8 ms·
Breaking Madden: The Super Bowl, in which the machine bleeds to death
- davidw 13y agoInteresting how the game score counter can't go over 255. Sounds like premature optimization at work.
- ijk 13y agoI can sort of see storing the score as an unsigned char, since that's larger than the largest real-world score. I have no idea what's going on with the 266 value, though.
- colmvp 13y ago"Interesting how the game score counter can't go over 255." They just didn't expect anyone to play against the Dallas Cowboys. Rookie mistake.
- mjmahone17 13y agoOr it's from back in the day when Madden used an 8-bit processor, and the code for scoring has just never been updated to use something other than char.
- BlackDeath3 13y agoWasn't Madden 25 recently released? And score is still kept in eight-bit storage? And the Innovative Title of the Year award goes to...
- munificent 13y agoWhen I worked on Madden around 2007 or so, you could still find the original code for updating the score on a touchdown. It had Steve Chiang's[1] initials by it. It's not like the rules for that have changed much over the years, so there's little reason to touch the code. [1] http://company.zynga.com/about/leadership-team/zynga-leadership-team http://company.zynga.com/about/leadership-team/zynga-leaders...
- BlackDeath3 13y agoNo, I get that football doesn't change all that much, and therefore the games don't need to change all that much (so why it's become an annual new release sort of situation is beyond me) so I could understand not redoing all of the game logic, but... eight-bit score storage?
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- cube13 13y agoAssuming a 15 minute quarter(though most Madden games have shorter quarters, especially if they're multiplayer), to get 255 points in a quarter, a team would need to score a touchdown + 2 point conversion every 30 seconds. For a full game, that's every 2 minutes. Any given play generally takes 10-20 seconds, and you're going to be running, bare minimum, 2 plays per 8 points(1 for touchdown, 1 for 2 point conversion). So that's about 25 seconds per score. If the teams are remotely well matched(i.e. aren't a Breaking Madden team), they'll take at least 2-3 minutes per possession, since you're most likely going to have 4 downs, which have a play clock of 40 seconds(most teams use around 30/play), so the "average" shortest possession is something like 2 minutes. The point of all this? The Breaking Madden games are really an outlier that you'd have to specifically code for.
- doktrin 13y ago> The point of all this? The Breaking Madden games are really an outlier that you'd have to specifically code for. Rather than coding special exemptions or rules, it seems that using 8 bit storage would have to be a deliberate choice on any modern platform.
- m_myers 13y agoSure, on any modern platform. But you don't change 25-year-old code unless there's a pressing reason.
- sehugg 13y agoIf they went all the way with optimization it would have rolled over back to 0.
- jmduke 13y agoWouldn't have expected this to show up on HN, but this entire 'season' is hilarious if you have even a cursory interest in sports video games -- there's a lot of (hilarious) frayed edges that get exposed when Jon pushes Madden to its limits.
- austinhutch 13y agoI was laughing the entire read and through the videos, the guy writing this is talented.
- nostromo 13y agoThis is my favorite thing about simulators: using them in unconventional ways. It reminds me of being a kid and trying to build a city in SimCity without roads.
- Crito 13y agoI suspect you'll like this then: http://www.vice.com/read/the-totalitarian-buddhist-who-beat-sim-city http://www.vice.com/read/the-totalitarian-buddhist-who-beat-... (related HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1352864 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1352864)
- Natsu 13y ago> It reminds me of being a kid and trying to build a city in SimCity without roads. I thought you were supposed to replace all roads with rails? :)
- chipsy 13y agoTechnically, you only need exactly one rail adjacent to a zone in the first game to make it grow, so the entire traffic model can be essentially ignored. Example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UEzzLXOs-iU http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UEzzLXOs-iU
- doktrin 13y ago> I was pretty amused that a computer could attempt the most basic of tasks -- addition -- and come up with two kinds of wrong. It's a bit ironic that addition is kinda the quintessential thing computers get wrong. Admittedly, not much of an issue these days - but the comment was amusing :)
- raldi 13y agoHe wonders why the score shows up as 266 when it should be 262. Well, 262 % 256 = 6. So if you have very old scoring code that expects the score to fit in an unsigned byte, it's going to think the score is 6. So that explains the 6 in the ones column. The 6 in the tens column, well, that I can't explain.
- Tossrock 13y agoI can't possibly believe something like a game's score would be recorded in an unsigned byte. The last time I saw an unsigned byte in use in a game was in the original Starcraft, which tracked number of kills per unit with a single byte, so if a unit killed more than 255 enemies, it stopped incrementing.
