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Why does the moon change size when you snipe it in GTA?
- 1970-01-01 3y agoSee also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9137736 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9137736 "Just remove the duck."
- m463 3y agoI think the answer is: if(time() > 10_years_in_future) duck.enable();
- LeonenTheDK 3y agoI love little game dev anecdotes such as these. Interesting relics of the development process. One of my favourites is Sonic 3D's secret level select screen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZs2HUW9tDA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZs2HUW9tDA
- marcusverus 3y agoBrilliant. Thanks for sharing.
- nocoiner 3y agoAt first I was deeply annoyed that this was presented as a video (why don’t you just tell me what it’s about?!), and then after about five seconds I was enthralled. Great watch. Like another poster said: brilliant.
- dmix 3y agoWow That whole yt channel is amazing, this is like crack for HN users
- qingcharles 3y agoHere's an easter egg in GTA that almost no-one has seen. I can't reveal its meaning. There were sacrifices :p https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/3ylmm4/comment/cyethcv/ https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/3ylmm4/comment/cyet...
- 9dev 3y agoCmon, give us a hint!
- qingcharles 3y agoThe first T is "The"
- exikyut 3y agoOK let's make this interesting then, hopefully you can at least answer this: is there anything out there that might help someone intrepid enough to work out at least the general gist? And where do they look? Game data? Obscure forum comments?
- qingcharles 3y agoWhat is weird is that everything to do with the meaning of that has been purged from the public Internet. Not by any conspiracy, I guess it just never made it into any indexer. I think it got removed from last year's remake.. probably because the new guys didn't know what the hell it meant. Like the people that paint over Banksy art.
- looping8 3y agoMy favorite is about the latest Pokemon game that has a fully rendered ocean at all times, which ruins the game's loading time and is, if I remember, never explored.
- beebeepka 3y agoOr the Crysis 2 ocean designed to slow down and GPUs at the time because they did not overdo tesselation. Good old nvidia and crytek.
- cipheredStones 3y agoA Tumblr post which goes into how truly insane this is, and offers a possible explanation for how it got to be that way: https://www.tumblr.com/sunspotpony/712834929488216064/so-i-discussed-this-with-several-friends-of-mine https://www.tumblr.com/sunspotpony/712834929488216064/so-i-d...
- Dah00n 3y agoWell that was a fun read until it forces you to log in :(
- traverseda 3y agohttps://archive.is/rGPKj https://archive.is/rGPKj
- exikyut 3y agoOh no I logged in
- atribecalledqst 3y agoI rebelled. On the console I set the display property of the #glass-container element to "none", hiding the popover window: document.querySelector("#glass-container").style.display = "none"; Then since scrolling was disabled, I just used the window.scroll() function to scroll down and see the small parts of the article that I wasn't able to read before the popup appeared. This works because Tumblr doesn't actually remove the parts of the article it doesn't want you to see from the HTML output, so it's still perfectly viewable if you can get past the popup. This is not generally the case though, for example most news sites actually remove the text you're not supposed to see if you don't log in. If I could figure out how to re-enable scrolling, I'd have a recipe for a pretty delicious Greasemonkey script. Dear tumblr -- Sincerely fuck off with this bullshit, thanks.
- beebeepka 3y agoCan't watch the video right now. Is it Sonic 3D Blast (always loved this game) or some different, newer title? Time for another replay!
- CodesInChaos 3y agoYes it is. Whenever the game crashes it showed a congratulatory message and the level select screen, so sega's QA wouldn't notice that it crashed. Hitting the console can cause such a crash.
- matheusmoreira 3y agoThat's very clever...
- mrweasel 3y agoIt's clever, but also a bit disingenuous. Sega wanted really high quality games and the developer gets annoyed by the bug reports and tries to work around the strict testing. There are no feedback for the developers once the game is out, they don't know if these bugs are triggered or how frequent, so they could be sending out defective games and the process that would have caught this has been circumvented. It's kinda of a dick move by a developers who feel like they know better.
- matheusmoreira 3y agoIt prevents crashes, allows graceful recovery by resetting the game state and is certainly the most creative use of exception handlers that I've ever seen. It is almost 2024 and there's production software out there with "catch all and do nothing" exception handlers. Software that assumes memory allocation never fails.
