BELLA EXPLAINS THE BUG
by Hazed
We’re all delighted that the long-standing crash bug that meant we had to ban new players has finally been nailed. It’s great to see Groundhogs in Fed DataSpace again.
But enquiries minds want to know just what caused the bug, and why it took so long to fix. So I set off to Bella’s secret lair underneath a volcano on the Jovian moon of Io - where she goes when she wants to get away from it all - to ask her.
I’m one of the privileged few that know the route to Io. It’s not programmed into the navcomps supplied by Arnie’s Surplus Store on the moon and one can only find it by using some special routing software provided to invited guests. Should unwanted visitors stumble upon it by accident they won’t be able to land: the moon’s surface is covered with active volcanoes and anyone attempting to send a shuttle down to the surface would quickly come to grief.
Fortunately, I have the password that allows me to fly my spaceship directly into Bella’s hideaway.
Once safely docked, I disembarked and made my way through her security measures - the wardroids standing guard, the laser detectors that scan for weapons, and the pools full of piranha - into the depths of her underground bunker. I found her reclining on a chaise longue, fresh from the bath, being tended by her personal droidservant. It was painting her toenails a fetching shade of green, to match her skin.
After the usual exchange of pleasantries, I asked her to explain - in words a non-techy like myself could understand - the cause of the crashes when new players set up characters.
I didn’t bother to write down what she told me. I only understood one word in ten. I begged her to simplify it.
Her next attempt was almost as impenetrable.
Finally I persuaded her to dumb it down for me, and I learned that there had been an intermittent buffer overrun present in the code for a long time. It became more pronounced at the time we moved Fed to the cloud, because we switched from a 32-bit program to a 64-bit program.
It took so long to fix the bug because the crashes didn’t happen right away, but anything up to 15 minutes later in an entirely different bit of the code, when the game tried to use the memory that had been overwritten.
Frankly, by this time my brain hurt so I took this brief explanation as sufficient and left. Besides, the droid was starting to wax Bella’s legs, and I didn’t want to stay and watch!
