I had a similar softlock in Skyrim at release that wasn't fixed until the toolset came out and I was able to go in and see that the script that was meant to fire was never actually added to the trigger. So a dude is supposed to come up to a door and open a little window to talk to you, but he would just stay sitting down in the room since the script telling him to go to the door and begin the dialogue that leads to the trigger that opens the door was written and available, but wasn't tied to the trigger of activating the door. I just put the script into the trigger and Bam! finally was able to get through the MQ.

Ever since, I have been salty AF about Bethesda's ability to build games. This was such a stupidly simple mistske and it persisted for months only to be fixed by modders with a simple 5 second change.

Floating point values: making your software misbehave out of nowhere since the year NaN.

This is actually an incredible coincidence; I love reading these stories but it's usually in the context of a speedrunner exploiting them rather than a poor dev asking "how did this ever work!?"

At one point, Valve accidentally broke blinking in HL2 era versions of the Source engine.

Like uh, there was originally, for all humanoid NPCs with visible eyes, some kind of timer and functionality that would cause NPCs to blink, at semi-random, semi-regular intervals.

Somewhere around approximately 2010-12, I think?... they broke this, and no NPCs would or could blink anymore, outside of totally scripted sequences involving blinking as or eye movement as a deliberate part of some fully blocked out, pre-scripted skit.

... Last I checked, roughly a decade later... they appear to have fixed it.

But I remember this being broken for like, years.

That was a pretty neat and fun story :) Thanks for sharing it. I never new that hw is also active on mastodon :)

Very cool.

Also Valve is legitimately one of the only devs who kept original source code from 2004.

Even Blizzard lost the original World of Warcraft code.

I like this one:

Also, whacking the manhacks with your crowbar goes from being a panicked flailing in flatscreen, to being an elegant one-swing home-run hit in VR.

It makes me like the fact that there are no melee weapons in Half Life: Alyx even less, though.

i wonder if this vr code was used for the hl2 vr mod, or those guys re-created it

That was a fun read, thanks for sharing!