this post was submitted on 28 Apr 2025
49 points (100.0% liked)

Programming

19911 readers
123 users here now

Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!

Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.

Hope you enjoy the instance!

Rules

Rules

  • Follow the programming.dev instance rules
  • Keep content related to programming in some way
  • If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos

Wormhole

Follow the wormhole through a path of communities [email protected]

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
snowe
Ategon
[email protected]
49
How a 20 year old bug in GTA San Andreas surfaced in Windows 11 24H2 (cookieplmonster.github.io)
submitted 3 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?

top 3 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Haha right, as if GTA:SA is that old xD
* checks Wikipedia *
Oh my god