- mr_sturd 3y agoMy favourite easter eggs are: I remember playing through the first F.E.A.R. and noticing a coffee machine in an office kitchen. It had an unknown brand name on it so I checked it against the game's credits and it matched up with one of the game's artists. My favourite, though, was playing through Deus Ex: Human Revolution and finding three sea shells on the wall next to a toilet.
- FirmwareBurner 3y agoThere are a lot more well known easter eggs in games of that era, especially in games by id software where staff would put each other's pics in hidden places in the game. Came from a time when games were a product of passion of a few, and not of a soulless corporation. But that's still alive in indie games today. Check out the games developed by "New Blood Interactive" for example Dusk, it's full of throwbacks and memes to classic games from the '90's. You can find them on Steam or at https://waste.money/ https://waste.money/
- sdflhasjd 3y ago> Came from a time when games were a product of passion of a few, and not of a soulless corporation. Only committee-approved and/or mandated easter eggs permitted. Don't forget to catalogue them all so the social media team have more content.
- whizzter 3y agoIt's all fun and games until you leave a literal sex-game(1) in there prompting geriatric lawmakers(2) to get into the action (3). (And yes, I've worked in games myself so I 100% see the reason why they left it in disabled, iirc there is 2 or 3 levels with geometries but broken scripts included on disc in the largest game I worked on) (1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_Coffee_(minigame) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_Coffee_(minigame) (2) https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/01/30/house-gets-younger-senate-gets-older-a-look-at-the-age-and-generation-of-lawmakers-in-the-118th-congress/ https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/01/30/house-get... (3) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_Entertainment_Protection_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_Entertainment_Protectio...
- CM30 3y agoYeah these anecdotes are great. One of the ones I found amusing was how the windmills in Perfect Dark were reskinned autoguns/turrets, presumably to implement the movement aspect more easily. As a result, if you get too close to it with cheats or glitches, the whole windmill will turn and fire at you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r00LITqBDEg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r00LITqBDEg Also Fallout 3's train mechanics, which were implemented as a piece of wearable armour: https://www.pcgamer.com/heres-whats-happening-inside-fallout-3s-metro-train/ https://www.pcgamer.com/heres-whats-happening-inside-fallout... And the Ascend ability from Tears of the Kingdom was a developer tool that got repurpose into an in game ability when they realised it'd make the caves much more convenient/enjoyable to navigate. https://www.gamespot.com/articles/zelda-tears-of-the-kingdom-ascend-ability-exists-because-cheating-is-fun/1100-6514110/ https://www.gamespot.com/articles/zelda-tears-of-the-kingdom...
- yen223 3y agoHaving worked in software for a while, I realise now the answer to questions like these is almost always "there were more important things to worry about"
- martin-adams 3y agoIf you want to see what this looks like in action, you can see it in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCcd6jEEKQU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCcd6jEEKQU
- baby 3y agothis is hilarious!
- farnsworth 3y agoThe blog post says small, medium, large, this shows about 8 different sizes, which is... even funnier somehow. The designers needed to see all the options in game.
- iforgotpassword 3y agoI'm pretty sure it was just 3 sizes in III. Maybe once they realized they left it in, they decided to keep it a an Easter egg and fully committed to it.
- Geee 3y agoBut why it's an ellipse? Surely that should be fixed first, rather than the size.
- aap_ 3y agoWidescreen support in ps2-era gta leaves things to be desired.
- iforgotpassword 3y agoBut... I don't remember it like that in SA on the PC at least. Weird. And I'm very sure III even had an option in the graphics settings to enable widescreen support, which was pretty odd. Why not just assume square pixels and figure it out from there...
- lurker919 3y agoJust for nostalgia, I'd like to shake the hands of the programmer/team who added the code allowing cheatcodes.
- keyle 3y agoI think it was pretty standard, even used for testing. God mode for example, that allows to fly through the map, is the OG of fast travel. Nowadays computers are so powerful you can have full blown editor doing essentially all the cheat codes, but back in the day, you'd want to be testing the construction of X, something you don't have money for, so you'd press a few keys to change hex values and you'd have (maxvalue - current cash) instantly, so you could test more effectively. Cheat codes would be hidden enough that regular players wouldn't find them but not impossible that players could use them. I think the logic is, you've paid for the game, you should be able to access all the content. Nowadays, since games are such big business, it's all too serious.
