PlunderBunny
10 hours ago
I figured out that, in the early versions of Realmz for the Mac, there was an enchanted item (a helm?) that added a few points to the wearer’s stats when equipped, but when removed it took away more than it added (i.e. left you worse off). It only took a few seconds for my programmer brain to start me furiously equipping and then un-equipping it, and sure enough, when that stat went to -127, one more equip-and-unequip was sufficient to give me a +128 bonus for that stat.
I never understood how that particular bit of logic could have been coded that way - it seemed so unnatural.
anon_cow1111
2 hours ago
If you still like video games and are a bit of a masochist you might try playing Noita sometime, a lot of the late game is basically built around this type of logic.
For example there's a wizard-type enemy that temporarily debuffs your max health by 50%, and the effect can stack if you get hit more than once. But what happens if you pick up a permanent health boost item while the debuff spell is on you? You gain the normal health boost, then it multiplies itself when the wizard's spell expires; you can can go from 100 to several thousand HP in seconds and there's basically no limit.
In any other game this would be considered a bug and patched out in the next update. NOT NOITA, motherfucker. You're almost required to do things like this for a lot of the end-game optional content.
LoganDark
8 hours ago
I would figure the reason was because calculating it based on your inventory every time it's needed would've been expensive, so the developers decided to cache it, but instead of recalculating it from scratch when there's a stat change, they decided to try updating it incrementally, but I guess also imperatively. A string of mistakes has to happen to lead to such a situation but it doesn't seem super unnatural to me.
Nition
6 hours ago
I wonder if it was percentage based. That'd be one of the easiest mistakes to make.
- Player has a stat of 100
- Wears "+10%" helm
- Player has a stat of 110
- Removes helm, game subtracts 10%
- Player has a stat of 99
Actually, now that I think about it more, that wouldn't work as described above because once your stat got close to zero you'd enter a kind of Zeno's Paradox situation.
chii
5 hours ago
it's more likely that the stat for equipping is calculated differently to when unequipping (ala, "same" code in two different places, and one got modified at some point and forgot about the other).
thaumasiotes
2 hours ago
> I wonder if it was percentage based. That'd be one of the easiest mistakes to make.
How would that be one of the easiest mistakes to make? There are no operations for working with percentages, nor is it a thing you'd want to do.
To make that helm work as you describe, you'd need to multiply the stat by 1.1 when equipping the helm and then by 0.9 when deequipping it. But at that point you've lost any justification for making the mistake; those are just two random numbers that don't cancel each other out. It's not like you're adding a number in one place and then erroneously subtracting that same number somewhere else.
(Also, these are very strange multipliers to use this way, because they can never produce exact results. You're bound to see rounding errors if you insist on update-when-equipping and update-when-deequipping instead of recalculate-stats-when-equipment-changes.)
Nition
an hour ago
That exact sort of magic numbering is rife in games from what I've seen over the years, especially in stuff like an old RPG from 1994. Maybe you've seen better game code on average than me. But you don't even really need the "random numbers" - I'd expect a mistake like:
GetItemChange(curVal, percentBoost) { return curVal * PERCENT_BOOST; }
eqipVal = val + GetItemChange(val, percentBoost);
// ... later...
unequipVal = val - GetItemChange(val, percentBoost);
if ((item.sp1 > 59) && (item.sp1 < 100))
c[character].condition[item.sp2] = 0; /**** neutralize condition ***/
if (item.sp1 == 122) /******** item adds attacks **********/
{
c[character].attackbonus += item.sp2;
}
if ((item.sp1 > 19) && (item.sp1 < 60)) /******* adds condition *****/
{
if (c[character].condition[item.sp1 - 20] > -1)
c[character].condition[item.sp1 - 20] = 0;
c[character].condition[item.sp1 - 20] += item.sp2; /**** make condition[sp1-20] = sp2 ***/
}
if (item.sp3) /******* adds special ability *****/
{
if (item.sp3 < 0)
c[character].special[abs(item.sp3) - 1] += item.sp5;
else if ((item.sp3 < 16) && (item.sp3 > 0))
c[character].spec[item.sp3 - 1] += item.sp5;
else
partycondition[item.sp3 - 30] -= abs(item.sp5);
}
if (item.sp4) {
if (item.sp4 < 0)
c[character].special[abs(item.sp4) - 1] += item.sp5;
else if ((item.sp4 < 16) && (item.sp4 > 0))
c[character].spec[item.sp4 - 1] += item.sp5;
else
partycondition[item.sp4 - 30] -= abs(item.sp5);
}
}