Our Favorite Bugs - Part II
Original Link (now dead) - http://acdm.turbinegames.com/featuredarticles/?action=view&article_id=41
Our Favorite Bugs - Part II
By Alicia Brown
Turbine prides itself on delivering quality products. But even in the best development house, bugs sometimes slip through the cracks. Fortunately, we usually catch them before they trouble the players. But even a dead bug has value; some of the things we've accidentally done to our game are downright funny. In part one of this series we told you about invisible chests, Abdo-man, cows wielded as weapons, hyperventilating avatars and dancing drudge dolls. If you thought that was the complete list of amusing mistakes we've made here, we're flattered, but you're wrong.
The truth is, the articles were originally inspired by something we couldn't share with you until after the release of the September event -- an extremely amusing bug that almost did permanent damage to ACDM's "PG" rating. So we thought we'd tell you about it and a few others now.
Martine's Codpiece
During development of the September Event, the team created an object known as "Martine's Mask." While the art looked fine, it turned out that actually equipping the mask got results that were not quite what was intended. Instead of equipping over your face, the mask ended up a wee bit lower on your anatomy than anticipated. The development team quickly dubbed the mask, which equipped at crotch level, "Martine's Codpiece."
LiveOp Disaster
It wasn't technically a bug, but it definitely wasn?t planned when players got the upper hand while attacking one of ACDM's legendary characters. It happened during a Live Op when Queen Elysa and Hareltah the Tumerok chieftain, both played by Turbine employees, were trying to destroy the Cistern Core. Queen Elysa and her party were powerful but, just like regular players' characters in the game, they could make mistakes and even die.
A fatal mistake was made, according to the dev who was playing Chief Hareltah. He noticed Queen Elysa had been hit with some powerful negative spells; being a mage himself, he attempted to negate these harmful spells by casting "dispel magic." He succeeded in removing all negative spells cast on her by other players, but didn't remember that this spell was so powerful that it would also eliminate all of Queen Elysa's remaining positive spells! Thus, following the "dispel," she was much more vulnerable when other players cast more negative spells on her. Within a few minutes, Queen Elysa was dead! The way this LiveOp was structured, if Queen Elysa died in the final chamber, then she "lost" and the players "won." So the Queen Elysa's effort to destroy the core was sabotaged by one of her own party!
Invisible Trees
Players may remember one particular "change in the seasons" on Dereth being more dramatic than the leaves changing colors on the trees. Due to an undetected error, a patch was released that contained more than met the eye, literally. An archer could target a monster, shoot -- and sometimes see their arrow stop in mid-air, then bounce back as if it hit something and fall to the ground!
Dereth is full of wonders -- and among them is the fact that, for a time, some trees had unintentionally been rendered invisible. Your missiles could hit and bounce off them, or you could wind up bouncing off them yourself, since you couldn't see them. Moreover, since it wasn't something that had been intended, there was nothing in the game to explain the phenomenon to players.
Sometimes there just isn't a completely logical explanation for what causes a bug but, to give you an idea of how difficult finding and fixing them can be, we'll tell you what was done to trace and fix this problem.
According to the artist involved, when told to change the game's seasons, he altered the colors of a bunch of textures on small shrubs. He didn't change anything except the color of the shrubs, and since it all seemed to work as desired, he saved his changes and moved on.
When the event went live, however, people started telling him that trees were "missing" all over Dereth. But that wasn't what was really happening, as he found when he did some checking. What he discovered was that while the trees were still there physically -- i.e., you could bounce arrows off them and/or collide with them yourself -- they simply weren't visible.
It took him quite some time to find out why these trees weren't showing up. Going back to the most basic data, he found that the scene files (which decide where trees go) were correct, thus creating the trees, and when he checked the objects themselves, they also checked out okay. But the trees he called up with his test tool were invisible.