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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?
Right before I left from Microsoft: int security = *NULL; // eat it!
Most people don't get why the integral of "e to the x" is so funny. Most math majors don't have a sense of humor.
GOTO :-) (or is that two..?)
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Once I had an assignment due and at the last minute before being evaluated, realized I had made a huge mistake, even though the code looked OK...
Too much time playing games in class and I was about to fail the course unit if I didn't pass that one test (right at the end of a semester)
So I ran the program, adjusted the output in a word processor, saved it as a file and threw some code hidden in the comments that read the file, outputted it and exited.
Three minutes later my code was evaluated... I was the only one who passed.
Fortunately, no one investigated too carefully at the time why I was the only one who passed, because after trying to fix the code later in my own time, I realized the source data we were all supplied was corrupted.
Inevitably, Later the same lecturer came to the same conclusion when his program didn't work either and cornered me to ask why mine worked (of course he was suspicious). Thinking quickly, I told him my source data was corrupted and that I fixed that first so my program would work. I don't know if he believed me, but he accepted the story.
Fortunately, I got away with it and I got to keep the pass.
The editor might have approved this submission just to meet some kind of deadline or a minimum requirement.
Have you ever needed to insert terrible code to make something work at the last minute?
Wouldn't "have you ever shipped a product without needing to insert terrible code to make something work at the last minute?" be a more sensible question?
This is one of those stories where the story isn't the point, it's the comments that are worth reading, so it's only a problem if we have the same comments :-P
I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
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
In the real world there are deadlines, and it's entirely the developer's responsibility to be able to meet those deadlines without using such "dirty coding tricks". Good developers should have tested their code so as to not have serious problems to fix at the last minute, and designed it so as to be able to extend it easily.
Yes, because deadlines are always reasonable and never pushed up. And change orders are a myth.
#DeleteChrome
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.
This was a pretty important assignment back when I was studying computer science. It added to the final mark mark for that particular class. The task was to write a reasonably complex application in Prolog or some functional programming language, I can't remember which it was. I think the goal was to pair males and females based on their preferences, and find the optimal solution. Of course, I screwed up royally, and nothing worked five minutes before I had to demonstrate my solution.
So in the final five minutes, I changed my code so it would avoid the parts which put it into an infinite loop, and instead simply output a random result. My goal was to tell the prof that it had worked a few minutes earlier, and that I didn't know what had gone wrong, and could I please have another week?
So I demonstrated my app, it gave its random output, and I was about to start with my "damn, it used to work properly" spiel when he said (and this is actually true, even though it sounds unbelievable):
"That's great! The result is correct, and your app is also quite a bit quicker than my own implementation of the problem. Congratulations, I think you're the only one so far who managed to get the correct result so far."
I was so taken aback that I probably just stared at him for a few seconds. Then, I stupidly said "So... You want to see my code?" but he was like "No, the result is correct, and your implementation is very fast, so I don't need to see the code. Good job. Send in the next guy."
And so I did.
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;
}
Slashdot sorely needs "douchebag" moderation.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
> it's the comments that are worth reading
More specifically the comments in the article. I loved this one:
"Back on Wing Commander 1 we were getting an exception from our EMM386 memory manager when we exited the game. We'd clear the screen and a single line would print out, something like "EMM386 Memory manager error. Blah blah blah." We had to ship ASAP. So I hex edited the error in the memory manager itself to read "Thank you for playing Wing Commander.""
That's awesome.
Basically ALL the software you use works like this.
Welcome to the real world, no need to feel bad.
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. ---*
Back in college, we were at a programming competition and I was the on-the-keyboard coder for one of the problems. We had 10 minutes for the problem and I coded it quickly, having decided on the best algorithm before sitting down. Part of the solution was a sorting routine on a list. We were using Visual C++ although we were all not C++ experts at the time, and so rather than mess with the STL and the possibility of having to read documentation, I did it all from scratch. I knew that sort was already in use by the standard library, so I called my routine mysort.
Apparently, however, Visual C++ includes a mysort in its standard library. So, with the clock ticking down and the solution's only impediment to our victory being an identifier conflict, I renamed the routine the way that any one of us would have: myfuckingsort. We won the competition.
In this particular competition, the judges were not supposed to read our code - they just run the output of your code on the input and check for correct output - so I felt safe when I typed what I did. However, one of them came up to us afterwards and told us that they do in fact usually read the code of the winning team to see if we did anything unique in our solution. Yep. Sure did. And my classmates and professors never did let me live down what was affectionately nicknamed the fucksort algorithm.