Funny game glitches

[purpleravenhawk]

Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion - Our new Radiant AI system - which let all the NPCs in the world think and act on their own - led to some of the best bugs. My favorite was a quest where you had to talk to a prisoner in jail. Sometimes, when playtesting, we would find him locked in his cell, dead. It took us forever to figure out why. Turns out, the guards in the jail could run out of food and get hungry. They would then go down and kill the prisoner to take his food. This all happened when the player wasn't there. I still don't remember how we figured it out. But the solution was easy: more guard food.


rofl I love this one. I mean, it's what we want in AI - the ability to think for itself and solve its own problems. It's not its fault that the solution it came up with wasn't one we liked. xd It's also kind of creepy considering the work they're doing to put AI into robots.  

[purpleravenhawk]

In Dead to Rights: Retribution, ammo is at a premium, and it's not uncommon for Jack to run out. Fortunately, Shadow, Jack's AI dog buddy, can spot when this happens and help out. Unfortunately, early on he was so eager to help out that he would run and fetch live grenades and place them obediently at your feet. Another bug occurred while Jack and Shadow were fighting enemies on a wooden walkway above the streets. During this section, Shadow would randomly sink into the walkway in a way that left only his ears and snout visible. As enemies would come after Jack, Shadow would take them down, pulling them halfway through the walkway. Because of the random sinking and the vicious way he would pull enemies through the walkway surface as they thrashed about, Shadow resembled a shark.  

[purpleravenhawk]

Star Trek Online - In our game your character can be both a ship and a captain, but there were times when under great stress the code would get confused and it wasn't sure when you were supposed to be your ship and when you were supposed to be your captain. People would beam out into space thinking that they were going to their starship and they'd end up as a ship-sized person floating around in space. Sometimes the opposite would happen too - they'd be a ship and beam down to a space station only to find that they were still a person-sized ship flying around the station.  

[purpleravenhawk]

Terminus - In one case, every time you tried to fire a missile, your spaceship would spontaneously blow up. We had worked to model the game with incredible accuracy, and we just could not figure out why the ships were exploding. It took a long time to figure out the root cause - it turned out that the diameter of the missile was slightly larger than the weapons bay port it was getting shot out from, so every time it hit the port, it exploded and took the player's ship with it. Also, we had a particular ship that would fly out of the space dock and immediately all the controls would go dead. The joystick wouldn't work, no keyboard input. It turned out that we had modeled inefficient radiation shielding on the ship. So the moment the ship took off, the radiation from the engine's core would kill the pilot.


Awesome. So they were TOO accurate. xd  

[purpleravenhawk]

Flower - At one point, the flower that grows at the end of each level was affected by the number of petals that you collected during the level. Of course, before the game was balanced, when we were just testing out mechanics, we'd create such large swarms of petals that the final flower grew to epic proportions. We ended up calling it the Flower Mothership. It looked like it would inhale the entire valley.  

[purpleravenhawk]

The Maw - One of our achievements hinged on the player feeding the Maw every single creature in the game. As we got close to the end of development, it seemed like we were running into all these cases where we couldn't find the last creature or two in a level even though we visited all their locations. It soon became apparent that the Yums were disappearing somehow. We were at a loss. Finally, by chance, one of us happened to be passing by one of the territorial Gastros as it defended its zone against a Yum. It grabbed the Yum in its mouth, shook it vigorously, and tossed it at a mountain. The Yum hit it and then suddenly went rocketing into the air like a Smash Bros. character. It turned out that if a creature was small enough and got shoved too far into an indentation in the terrain, our physics library helpfully resolved the situation by firing the creature into the air at near-infinite velocity. I thought it'd be fine to just tell players to wait a couple days for the Yums to fall back to the ground, but the designers made us fix the bug instead.  

[purpleravenhawk]

That's all. You may commence reading.  

[Tybarious]

purpleravenhawk

Star Trek Online - In our game your character can be both a ship and a captain, but there were times when under great stress the code would get confused and it wasn't sure when you were supposed to be your ship and when you were supposed to be your captain. People would beam out into space thinking that they were going to their starship and they'd end up as a ship-sized person floating around in space. Sometimes the opposite would happen too - they'd be a ship and beam down to a space station only to find that they were still a person-sized ship flying around the station.

haha now thats funny, thought I think some trekkies wouldn't ether one  

[purpleravenhawk]

I think it'd be kinda neat to be a ship-sized person. surprised I'd poke the other ships. xd  

[Tybarious]

lol  

[xwhateverxdudex]

I liked the dog that would retrieve live bombs. LOL