- 13of40 3y agoMy own experience testing video games back in the mists of time was you get assigned Level Nine, for example, and the entire game is a crashy stuck-in-the-floor mess where all of the low hanging fruit has already been reported. Without a cheat to get you to Level Nine you'll never even be able to do your "commute" there, much less do your job.
- cassianoleal 3y agoI remember back in the day a memory editor for DOS. It was a TSR (terminate and stay resident, esentially a background process) that you'd load before firing up the game. Once in the game, at any time you could press a hot key (F12, I think) and it would freeze the game and open a TUI with a hex editor where you could search for values (money, number of lives, whatever else you could think of), change them and go back to the game. Fun days!
- CoastalCoder 3y agoHow would you figure out which memory location stored a given thing, e.g. # of lives?
- hughes 3y agoWhat is "SA" as referred to in the conclusion?
- CarVac 3y agoSan Andreas
- alphameese 3y agoSan Andreas, as in GTA: San Andreas
- pcchristie 3y agoTo add to the replies, the funny part is that they made two entire, much bigger sequels/expansions based on the same engine (and very similar mechanics/assets). So not only did this make it into the final release, but was rolled forward to two other entire releases.
- aap_ 3y agoNot only was it left in the code, it was even changed to allow multiple size levels. gta 3 only has a toggle, two sizes.
- cdchn 3y agoNo code lives longer than something that is a temporary fix.
- voiceblue 3y agoRelevant poem from The Codeless Code: http://thecodelesscode.com/case/234?lang=nl http://thecodelesscode.com/case/234?lang=nl Even references the moon!
- Dalewyn 3y agoThere is nothing more permanent than a temporary solution. -Old Russian Proverb
- olalonde 3y ago“Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program” – Milton Friedman Though it seems he wasn't the first to use the phrase: https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/50691/did-milton-friedman-say-that-nothing-was-so-permanent-as-a-temporary-government https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/50691/did-milto...
- adaboese 3y agoAn SRE in a company I worked used to say that naming something temporary ___ is the best way to ensure that no one touches that code.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- gambiting 3y agoWhen we shipped the first The Division someone compiled a whole list of comments from code that said things like "Fix by <date 2 years earlier>", "DO NOT SHIP THIS CODE", "Temp fix", "No idea why this code works, will refactor later", etc etc etc. It was highly amusing to read.
- a_t48 3y ago
- LZ_Khan 3y agoCan't he just have shown screenshots of different sizes of moon lmao.
- bentcorner 3y agoI think from a game design standpoint there will be times when the game will intentionally set things up so the player will see the moon (e.g., meet someone here, cutscenes plays, player is now at a stakeout with the moon in the background), making the moon adjustable allows the artists to make their decision without needing to bother the programmer, especially if the cutscenes and camera framing aren't done yet.
- willsmith72 3y agoi've been in similar situations, you try that, but when they see it in the "wild" (while actually playing the game, using the app...) they change their mind. The 3 ways to go about it: 1. give them something real to play with, like this 2. overrule them and tell them it's done 3. tell them it's baked into a 3rd party library you're using and will take a month to change
- dragonwriter 3y agoThey knew what the options looked like, there was disagreement on which was better, and apparently no one in a position to simply issue a decision to end the debate.
- neckro23 3y agoI wasn't expecting this explanation. I always thought it was just a silly "shoot the moon" gag.
- 13of40 3y agoYep, it was the first thing I read today that gave me a genuine chuckle.
- agbrrw 3y agoI didn't know Vermeij was posting these, thanks for sending this link. All posts seem recent
- Philpax 3y agoYep, he started just under two weeks ago! https://twitter.com/ObbeVermeij/status/1723424031808839801 https://twitter.com/ObbeVermeij/status/1723424031808839801
- bombcar 3y agoThis is the moon version of the folklore Jobs build a calculator app.
- wkat4242 3y agoLol I always thought this was a deliberate Easter egg
- progne 3y agoWhat if someone tries this IRL and the moon actually jumps closer and makes the shooter pass out so it stays there and the tidal forces rip apart the crust and we all die. Don't encourage them.
- spacecadet 3y agoThis site has like no sense of humor...
- smegsicle 3y agojust because you see a joke you don't like doesn't mean the whole site has no sense of humor
- youcantcook 3y ago[flagged]
- _c3ag 3y agoyou are being very agressive T.T
- youcantcook 3y ago[flagged]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- jccooper 3y agoYes. Deliberately. While not explicitly against the guidelines, jokes are generally considered to not contribute to the conversation.
