| Date: | June 4, 2004 / year-entry #222 |
| Tags: | history |
| Orig Link: | https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20040604-00/?p=39013 |
| Comments: | 35 |
| Summary: | During the run-up to Windows XP Service Pack 2 Beta in December of last year, there was a list of five bugs that the release management team decided were so critical that they were going to slip the beta until those bugs got fixed. The third bug on the list: Deer Hunter 4 won't run.... |
During the run-up to Windows XP Service Pack 2 Beta in December of last year, there was a list of five bugs that the release management team decided were so critical that they were going to slip the beta until those bugs got fixed. The third bug on the list: Deer Hunter 4 won't run. Deer Hunter has the power to stop a beta. |
Comments (35)
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Don’t keep me in suspense. Why didn’t deer hunter run?
Its copy protection was crashing.
From similar posts in the past, I assume that the copy protection was relying on some undocumented "feature" of previous Windows versions. Is this right, or was it a legitimate bug in XP sp2?
I don’t know; I didn’t work on this bug. I just saw it on a list. My guess is that the copy protection was relying on intentionally illegal operations failing in a very precise way. Whether they were right to rely on that I do not know.
You know, I’m actually not surprised in the least.
You know there’s a very obvious reason why breaking Deer Hunter is a showstopper bug. Think about the kind of people that would play a game like Deer Hunter. Think about the likelihood that said people would have (a) a short temper, and (b) access to REAL firearms. I leave the rest as an exercise for the reader. :-)
Haha, you know what they say: a man with a gun is a citizen, a man without a gun is a subject. It applies to computer game players too.
alcy.net » Deer Hunter has the power…
Video games like Deer Hunter and Who Wants To Be a Millionaire sell millions to the masses. Quite a huge profit margin seeing as those games don’t have as much money put into them, especially compared to games like Halo and Diablo 2. You can make lots of money making simple, easy games your neighbors want to play.
"Deer Hunter has the power to stop a beta."…
*silence* do not underestimate copy protection too I gather..
Erbo is probably right. I suspect someone on the XP SP2 team received "fan mail" from J*hn…
I’m not particularly surprised by this. It’s not too much different from some of the other backwards compatibility bits and pieces that were saved over the years.
I *am* surprised that anyone would play Deer Hunter. I saw the first one. It was… well, let’s be polite and say "not good".
But data corruption and deletion bugs reported early in Windows Media Player 9’s beta were never fixed for final release. (I guess that development team were busy playing Deer Hunter?)
In my experience there’s some kind of universal karma field for software bugs. One implication is that as soon as a bug is discovered in one remote corner of the world, within hours it will occur everywhere, sort of like the software version of the hundredth money theorem. I’ve discovered problems during development that have been in the code for years, yet before I have a chance to communicate them to anyone, the phone is ringing because someone on the other side of the world is running into that very problem.
The second implication is that if you decide to release with some rare, unreproducible bug, you can’t assume that it will never occur in real life. It will usually turn out that some combination of factors makes it happen much more frequently in the real world outside of the lab.
As a result, when deciding on release criteria, you need to consider not just the immediate implications of the bug, but what related problems there could be. Perhaps Deer Hunter 4 by itself is not a big deal, but how many others of the tens of thousands of PC games might have similar problems?
If Deer Hunter 4 used a common copy protection system such as SecuRom, then it is in Microsoft’s best interest to fix the problem. A problem with SecuRom would cause a whole series of games not to run on XP/SP2. Deer Hunter 4 just might have been the game that triggered the bug report.
Then again, I could just be pulling all of this out of my butt.
Tim is quite right, you want to at the very least understand every regression of this class.
Copy protection mechanisms are also tricky, because they are constantly changing so that someone can’t write a one-hack-for-all type fix. Since test lists are limited, even a single broken application is likely to mean that dozens more are broken.
However, Raymond’s point about Deer Hunter being important is well taken. For XP, we had to make sure every ‘Hunter’ game was working. And there are lots of them (Shark Hunter, Turkey Hunter, …)
Theres quite a few copy protection schemes that only work if the user is an Administrator, even if the game itself would work under a Limited user account, something to do with wanting to have RAW access to the CDRom itself. Surely it’s not a good idea to have to be an administrator just to play a computer game. I’d rather they forgot about the protection and just made sure the game worked under a limited account.
I suppose the alternative is for the game to install a service or driver with a higher privilege level that lets it communicate with the CDRom, but I’m not sure I like that idea much either.
It amazes me that publisher are still using these horrible slow and crashy copy protection schemes. It’s gotten to the point that I wont buy a game if I can’t find a crack to disable the protection program.
And of course "warez" versions of the game have no protection anyway, so (like product activation and other horrors) the only people who are inconvenienced are those that own legitimate versions. And even worse, some games now won’t run if they detect CD emulation software (Daemon Tools, Alcohol, etc.). I go to a lot of LAN parties, and rather than run the risk of losing or damaging CDs I run them from MDS images, which apparently means I’m a pirate.
Copy protection is a fact of life if you do business in Europe. Retailers will purchase substantially more copies of a game when they have copy protection. Why? I really don’t know.
We could get rid of a whole series of bug reports if publishers didn’t require us to use copy protection.
"the only people who are inconvenienced are those that own legitimate versions." It does prevent simple friend-copying, where one copy of a CD gets shared among a group of physical people.
"the only people who are inconvenienced are those that own legitimate versions." It does prevent simple friend-copying, where one copy of a CD gets shared among a group of physical people.
Ya, and people burn CD’s. So what? Sneakernet is not worth destroying, given the goodwill it trashes.
I think it would be interesting to put out a game that had an activation feature that says you can install up to 3 times a month legally. So you give it to two buddies… so what? I bet oodles of peeps would "go in" and buy it. The best games are often the cheapest.
Copy protection causes major pain for us in Wine (Windows-emulation-on-Linux) land. Systems like SafeDisc enjoy making assumptions about the exact place a process that is created suspended will actually be suspended at, as well as thinks like the timing profiles of CD drive seeks. They also have a tendency to load drivers to check for debuggers (we load them in userspace and use instruction emulation to deal with that).
""the only people who are inconvenienced are those that own legitimate versions." It does prevent simple friend-copying, where one copy of a CD gets shared among a group of physical people"
The copy protection on UT2003 didn’t let you install it from a DVD-ROM (this is the EU version). I had to install it over the network from a machine with a CD writer:(
Out of morbid curiosity Raymond, what were the other four bugs on the list? Ummm, that is if you care/can disclose. Were they all as intriguing as custom copy protection schemes?
Good to see that contemporary mass market software impact is still a show stopper.
"—– Hunter X products weigh heavily upon Microsoft’s Windows XP SP2 Beta" Can’t wait for the blog about "Madden XXXX" holding up a RC. :)
Honestly, I forget. The others were rather boring.
Tim Danner » Do not underestimate the power of the game Deer Hunter
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As the smell of smoke has permeated my appartment as a result of the fire on Mount Coot-tha just down the road, I can’t sleep. As a result, I have elected to use my time more efficiently and have responded to some emails and finally got a chance to do some reading. Thanks to Westy for a series of links that have proved most informative. Firstly, the research conducted on internet deprivation was fascinating for its identification of the reliance many now place on these technologies. *looks at self* Hmm. A few years back I might have felt a tad reliant on internet connectivity. Lately though I think I could well go without it for a fortnight. I’d just hate to come back to my email!!! And this link to a discussion of bug fixing for Microsoft operating systems explains just how hard it is to find all the various nuances of program functionality in updating system activities. At least it’s good to know there are those out there who are dedicated enough to gaming to fix some problems! :) And finally this link to…