, I seem to remember a friend having problems with that (the repo was public read, apart from a small directory that was restricted read, and there were problems for anon users. Fine-grained commit rights shouldn't be much of an issue though)

    LiquidFire:
    OpenOffice already can use KDE's Crystal icon set: http://img169.imageshack.us/img169/3696/oocrystalzl1.png. See this.
    The UI advantage of Office 2007 over OO.o isn't about the icons.
  • (cs) in reply to genki
    genki:
    unklegwar:
    okay, exactly HOW is this Worse Than Failure (ugh)?
    I think it's a wtf because despite the bugs and known problems, the creation of a superficial 'cool' feature managed to distract the executives enough to allow them to finish the project successfully.

    I think unklegwar's jab at the name change flew over (or perhaps around) your head.

    While a great computer game and many pay checks being saved from bug and cost overrun hell by an eye candy feature rather than bug-fixes is clearly a "What the fuck?!?!?" WTF, it is not a "Worse than failure" WTF.

  • (cs) in reply to me
    me:
    Perception is reality.

    Argghhh.... for the sake of my own sanity, could we revise that to "The suits will pretend that their perception is reality."? Because this site is filled with reams of data suggesting that their perception is nearly always wrong.

  • Anonymouse (unregistered) in reply to KattMan
    KattMan:
    The MS dirtbike one (can't remember the real name) did this if you started at one corner of a map and hit the throttle real hard across flat terrain until you hit a good hill and flew off the edge of the map on the other side. You would bounce off the invisible barrier and fly around the screen.
    That would be Motocross Madness. Good times...
  • Hunter (unregistered)

    Another couple of games that had things like that were Driver for the PS1, and ATV Offroad Fury on PS2. In Driver, you could sometimes slam into the back of another car hard enough that it would send you flying up into the air, usually to about the height of most buildings. In a game with almost no jumps whatsoever, that was pretty fun.

    In the atv game, there was a mode that let you drive freely around on the map. When you got to the edge, there was no indication that there was a border, and the terrain extended past the limits you could drive. So you'd be cruising along, minding your own business, then suddenly go flying off your atv backwards for thousands of feet before landing. Watching your ragdoll driver get thrown around like that then slam into a hillside was one of the most fun parts of that game.

  • Eeve (unregistered) in reply to bstorer
    bstorer:
    One of the reasons F/OSS struggles. It is often just a case of not looking polished, regardless of the quality.

    Oh, right you are! This is such an understatement.

  • Hyuga (unregistered) in reply to Michael

    Michael: Who are you, and are you for hire?

    I am in the exact same situation right now, at least as you've described it--including the web app in question being for project management. I actually do have user-changeable themes on the to-do list, and have a strong feeling that it will make all the difference -_-

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