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Fun with bugs
Going to do my New Year's post tomorrow, but first another Cataclysm story.
So if you know anything about video games, you know the way the player perceives them and the way they work under the hood rarely have anything to do with each other. FPS devs making the apparent last 10% of the player's health actually 40% of the total health bar, or making the last bullet in a magazine do 5x the damage of the rest, so that the player is more likely to end a fight on low health and out of ammo in their gun and feel the best feeling in a game, that you had to pull out all the stops against overwhelming odds and just barely won. Fallout 3 not having any system for vehicles so the metro trains were actually NPCs with giant tram-shaped hats that you climbed inside and then the NPC would run along under the tracks, that kind of thing.
In Cataclysm, you can scan in books to an e-reader or a smartphone, as a reflection of how good modern cameras are, and then keep your entire book collection with you. This is very convenient but a recent bug exposed how it actually worked. There was a change in the way gun magazines worked, and fixing that bug meant that people were picking up their smartphone, turning on the flashlight, and suddenly having a hundred books materialize out of thin air and fall into their lap.
This is because how book scanning works behind the scenes is that smartphones, laptops, etc., all have a giant invisible Tardis pocket that makes a physical copy of the book and holds it, so the PC is still using the code for reading a physical book, they're just carrying it invisibly with them. And the change to gun magazines meant that pocket was changing and the game was doing what it's supposed to do when a pocket changes somehow--kick out the entire contents so it doesn't get lost. Thus, sudden magic library!
I'm not sure if this is better or worse than how monsters with ranged attacks actually have an invisible NPC holding a gun do the actual firing or not.
So if you know anything about video games, you know the way the player perceives them and the way they work under the hood rarely have anything to do with each other. FPS devs making the apparent last 10% of the player's health actually 40% of the total health bar, or making the last bullet in a magazine do 5x the damage of the rest, so that the player is more likely to end a fight on low health and out of ammo in their gun and feel the best feeling in a game, that you had to pull out all the stops against overwhelming odds and just barely won. Fallout 3 not having any system for vehicles so the metro trains were actually NPCs with giant tram-shaped hats that you climbed inside and then the NPC would run along under the tracks, that kind of thing.
In Cataclysm, you can scan in books to an e-reader or a smartphone, as a reflection of how good modern cameras are, and then keep your entire book collection with you. This is very convenient but a recent bug exposed how it actually worked. There was a change in the way gun magazines worked, and fixing that bug meant that people were picking up their smartphone, turning on the flashlight, and suddenly having a hundred books materialize out of thin air and fall into their lap.
This is because how book scanning works behind the scenes is that smartphones, laptops, etc., all have a giant invisible Tardis pocket that makes a physical copy of the book and holds it, so the PC is still using the code for reading a physical book, they're just carrying it invisibly with them. And the change to gun magazines meant that pocket was changing and the game was doing what it's supposed to do when a pocket changes somehow--kick out the entire contents so it doesn't get lost. Thus, sudden magic library!
I'm not sure if this is better or worse than how monsters with ranged attacks actually have an invisible NPC holding a gun do the actual firing or not.