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Brenda’s Phone Bill

There’s a bug that seems to have been in Phoney Girlfriend since our first production launch on January 10th 2014.  Soon after launch a lot of people told me about a bug where Brenda repeats a message about her phone bill.

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Screen Shot 2014-02-07 at 12.29.40 AM
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Screen Shot 2014-02-07 at 12.28.30 AM
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Screen Shot 2014-02-07 at 12.28.12 AM

 

It never happened to me, and other people seemed to get through the game okay. A few people commented about Brenda’s death, which is an indication they got to the end. The characters script is made up of Conversations, which are made up of Interactions. There are different types of Interactions, but that’s a bit irrelevant. All Interactions have an interaction_id and a next_interaction_id. The interaction_id, as you may have guessed, is a unique identifier, while the next_interaction_id, tells us what interaction should follow after this one.

It is possible for the script to be messed up and link to an earlier interaction and get stuck in a loop.

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Choose “Hi Bonnie, I’m [PLAYERNAME].” and Bonnie will jump back up and say “Hi [PLAYERNAME], I’m Bonnie”

However it’s unlikely, I wrote code to test the XML files for that exact occurrence. I would have caught an error like that in my own testing and after analyse the script thoroughly I couldn’t find any examples of that happening. Finally, I took a look at my friends phone that was experiencing the bug and I discovered he chose every option and it still repeats itself.

So what’s the cause?

I do not know. I’ve been chasing this bug for over a week. I can’t even reproduce myself. To be fair, I haven’t tried that hard. The general steps for fixing a bug are:

1. Reproduce the bug, make the bug happen. This is not always easy

2. Figure out why it’s happening. This involves running the debugger or dumping out values.

3. Write code to fix the bug.

4. Try to reproduce the bug using the exact steps in step 1. If it doesn’t happen again your mission is complete.

If the bug is really hard to consistently reproduce then  you are pretty much fucked. You can’t really be sure you code has fixed the bug. So step one is the most important step.

My Reproduction Strategies, lol

1. Brenda usually takes about fifteen minutes to send you a message. I’m a programmer, I don’t have time to wait for that shit. So I’ll cut the timer to zero seconds, run through Brenda’s script. I don’t think this strategy will work though. I have tried this before

2. Modify the script so we start at the interaction just before the phone bill message. Play the game at normal speed, and do not charge the phone. I suspect the chat resumption code is fucking up somewhere and it also has something to do with transition from Conversation #1 to Conversation #2.

3. If those two strategies don’t work I will have to play through the game at normal speed from the beginning. Arghh… it’ll take a long time. Also I suspect this occurs when people are playing the game infrequently. Those that charge through don’t seem to experience the bug.

I’m going to start blogging daily, so you’ll find out tomorrow whether or not this bug was conquered.

Edit – 10 February 2014

I was able to reproduce the bug! In only a few hours after writing this blog post. Nice work Angus. Here’s the exact reproduction steps.

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Screen Shot 2014-02-10 at 10.23.56 AM


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