The "Velcro" bug seems uncannily familiar. We had extremely similar issues on a game I worked on. Our lead programmer was going down the "dirty hacks" route, wh

The "Velcro" bug seems uncannily familiar. We had extremely similar issues on a game I worked on. Our lead programmer was going down the "dirty hacks" route, which worked in some cases but in others was producing new bugs. In one instance, I think it was a hovership colliding with a tower, there was a back-and-forth between him and QA for about a week, where he'd patch against a specific symptom, and QA would (literally) find a new angle of attack where it would break yet again. The deadline was looming, so one day, he came up to me and asked, "you studied physics at university, right? Can you have a look at this?" So I did. It took me a weekend, but I eventually tracked it down to a horrendously broken box-to-capsule collision detection and response, which I rewrote. (capsule = sphere-capped cylinder) Sometimes, the less dirty fix does make it into the game. :)