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@TomF@mastodon.gamedev.place

Post #734623

2025-11-21 21:45 UTC

Recent discussion about the perils of doors in gamedev reminded me of a bug caused by a door in a game you may have heard of called "Half Life 2". Are you sitting comfortably? Then I shall begin.

Replies (20)

  • @TomF@mastodon.gamedev.place 2025-11-21 21:45

    Once upon a time, I worked at Valve on virtual reality. This was in 2013 around the time the Oculus DK1 emerged, and Joe Ludwig and I decided that the best way to figure out how VR would work in a real game context was to port a real game to it and see what happened.

    Open ##1552875

  • @ekari@mementomori.social 2025-11-21 23:50

    @TomF Thanks for taking the time to write this :blob_wink:

    Open ##1552915

  • @DarkSheepArts@mastodon.art 2025-11-22 00:50

    @TomF That was really fascinating. I'm not a programming person or into game development, and it was still really interesting to hear all about the problem and the process.

    Open ##1552918

  • @aburtch@triangletoot.party 2025-11-22 03:54

    @TomF @JoelFromNYC check out this thread.

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  • @bd@merveilles.town 2025-11-22 07:03

    @TomF wow amazing story haha

    Open ##1552921

  • @aras@mastodon.gamedev.place 2025-11-22 07:56

    @TomF ah right, the eternal lesson “but the code is the same!” — well, the compiler is not! (and in this case, parts of ISA are not the same either)

    Open ##1552922

  • @a1ba@suya.place 2025-11-22 08:07

    @TomF сс @nillerusr you definitely know what they're talking about :)

    Open ##1552923

  • @ppxl@social.tchncs.de 2025-11-22 08:45

    @TomF i really enjoyed this thread which feels kind of @foone problems (always use the right legacy compiler lol). It also sheds good light on how software development works in general, at least as far as I experienced it over the last decades. And with a great story too! Good times have been had

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  • @aaron@cutie.city 2025-11-22 08:59

    @TomF Hands down one of the most interesting threads I've ever read on the Fedi 😁

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  • @taatm@mathstodon.xyz 2025-11-22 10:01

    @TomF @siracusa I loved this nerdy story!

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  • @TomF heh, in the beginning I thought You're going to talk about the bug which is favored by plentybof speedrunners of HalfLife. The ones which add health instead of substracting on damage :)))

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  • @hadriscus@mastodon.art 2025-11-22 10:54

    @TomF hah ! loved it

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  • @gnarlybob@fosstodon.org 2025-11-22 11:09

    @TomF Funnily enough, when I saw the pic at the start of this thread, my first thought went to "huh, I wonder if this is going to be about that weird bug where I couldn't open the gate." I never played HL2 until around 2014 or so on Linux.

    Open ##1552929

  • @pBaesse@bolha.one 2025-11-22 11:13

    @TomF @capeta thanks for the so interesting story :catjam:

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  • @lasse@social.tchncs.de 2025-11-22 11:23

    @TomF legacy of this bug reaches back to FDIV 🤡

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  • @sgtpepere@ludosphere.fr 2025-11-22 13:49

    @TomF Great story ! Thanks ! :)

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  • @Dragonhead@mastodon.social 2025-11-22 14:42

    @TomF Fascinating bug. Thanks for write-up!

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  • @mk@bsd.network 2025-11-22 14:52

    @TomF@mastodon.gamedev.place the perils of things working too well despite bad bugs. At work we had an issue, which ultimately turned out to be a hardware bug where RAM was wired up incorrectly, but so much stuff worked that I kept thinking this was a software issue, because how could memory be bad when pretty much everything worked? Well, not everything ran from the same memory, and caching hid the issue, but things working was a major distraction.

    Open ##2725365

  • @CyberB@infosec.exchange 2025-11-22 17:48

    @TomF@mastodon.gamedev.place excellent read! Thanks for sharing! I could just feel how maddening it would be to see that the bug had been there since the beginning. There's a good lesson indeed in this story that a hobbyist dev like myself can take away about compilers.

    Open ##2804086

  • @CyberB@infosec.exchange 2025-11-22 17:52

    @TomF@mastodon.gamedev.place excellent read! Thanks for sharing! I could just feel how maddening it would be to see that the bug had been there since the beginning. There's a good lesson indeed in this story that a hobbyist dev like myself can take away about compilers.

    Open ##3060433