The weirdest coding hack I’ve ever seen myself was in a very talked-about first individual shooter collection whose engine my studio was utilizing for a unique sport. At one level, the animation system pulled a really particular hard-coded string from the string desk (the repository used to carry the entire items of textual content within the sport for translating and such) and forged it to animation knowledge (i.e. it declared “No matter it was, we don’t care. It’s animation knowledge now” and handled it as such), then utilized that animation knowledge to the character within the sport.
The animation programmer didn’t perceive it both. We couldn’t work out the place it got here from or what it was, however it was very noticeable when it occurred in-game – we had modified the animation skeleton, so the animation knowledge (designed for a unique skeleton) made the character fold over right into a pretzel for a bit. We additionally couldn’t take away it, as a result of it could break all the animation system if we did. We tried. So we left it and tried to keep away from it as a lot as doable.
The funniest coding hack I’ve heard of might be for the unique Wing Commander. The crew at Origin Programs had been utilizing a particular reminiscence supervisor that might crash every time they exited this system. They couldn’t work out learn how to repair it, so they only hacked the reminiscence supervisor to say “THANK YOU FOR PLAYING WING COMMANDER!” as a substitute of “Error in Emm386.sys”.
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