this post was submitted on 28 Apr 2025
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Programming

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How a 20 year old bug in GTA San Andreas surfaced in Windows 11 24H2 (cookieplmonster.github.io)
submitted 4 days ago by Kissaki to c/programming
3 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

My home PC is still on Windows 10 22H2, while my work machine is on Windows 11 23H2, and, to no surprise, neither machine reproduced the issue – Skimmer spawned on the water just fine, creating one via script and putting CJ in a driver’s seat worked too.

That said, I also asked a few people who upgraded to 24H2 to test this on their machines and they all hit this bug.

I have a likely explanation for why Rockstar made this specific mistake in the data to begin with – in Vice City, Skimmer was defined as a boat, and therefore did not have those values defined by design! When in San Andreas they changed Skimmer’s vehicle type to a plane, someone forgot to add those now-required extra parameters. Since this game seldom verifies the completeness of its data, this mistake simply slipped under the radar.

What made the game work fine despite of this issue for over twenty years, before a new update to Windows 11 suddenly challenged this status quo?

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Thanks for posting this. I see it was on a few other communities last week but I missed it somehow. Great debugging and reminds me of the classic GTA5 online mode fix.

Does anyone know how debug symbols came to be available for the old games?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 days ago

I researched at bit about the debug symbols, and it seems like, for the most part, people have both found official builds where the debug symbols were simply left in, and info useful to debug the games in leaks.