- raldi 13y agoDon't miss this comment from a person who worked there: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7159513 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7159513
- joesmo 13y agoApparently this limitation shows up elsewhere in the game, suggesting it might be a problem of too few bits, indeed: "Peterson actually rushed for over 1,100 yards, but once again, the game stopped counting at 1,023. I'm guessing that this is because only 1,024 values can be represented by 10 binary switches in a computer system, and the game's developers (understandably) never would have guessed that another set of switches would be necessary." -- http://www.sbnation.com/2013/10/2/4784946/breaking-madden-in-which-the-eagles-defense-gets-drunk-and-gives-up http://www.sbnation.com/2013/10/2/4784946/breaking-madden-in...
- lmm 13y agoI know how whiny this sounds, but please deinterlace before you upload to youtube. I get a headache just looking at this video.
- SixSigma 13y agoI don't think people understand interlacing. The really saddest part is when news video is imported from a region with opposite interlacing and the fields are reversed when broadcast. It means the editors are either only previewing on non-interlaced or half-sized screens or they don't understand what they are seeing. I once made a similar mistake. Someone submitted a video to my film festival and it was interlaced the wrong way. I swapped the fields and didn't do a full preview. Half way through the submitted video had swapped field order and I'd not noticed. After the screening I explained the error and apologized. She hadn't even noticed. Some people just can't see. Another example - a single field glitch. me : what's that glitch? person : what glitch? me (touching the screen next to the glicth) : here person : what glitch? I just couldn't get them to see it.
- derekp7 13y agoI can't tell you how many times I've sat down at someone elses computer back in the CRT monitor days, and had to up their refresh rate to something tolerable (it was always defaulted at 60Hz). Almost no one noticed the flicker at 60. This used to not be so bad, until most interfaces switched to black text on a white background. Argh, my eyes bled.
- cllns 13y agoJeez, firebug shows this site as being 64.7MB for me. And 'onload' occurred after 36 seconds.
- schwap 13y ago55MB was the (large) GIFs. Maybe HTML5 video would've been better. Disregarding that, 10MB is still pretty large, though.
- aw3c2 13y agoThat "maybe" is a definite "definitely". I would not be surprised it using video would make it 5.5MB.
- dandelany 13y agoNot to mention, they could be lazy loaded since they only play when you mouse over them...
- YokoZar 13y agoGfycat (http://gfycat.com/ http://gfycat.com/) is a fantastic solution to this -- it loads HTML5 video or an animated gif depending on what the client supports.
- jpace121 13y agoSBNation is one of the sites that spends lots of time making their site look really cool, but it definitely makes their websites kind of large.
- mschuster91 13y agoIf only Chrome had a feature of warning you when a website exceeds a certain size - I'm on 500MB of data a month!
- jboggan 13y agoI love these kinds of glitches, always makes me laugh until I cry. Reminds me of the best one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Zs4yxkRI6U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Zs4yxkRI6U
- mistermcgruff 13y agoThis had me crying I was laughing so hard. In an airport bar. People were staring.
- ChuckMcM 13y agoOh god I laughed hard on that one. FWIW, and I am not making this up, this is Don Knuth's[1] favorite way of playing video games. I had set up an experiment with an xbox, a copy of Halo (fighting aliens game) and a copy of Dead or Alive (fighting boobs game)[2], Don came by and wanted to see the games, he dismissed DoA pretty quickly but Halo2 we played for about an hour and a half. Don loved to have the character do things the developers probably had not thought they would try to do (like fall through a crack in the geometry and walkaround in "space" underneath the ship) He was really creative, we sat for a while with six aliens who wanted desparately to kill us but would not cross a door threshold which if we stepped through the door would close. It was very entertaining. Much like this Madden game. The color commentary though was really priceless. [1] Yes the "Art of Programming" Don Knuth. [2] It was a simple experiment at a conference, first half the console sat there, play either game, mid conference announced that we were tracking hours played on each game and compare second half ratio to first half ratio.
- sharkweek 13y agoHis weekly depictions of terrible NFL scenarios were instant classics for sports comedy. Jon Bois is one of the best in the business of just ridiculousness, I highly recommend checking out his entire season this year. But this one takes the cake as the bugs at the end really made for an incredible story.
- anigbrowl 13y agoDead or Alive (fighting boobs game) Filed under 'things I wish I hadn't searched for.' WTF.
- girvo 13y ago
- HannibalLecter 13y agoAs some of you know, 255 is a typical vchar max in database lingo, so when the game score goes above that (which a football game never would), then other parts of the database are obviously getting overwritten with scoring information causing all kinds of messed up problems. The game is essentially glitching out.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- blinktink 13y agoTo those who suspect old code or premature optimization, if you read the comments all EA sports games apparent cap out at 255 points. It's an intentional throwback. When he did it in one quarter he triggered an Easter egg, a "false start".
- habosa 13y agoDamn that was too funny. I would love to see something similar with other games.
- chris_wot 13y agoThis website has an irritating bug. It's got a scrollbar next to the main scrollbar. Firefox 26.
- giantrobothead 13y agoTremendous. I love how the simulation threw its hands up at the end and gave up in such spectacular fashion. Mathematical abomination, indeed.