Tom Forsyth (@[email protected])
mastodon.gamedev.place
Attached: 1 image 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.

(Archived link)

New Half-Life 2 development lore drop!

It’s a wild ride to read. It’s about a very niche bug that softlocks the game but somehow the bug can travel back in time and even affect the original retail version of Half-Life 2.

TLDR: the bug

The softlock happens because an NPC is standing in the way of a door. This didn’t happen in the original because it was compiled using the old-school Intel x87 floating point handling and not the (relatively) more modern SSE behaviour, which does cause the softlock. The bug managed to time travel to the retail build because modern compilers use SSE instead of x87.

  • Glitchvid@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    11 hours ago

    it doesn’t seem like too much of a leap to replace that with Alyx grabbing a random length of pipe or chunk of rebar or something from the multitudes of trashed urban environments she traverses throughout the game.

    Could’ve used the socket wrench Alyx was shown with in HL2 promotional material. It was originally supposed to be her counterpart to the crowbar anyway.