The bug fixes It is one of the most frustrating tasks in video game development, especially when a failure seems to occur completely randomly and without following any pattern. The world of bugs in video games is very curious, and if not tell the guys at Atari, who when trying to center the company’s logo on the game ‘Tempest’ they ended up implementing a bug which allowed infinite games to be played.
Well, something along those lines has happened to Black Beach Studios, developer of Iron Rebelliona mecha shooter for virtual reality. The studio spent months facing an enigma: players kept complaining on Steam and in the Meta Quest store about unexpected closures in the game. The problem was that in the automatic bug reports absolutely nothing appeared.
It wasn’t until the team began recreating very specific game situations that they came up with a chain of errors so absurd that, in retrospect, it almost seems like a joke despite making all the sense in the world.
Two Germans, a fight and a fall to the left
Screenshot of Iron Rebellion | Image: Black Bleach Studio
According to they explain the developers themselves in a video posted on TikTok, the origin of the problem lay in an extremely specific combination of events. The game crashed exactly when the following happened:
- A mecha was destroyed.
- The remains of the mecha were falling to the left.
- The combat took place at a very specific point on a specific map.
- And there were always exactly two German players participating in the game.
Given this, the team asked the logical question: how is it possible that the players’ language causes the game to break? Those of you who know computer science will already be guessing the reason: the decimalsthat the devil carries them.
In computing, decimal numbers are a delicate matter. While in the English-speaking world the point is used as a decimal separator (for example, 1.99), In countries like Germany, the comma is used by default (as we do in Spain, for example, with 1.99). If this is not taken into account, the ingredients for disaster are in place: due to the German localization, the game, for some reason, converted decimal points into commas when calculating physical positions.
Image | Black Beach Studio
When the mecha fell to the left at that specific point, the game sent the position data in network packets to the rest of the players. Due to locale settings, these packages contained commas instead of periodswhich caused the other players’ network code to not know how to interpret the information. The data could not be processed and the game would crash completely instantly.
The problem has already been solved and the game is fully functional, but it is not the first time something similar has happened. In fact, something similar happened in a very beloved game: ‘The Witcher 2’. The game had a bug in memory management and font encoding with German texts, so every time I tried to process a character with Umlaut (ä, ö, ü) or ß, it would break. Furthermore, it happened in any context: when played in subtitles, in the inventory… The community had to come to the rescue with an unofficial mod.
Via | Gamestar.de
Image | Gamestar.de
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