More dirty coding tricks from game developers (2015)

In the March 2010 issue of Game Developer Magazine, Gamasutra revisited the "dirty coding tricks" employed by game developers to get their games into the hands of consumers. This follow-up to the 2009 feature explored hacks and heroics throughout game history, even extending to the business software sector. The article aimed to inspire developers to learn from past mistakes and release games that worked on time.

One memorable hack involved the Wing Commander game. When exiting the game, an exception from the EMM386 memory manager occurred, displaying an error message. To avoid this, the error message was hex edited to read "Thank you for playing Wing Commander."

Another story recounted a horror experience working with a faulty 3D engine provided by a publisher. The engine had numerous issues, requiring extensive debugging and modifications. The BSP compiler, in particular, had a randomized algorithm that made visibility problems unpredictable. The developer created a preprocessing stage to shuffle the order of brushes before feeding them to the engine's BSP compiler, fixing the issues reliably.

During the development of NBA JAM TE for the Genesis, the game cart featured a flash chip storing game data. The publisher ordered 250,000 copies, but no one reset the flash chips on the test carts, causing the carts to malfunction when shipped. The studio attempted various hacks, but finally, an extra leaflet was added to each box explaining how to fix the issue by playing the games in a specific order.

Finally, in Nitrobike for PS2, a four-player mode level design proved challenging due to the lack of occluding features. The developer resorted to a creative hack: placing a particle-based wall of smoke as an occluding polygon between two open doors in a movie-themed level. This solution not only addressed the performance issue but also integrated seamlessly with the level's themes.