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No. 1809: Game Developer Garfield

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Game Developer Garfield

First | Previous | 2014-05-02 | Next | Latest

Permanent URL: https://mezzacotta.net/garfield/?comic=1809

Strip by: Lubaf

{Jon flies across the screen right and then left.}
Jon: WEEEEEE!
Jon: Told you!
Garfield: I'm still fixing this wall eject bug next patch, even if it is fun to abuse.

The author writes:

As I write this, I'm watching the Awesome Games Done Quick 2014 run of Skyrim live, which features a glitch that allows infinite sprint. High level Speedrunning (essentially, completing a game as fast as possible) frequently centers around glitches that allow the player to go out of the intended game boundaries.

One common way of preventing an out-of-bounds (or OoB) error is to not just make solid walls, but thick ones, but that leads to a different set of glitches that use the wall ejection method (as many games have code that ejects the player from the wall) to go faster then the developers intended (see, for example, http://speeddemosarchive.com/MegaMan2.html which features a separate category for "Zip Glitches", which use exactly the kind of glitch I'm talking about here).

Presumably, Garfield here is developing a 2D platformer that somehow allows Jon to clip into the floor, and convince the game that he needs to be ejected perpendicular to the direction he actually is supposed to (left and right, instead of up). (Although wall-eject-style bugs also show up in 3D games as well, they're more common in 2D games.)

[[Original strip: 2014-01-09.]]

Original strip: 2014-01-09.