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How a 20 year old bug in GTA San Andreas surfaced in Windows 11 24H2

(cookieplmonster.github.io)
1371 points yett | 9 comments | 23 Apr 25 14:00 UTC | HN request time: 1.034s | source | bottom
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db48x ◴[23 Apr 25 14:32 UTC] No.43772686[source]▶
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trinix912 ◴[23 Apr 25 15:27 UTC] No.43773261[source]▶
Putting the (very valid) reasons for not having human-readable game saves aside, are you sure it's worse than using a 3rd party library that's built to accept semi-valid input values, possibly evaluates user input in some way and has difficult to debug bugs that occur only under certain inputs? I agree that writing a stable and safe parser for a binary data file isn't easy, but there's less things that can go wrong when you can hardcode it to reject any remotely suspicious input. Third party XML/JSON libraries OTOH try to interpret as much as possible, even when the values are bogus. Also no need to deal with different text encoding bugs, line endings...
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hattar ◴[23 Apr 25 15:31 UTC] No.43773307[source]▶
> Putting the (very valid) reasons for not having human-readable game saves aside,

I don't follow. What would the reasons be?

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1. gsinclair ◴[23 Apr 25 15:40 UTC] No.43773397[source]▶
A human-readable game save file is presumably human-editable.
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2. kadoban ◴[23 Apr 25 15:58 UTC] No.43773604[source]▶
Require a hash in the file to match the rest of the file if you want to avoid effortless changes to the file.

(There is no way to prevent changes by a knowledgeable person with time or tools, so that's not a goal)

3. RHSeeger ◴[23 Apr 25 16:03 UTC] No.43773642[source]▶
Most binary save game files are human editable, too; unless they go through a separate encoding stage.
replies(1): >>43775181 #
4. mrguyorama ◴[23 Apr 25 16:29 UTC] No.43773899[source]▶
Before game companies earned all their profit through selling cosmetics and premium currency nobody cared if you cheated at your single player game and nobody SHOULD care if you want to give yourself extra money.

It's only now that single player progress is profitable to sell that video games have taken save game encryption to be default.

It's so stupid.

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5. keyringlight ◴[23 Apr 25 17:17 UTC] No.43774385[source]▶
The trouble is that if some weirdness happens because of the edit, you've got to handle it even if you say it would be reasonable to assume that it's outside of being supported. Maybe you spend a bit more time defensive coding around what inputs it reads from the file, maybe a certain proportion of users doing the save edit see bugs in an apparently unrelated part of the game and seek support (and their bug report might not be complete with all the details), developers spend time to chase down what went wrong, maybe they bad-mouth it on forums which affects sales - there's going to be some cost to handling all of that.

One of the anecdotes from Titan Quest developed by Iron Lore is that their copy protection had multiple checks, crackers removed the early checks to get the game running but later 'tripwires' as you progress through the game remained and the game appeared to crash. So the game earned a reputation for being buggy for something no normal user would hit running the game as intended.

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6. mrguyorama ◴[23 Apr 25 18:13 UTC] No.43774995{3}[source]▶
>The trouble is that if some weirdness happens because of the edit, you've got to handle it even if you say it would be reasonable to assume that it's outside of being supported.

What? No. What even are you suggesting? Hell, games with OFFICIAL MODDING SUPPORT still require you submit bug reports with no mods running.

Editing game files has always been "you are on your own", even editing standard Unreal config files is something you wont get support for, and they are trivial human readable files with well known standards.

>One of the anecdotes from Titan Quest

Any actual support for this anecdote? Lots of games have anti-piracy features that sneakily cause problems, and even could fire accidentally. None of those games get a reputation for being buggy. Games like Earthbound would make the game super hard and even delete your save game at the very end. Batman games would nerf your gliding ability. Game Dev Tycoon would kill your business due to piracy.

None of these affected the broad reputation of the game. Most of them are pretty good marketing in fact.

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7. hermitdev ◴[23 Apr 25 18:28 UTC] No.43775181[source]▶
Editting simcity saves was my introduction to hex editing...
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8. dwattttt ◴[23 Apr 25 20:57 UTC] No.43776548{4}[source]▶
Game Dev Tycoon even later added Pirate Mode to the game, for people who wanted to experience super-hard-mode. Complete with random mail they got telling them why people pirated their game, framed as why people were pirating the game you just made.
9. RHSeeger ◴[24 Apr 25 16:21 UTC] No.43784537{3}[source]▶
For me, iirc, it was Bard's Tale