[jonhohle]

I think many games were that way. SotN definitely has a global timer. On a native 32-bit system it makes sense, especially when the life of a game was a few months to a few years on the retail shelf. No player is going to leave their system running for 2.27 years so what’s the point of even tesing it?

Who knew at the time they were creating games that would be disassembled, deconstructed, reverse engineered. Do any of us think about that regarding any program we write?

[Gamemaster1379]

Can be more than timers too. There's a funny one in Paper Mario where a block technically can be hit so many times it'll reset and award items again. Hit enough times it'll eventually crash. Of course it'd take around 30 years for the first rollover and 400 or so for the crash. https://n64squid.com/paper-mario-reward-block-glitch/

[rybosome]

It’s a totally reasonable choice in that context.

I wonder if any sense this is criticism (or actual criticism) is based on implementers of SaaS who have it so deeply ingrained that “haha what if the users of this software did this really extreme thing” is more like “oh shit what if the users of this software did this really extreme thing”.

When I worked on Google cloud storage, I once shipped a feature that briefly broke single-shot uploads of more than 2gb. I didn’t consider this use case because it was so absurd - anything larger than 2mb is recommended to go through a resumable/retryable flow, not a one-shot that either sends it all correctly the first time or fails. Client libraries enforced this, but not the APIs! It was an easy fix with that knowledge, but the lesson remained to me that whatever extreme behaviors you allow in your API will be found, so you have to be very paranoid about what you allow if you don’t want to support it indefinitely (which we tried to do, it was hard).

Anyway in this case that level of paranoia would make no sense. The programmers of this age made amazing, highly coreographed programs that ran exactly as intended on the right hardware and timing.

[technion]

Let's say youre pedantic with code. Ive been trying to be lately - clippy has an ovefflow lint for rust i try to use.

Error: game running for two years, rebooting so you cant cheese a timer.

Does this make the bug any better handled? Bugs like this annoy me because they arent easily answered.

[account42]

There are always limits to what a program can do. The only fix is to choose large enough integers (and appropriate units) so that you can represent long enough times / large enough sizes / etc. that anyone could reasonably encounter. What sizes make sense also include how they impact performance and for a game from the 32-bit era, a crash (controlled abort or not) after over two years is probably a better choice than slowing everything down by using a 64-bit integer.

[jraph]

Isn't this common in the computer game scene? Shouldn't you asume your game will be disassembled, deconstructed, reverse engineered?

Although for old games released before internet was widespread in the general population, it might have not been this obvious.

[sim7c00]

aslong as it doesnt lead to online cheats having such code is fine. if someone wants to reverse the game find an obscure almost untriggerable bug and then trigger it or play with it. 2.6 year game session is crazy if its not a server, and if its a server, thats still really crazy even for some open-world open-ended game... its a long time to keep a server up w/o restarts or anything (updates?).

looking at the various comments, there might be even some kind of weird appeal to leave such things in your game :D for people to find and chuckle about. it doesnt really disrupt the game normally does it?

[lstodd]

> if its a server, thats still really crazy even for some open-world open-ended game... its a long time to keep a server up w/o restarts or anything (updates?).

Pretty much doable even without resorting to VM migrations or ksplice. My last one had uptime in 1700s (days). Basically I leased it, put a debian on it and that was that until I didn't need it anymore.

[lentil_soup]

they're still made like this. Just now I made a frame counter that just increments every frame on a int64. It would eventually wrap around but doubt anyone will still be around to see it happen :|

[account42]

For some games the timer is stored is save files so it doesn't even have to be continuous play time. 2 years is still longer than anyone is expected to spend on a game.