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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 | 2 comments | 23 Apr 25 14:00 UTC | HN request time: 0.002s | source
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db48x ◴[23 Apr 25 14:32 UTC] No.43772686[source]▶
[flagged]
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mschuster91 ◴[23 Apr 25 14:43 UTC] No.43772801[source]▶
To u/db48x whose post got flagged and doesn't reappear despite me vouching for it as I think they have a point (at least for modern games): GTA San Andreas was released in 2004. Back then, YAML was in its infancy (2001) and JSON was only standardized informally in 2006, and XML wasn't something widely used outside of the Java world.

On top of that, the hardware requirements (256MB of system RAM, and the PlayStation 2 only had 32MB) made it enough of a challenge to get the game running at all. Throwing in a heavyweight parsing library for either of these three languages was out of the question.

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kevin_thibedeau ◴[23 Apr 25 15:13 UTC] No.43773123[source]▶
The flaw isn't the language. The issue is a 0.5x programmer not knowing to avoid sscanf() and failing to default and validate the results. This could be handled competently with strtok() parsing the lines without needing a more complicated file format.
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1. danbolt ◴[23 Apr 25 16:42 UTC] No.43773984[source]▶
I’ll be the first to defend the greybeards I’ve befriended and learned from in AAA, but having seen codebases of that age and earlier, the “meta” around game development was different back then. I think the internet really changed things for the better.

Your average hire for the time might have been self-taught with the occasional C89 tutorial book and two years of Digipen. Today’s graduates going into games have fallen asleep to YouTube lectures of Scott Meyers and memorized all the literature on a fixed timestep.

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2. fragmede ◴[23 Apr 25 18:07 UTC] No.43774926[source]▶
Otoh, the Internet has meant that nothing is ever finished, there's always an update to download.
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