- dudeinjapan 3y ago
- marktani 3y agothis is just hilarious and not at all what I expected
- trilinearnz 3y agoSimilar thing in Terminator: Skynet back in the day. Shoot at the moon and you get an "Ow!" message appearing in your status area. A few more potshots and it literally falls out of the sky - great stuff ;)
- parkerrex 3y agoKludge = easter egg
- hshsbs84848 3y agoHaving the artists tweak it via sniping is hilarious Usually you would do that by just adding a console variable they can tweak
- sergiotapia 3y agoReminds of a pro-tip some wizard told me when I was a wee lad in year 1 of my career as a software dev: Leave some glaringly misplaced or ugly in the UX, the boss/client will ask you to change that and won't nitpick other things that aren't worth the time. A kind of bait if you will for nitpick feedback.
- pbj1968 3y agoI first read about this trick in a Heinlein novel, and it involved shipping logs if I recall correctly. Luckily I caught it early in my career - leave in an easy mistake that is trivial to fix and harms nothing. It 100% works. The nitpicker feels like they won and you don’t waste time watching them spend hours pouring over everything.
- hamburglar 3y agoNitpick: poring :)
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ksaua 3y agohttps://bwiggs.com/notebook/queens-duck/ https://bwiggs.com/notebook/queens-duck/ :)
- Racing0461 3y agoThis is the quality content i come to HN for. Less gossipp about openai please.
- 404mm 3y agoAnother one worth sharing: treasure fox in TES: https://kotaku.com/yes-skyrims-foxes-do-lead-you-to-treasure-sort-of-1847514070 https://kotaku.com/yes-skyrims-foxes-do-lead-you-to-treasure...
- Arrath 3y agoI adore the fact that it was left in for three games because "well they never got back to me".
- gpderetta 3y agoExcellent. Possibly also counts as malicious compliance.
- csmattryder 3y agoA blog isn't enough for this kinda stuff, I've love to read the book on the entire early days of what became Rockstar North.
- teddyh 3y ago> I suggested to make the size of the moon changeable in the game. This way they could decide in their own time and let me know the conclusion. Like the Calculator Construction Set on the original Mac: <https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Calculator_Construction_Set.txt https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...>
- austin-cheney 3y agoWhat I find most strange is that this was never validated by anybody. The company simply trusted the developer, the developer put it in, and nobody said anything. It just worked and everybody was happy. In web dev people struggle to put text to screen. The struggle is real. Everybody has opinions on what the code should look like, how it should work, and will scrutinize each word to death. All of that internal pain is on top of megabytes of giant layers of abstractions that likely went through the same ass pain. Ironically, almost nobody in web dev (maybe about 4% of the people doing this work) actually has any idea what they are doing. Its almost as though people are posturing to justify their existence.
- michaelsalim 3y agoI think that assumes more than what the author intended. Just because they didn't mention it, doesn't mean what there weren't any validation /process in place.
- mrkramer 3y agoGood old memories of GTA, but I always expected to be blinded by the moon and the sun when I zoomed in with binoculars or a sniper.
- thetoon 3y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_illusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_illusion ;)
- lovedaddy 3y agoI was working on an F1 game back in the PS1 game. The studio wanted to fire one of the track texture artists. They pulled him up for a texture that was on the back of one of the break boards... 'whats this?' Now given it was like a 16x16 texture, he could have said anything.. 'its <name> as a stick man with his ** out!'. Handed them the ammo. However, related to the moon, we did a demo / prototype one time, and put it into a soft QA cycle before sending to publishers. One of our QA (rightly, but sigh) raised a bug saying the moon was upside down, and given the location of the game, it would be rotated.
- SuperNinKenDo 3y agoI mean, if they wanted to fire him anyway, and that was his response, he probably knew what was going on and decided to go down swinging.
- tempodox 3y agoGood to know! It never occurred to me. When I get back to San Andreas tonight I'll have to try that.
- RobKohr 3y ago"I've decided to take the blog down. It's come to my attention some of my former colleagues don't enjoy it as much as I thought they would. No pressure from R*. My own choice." Wow, what bunch of fuddy duddies. You can still read it here: https://web.archive.org/web/20231120213502/https://insiderockstarnorth.blogspot.com/2023/11/why-does-moon-change-size-when-you.html https://web.archive.org/web/20231120213502/https://insideroc...
- nosrepa 3y agoThanks!