This is the most baffling and puzzling bug I have ever encountered or read about..

[FrankJones]

On top of that, from what the dev is mentionning in the report, there seems that the game might have some combo depending on what cards are in play, so i would definitively classify that as non-simple game.

It's a simple game in the sense that on each player's turn, the active player must play a character card. This happens every turn. The game cannot proceed to the next player's turn unless the current active player has played a card.

Similar to Chess - the game does not change to the other player's turn unless the active player moves a piece. There is no option in Chess to "do nothing" .

Similar to Azul - each player must draw at least one tile before it becomes the other player's turn. "Taking no tiles" is not allowed.

That's why I am trying to use examples from games such as Chess and Azul. Aquatica is a niche game for which most people in this thread probably do not know the game or the rules.

If I had written a post entitled, "What a mysterious and baffling bug; in my game of chess, my opponent's turn was skipped and I got 2 turns in a row", would people still be saying, "Oh, that sounds like a normal common bug"?

[FrankJones]

Again, there is no such thing as a player's turn. The bga framework is very basic and let you do whatever you want as a developper (as long as you are sticking with the coding language used for the framework). So developpers handle players active status themselves, they just have built in function to make a player active, that's all.

I understand that. I have written fully functional code for some turn-based games. Part of the code (for the game to function properly) required that I write some code to have the game switch the active player from the person who just completed a turn to the opponent so that the opponent could then become the active player.

Aquatica has that code, otherwise the game would not function; the game would not know whose turn it is.

[FrankJones]

I don't understand the antagonism toward me in this thread.

As I said, I have spent countless hours helping debug one of the most popular games on this site (Terraforming Mars). I helped close hundreds of bug reports in that bug report forum, either by replicating the bug, or showing that it was not a bug.

I am not a professional, but I have written fully functional code for turn-based games. I am not sure how professionals do it, but my code essentially:

ran on a "while" loop that continues as long as the game condition "Game_is_over" was false. After each player's turn, the code checked the end game condition, and if the condition was met, the loop ended, and the game ended and declared the winner. If the game end condition was not met, the final line of code in the loop changed the active player to the other player, thus beginning that other player's turn.

There was nothing in my code that could possibly skip over the active player, especially when no input or interaction occurred from either player.

[FrankJones]

I just want to solve the mystery. Pure curiosity at this point. And my desire to help the Aquatica game.

I am going to play a 2-player game and replicate the exact sequence, and see if anything unusual happens.

[nik592]

If I had written a post entitled, "What a mysterious and baffling bug; in my game of chess, my opponent's turn was skipped and I got 2 turns in a row", would people still be saying, "Oh, that sounds like a normal common bug"?

Whether a bug is rare or common doesn't change the process for managing it.

So, personally, yes, if you told me this happened in a game of chess, I'd say, yeah, that's a bug. Report it. Start a new game. Hopefully it won't happen again and/or the devs might be able to figure out what happened and fix it. By raising your bug, theoretically, you're putting it out there as a first data point. More might come along. Maybe that will help. Maybe it'll never get solved.

I guess I'm a bit lost about what you're expecting people to say? "You're right, this is the most unlikely bug I've ever seen, congratulations on finding a unicorn?" "You're right, that bug is impossible so..." - I don't even know how you would end that sentence. The bug clearly IS possible, because it happened. You acknowledge it's probably a rarely encountered bug, so it's not super likely you'll get people agreeing it happened to them (and it doesn't appear to have for those of us on this thread), so what else can we say, beyond "it's a bug, report it..."?

[FrankJones]

Nik592,

Just to be clear, I appreciate your input as a professional developer.

You were wondering what I was trying to accomplish. I'm just trying to figure out HOW the bug happened. Which lines in the code permitted the very unusual occurrence of the game losing track of whose turn it was. I find programming fascinating. I love it.

I find this bug so intriguing and unusual, and I want to crack the code and figure out how it happened. I want to tr to replicate it. That's why I sought input from professionals such as yourself.

I started a 2-player game and was able to set up the exact scenario, and make the exact same plays, and ... nothing unusual happened.

As a puzzle solver, and amateur programmer, and bug-forum admin, I'm just intrigued and puzzled that I cannot solve this!

That's all it comes down to. I know we can just restart the game. I just want to solve the mystery.



And I wouldn't want this bug to prevent the game from being out of Beta, because I think this bug could happen in any game at any time, but rarely.

