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Dirty Coding Tricks To Make a Deadline
Gamasutra is running an article with a collection of anecdotes from game developers who had to employ some quick and dirty fixes to get their products to ship on time. Here's a brief excerpt:
"Back at [company X] — I think it was near the end of [the project] — we had an object in one of the levels that needed to be hidden. We didn't want to re-export the level and we did not use checksum names. So right smack in the middle of the engine code we had something like the following. The game shipped with this in: if( level == 10 && object == 56 ) {HideObject();} Maybe a year later, an artist using our engine came to us very frustrated about why an object in their level was not showing up after exporting to what resolved to level 10. I wonder why?"
Have you ever needed to insert terrible code to make something work at the last minute?
I once worked at a Fortune 25 company in Chicago. They had this ENORMOUS mainframe program written in COBOL that ran their order inventory system which accounted for 20% of the companies revenue. All the guys who wrote this grunting pig of a system had either retired or had passed away. In the middle of the code was the following;
*
* We don't know what this does.
* Please leave it alone !
*
SET INSIDE-INDEX TO 1.
*
* We don't know what this does.
* Please leave it alone !
*
If this statement was commented out or removed the system stopped working. No one could find the problem. People had spent years looking for it but the code was such a mess and the documentation was so useless that they just left it alone and made a note that when the order inventory was re-done to make sure they left this "feature" out. I have been told that many old system have similar problems.
Another day closer to redwood heaven
Way back we had a project where we had to simulate entire train traffic entering Helsinki train terminal. Someone else had made the simulator and it ran pretty neatly, but unfortunately crashed mysteriously after about four - six hours of simulation time. Our customers were coming the on monday and I spent my sunday trying to figure out how this simulation worked and what crashed it. Finally I caught the problem, which was as simple as some null pointer to a train schedule or something similar which needed to be referenced. I couldn't figure out why it was null in time, so I just added test for null pointer, which skipped said code. Program ran fine and we got our money. Never figured out what was wrong with it. Luckily it was only a simulation.
Example? Right here:
#include <stdio.h>
void *f(void)
{
a:
printf("Here!\n");
return &&a;
}
int main(int ac, char **av)
{
goto *f();
printf("There\n");
return 0;
}
I like the way my former VB teacher put it (and yes I use the occasional GOTO, but then again I learned in the real BASIC-Commodore BASIC) he said "The GOTO is like a chainsaw. yes, some folks can actually make good things, and even make really nice carvings with a chainsaw. most just make a big fucking mess."
Of course me and him both laughed our asses off when some 19 year old tried to rip off my code and pass it off as his own. After laughing and giving the kid a big F the kid said "How do you know that he didn't steal it from me?". So he asked the kid where he learned VB and which OS and the kid said "Windows 98 and the VB I got from this class!" and the teacher projected the code onto the board and said "Now class, does anybody notice something a little...weird about this code?" and a girl popped up and said "Why are their numbers before the lines, and what is a GOTO?".
The teach just laughed and said "once upon a time their weren't any GUIs on personal computers. All you got when you turned it on was a blinking CLI and you had to write your own programs, using VERY old syntax. The person who wrote this is used to working in teeny tiny amounts of memory and using the old style, which works just fine if you know what you are doing, but if not it'll blow in your face like Mr. Greene found out when he tried to snatch this code and incorporate it into his own without knowing how it works" he then turned to me after staring at the code for a minute and said "Atari or Commodore?" and I looked shocked and said "Commodore VIC20, but how did you know that?" and he said "because I have been around long enough to have coded on just about everything, and that looked liked Atari or Commodore code. Very efficient, but about as subtle as a chainsaw." which is when he gave me the chainsaw quote.
So I have never forgotten the chainsaw quote, and while I can wield the chainsaw without making a mess, I saw first hand when others in the class tried to use GOTO what a mess you can make if you don't know EXACTLY what your code is doing. He caught me outside a month later and said "thanks a lot, I hadn't seen a GOTO in ages and then you come along and it spreads like the damned clap. Giving these youngsters GOTO is like handing a monkey a sledgehammer and letting them loose in a bomb factory. There is no doubt they are going to go boom, the only question is when." but what can I say, I'm just an old greybeard that was used to numbered lines and GOTO.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
So it was 1999 and I was working for a mom and pop software shop, we had been acquired by a dot com. All our money and toilet paper stock options were held until we delivered the re-branded product with source. Part of the "rules" said we had to have only C/C++ and VB6 source, NO OTHER LANGUAGE.
....(you get the idea)
. We finished converting a few rogue scripting modules and things like that, which creep in over time. But we COULD NOT find the source code to one of our VB6 DLLs (an old one that had not been changed since it was first compiled in VB6). We searched and searched and eventually the fastest coder(not me) started rewriting it. We were 1 day from delivery date and there was no way he could finish it, so I ran it through a disassembler.
the C++ code we delivered looked like this:
int functionName(int parm) {
_asm {
push esi
mov esi, dword ptr ds:[esp+8]
mov dword ptr ds:[edi], esi
retn
}
It was unreadable, but it compiled and worked and we got our money. I still wonder what they ever did with that... since the software is still in use...
This is the code for the Apollo 11 lunar lander flight computer.
http://code.google.com/p/virtualagc/source/browse/trunk/Luminary099/LUNAR_LANDING_GUIDANCE_EQUATIONS.s?r=258
and yes some of my code is in there along with the equivalent of a few "goto's
Lots of bright people worked on this and in some circumstances a "goto" is required.
*--- Sometimes a majority only means that all the fools are on the same side. ---*