Re:Ultima Underworld bugs
by dfan on Monday February 21, 2011 @11:55AM
(#2246074)
The "nice" thing about writing for PCs was that even if our game was slow, if we took long enough to release it, the hardware out there in the real world would catch up a bit. (Of course, taking a long time to release the game creates other problems...) It still amazes me in retrospect that people were willing to play Ultima Underworld at single-digit frame rates, though. It wasn't really an action game, but still. I think our target "that looks pretty smooth" frame rate was 12 Hz, and if a super-powerful PC could get up to 20, that was insane. It was a different age...
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Do you know which developer in UW2 was responsible for the Servant Strike bug? That glitch wasted 6 weeks of my life! I recently started playing UW2 again through Dosbox, using a character editor written in 1994 to change save files is humbling.
I would read a book or 10 full of these old-school game developing anecdotes.
I do, but he's paid me to keep quiet... Truthfully, he was pretty upset about having caused it at the time.
The worst thing was that you triggered the bug at the beginning of the game, but didn't discover that it had made the game unwinnable until the end.
These were posted here recently (in case you missed them): http://all-things-andy-gavin.com/2011/02/02/making-crash-ban...