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Bethesda Investigates Shivering Isles Bug
Gamespot reports on a glitch in the recently-released Shivering Isles expansion to Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. It's unclear at this time if the Xbox 360 version of the title also has it, but on the PC side of things a game-breaking snafu can arise after 50-120 hours of gameplay post-Isles installation. "The bug apparently starts affecting the game as soon as the expansion pack is installed for the PC version of Shivering Isles. The problem arises because the game generates a huge number of identification numbers internally for objects, and once the allotted space for those numbers becomes exhausted, newly created objects will disappear from the gameworld and the game could simply crash ... It appears that the more frames per second the game runs at, the faster that space of identification numbers fills up."
Wow, that's incredibly short sighted of them...I've seen crap like that before, working on databases built by amateurs. Like a lookup table that doesn't have a "flag" to tell the query which dataset the entries belong to, but instead a situation where the original designer just incremented the key by an arbitrary amount, e.g Rate codes are 1-999, product_codes are 1000-1999, etc, so when the 1000th rate code is added, it writes over the first product code, and chaos ensues.
You should never make the "size" of a variable part of it's identifying factor.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
A tested patch is clearly only a short way away.
c hnotes12.htm
This story broke about 4 or 5 days ago... and the longer you put off patching the more likely the problem is to hit.
http://www.elderscrolls.com/downloads/updates_pat
But this isn't graphics code...This is unique object identifiers. With graphics you know how big all the numbers are going to be! You set hard limits on all your rendering, and you're done. If your code isn't set to render past a certain point, it just won't...If you're set up to only process X vectors, it doesn't matter if the system is capable of more...And moreover, nothing grows in graphics processing. You process the same level all the way through...If the system has to do more work with a series of frames, dealing with shadows, and objects and funky light effects, stuff slows down, but that frame is the exact same "size" in terms of bits as all the previous frames.
In this situation, they're just storing object information. Not visual, just existence. And their number is too small...Hell, the patch that was released just adds some zeros on the end.
This is exactly what I'm talking about...People being stingy with the numbers because they think, in their minds, that all big numbers slow things down. Sometimes, big numbers are your friends.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Ouch, Bethesda seems to be making a bad name for themselves with Oblivion, in terms of software bugs. I don't mean to "troll" but my girlfriend's game has been screwed up multiple times, including the health bar no longer increasing, or the game bugging in such a manner that a quest could never be completed. We searched forums and contacted support about these issues (among others), with no solution ever found. Luckily I haven't encountered such extreme problems myself, but I have noticed small bugs from time to time. Regardless, such showstoppers as mentioned above are pretty unbelievable for a $70+ game of such supposedly high stature.