I'm not whining or anything related to the fact that it happened in "my" game. I was likely to lose. I just want to solve the mystery.

[Jellby]

It could be "not a bug", or at least not a bug in anything related to BGA, something like a hardware fault, a glitch, a random quantum fluctuation, a bug in some kernel/driver...

It could also be some kind of race condition in the game's code or in the BGA framework. Those are typically hard to catch and reproduce.

Even if it's just a plain game bug, it's definitely not "the most baffling and puzzling" I have encountered, nor "the most ludicrous ever". As bugs go, this one looks quite dull to me. Surprising that such a "basic" thing goes wrong (e.g. that it wasn't caught earlier, assuming again that it's a game bug), yes, but I've read and experienced much more "interesting" stuff.

NB. I think the award among the ones I've experienced goes to a scientific software that gave different results depending on the directory where the executable was placed, with one particular compiler. There was nothing in the code that should know about the executable path. I suspected some uninitialized memory or compiler bug, but I could never figure it out. The code has changed since, the compiler has been updated, and I haven't seen that happening in a while, but it still bugs me (pun unintended).

[nik592]

It could be "not a bug", or at least not a bug in anything related to BGA, something like a hardware fault, a glitch, a random quantum fluctuation, a bug in some kernel/driver...

It could also be some kind of race condition in the game's code or in the BGA framework. Those are typically hard to catch and reproduce.

100%, as I mentioned in an earlier post, I've also seen most of those (some are difficult to confirm you've "seen"). Race conditions are particularly a pain, so much so, that we now call them "red cars" along the lines of "that which shall not be named".

You were wondering what I was trying to accomplish. I'm just trying to figure out HOW the bug happened. Which lines in the code permitted the very unusual occurrence of the game losing track of whose turn it was. I find programming fascinating. I love it.

Yeah, I see you've said that, though it wasn't what came across in your initial post (as I've explained in a previous post) - you didn't mention curiosity there, just "this is weird and seems like it shouldn't be able to happen". I'll give you that you asked if it'd happened to anyone else, which is a reasonable question to determine if there's a precedent, but you've had enough non-responses to that by now that you can be pretty confident it's not something happening a lot. But your posts since seem to be wanting something you're not getting, though I'm not quite sure what that is, but you keep coming back to this idea of it being a "really weird" bug.

You said:

If I had written a post entitled, "What a mysterious and baffling bug; in my game of chess, my opponent's turn was skipped and I got 2 turns in a row", would people still be saying, "Oh, that sounds like a normal common bug"?

which I answered. Yes, my response would be the same. Had this bug happened in Chess I wouldn't be acknowledging it as being any weirder than it is in Aquatica.

As a puzzle solver, and amateur programmer, and bug-forum admin, I'm just intrigued and puzzled that I cannot solve this!

This is another thing I think people have tried to explain, including myself, Jellby, Tisaac and maybe others, because it's probably going to be difficult to replicate, it's probably going to be difficult to solve. That doesn't make it any more interesting (in fact, I'd argue it makes it less interesting), though it probably does mean you're not going to hear what the solution is, particularly among people spitballing in the forum and not looking at the code. The dev might tell you what happened if they solve it, but very possibly, it'll just get set aside as one of those things (and only revisited if we actually get more data points on it).

[FrankJones]

NB. I think the award among the ones I've experienced goes to a scientific software that gave different results depending on the directory where the executable was placed, with one particular compiler. There was nothing in the code that should know about the executable path. I suspected some uninitialized memory or compiler bug, but I could never figure it out. The code has changed since, the compiler has been updated, and I haven't seen that happening in a while, but it still bugs me (pun unintended).

That is definitely a puzzling bug.

[FrankJones]

Yeah, I see you've said that, though it wasn't what came across in your initial post (as I've explained in a previous post) - you didn't mention curiosity there, just "this is weird and seems like it shouldn't be able to happen". I'll give you that you asked if it'd happened to anyone else, which is a reasonable question to determine if there's a precedent, but you've had enough non-responses to that by now that you can be pretty confident it's not something happening a lot.

[Truncated]

This is another thing I think people have tried to explain, including myself, Jellby, Tisaac and maybe others, because it's probably going to be difficult to replicate, it's probably going to be difficult to solve. That doesn't make it any more interesting (in fact, I'd argue it makes it less interesting), though it probably does mean you're not going to hear what the solution is, particularly among people spitballing in the forum and not looking at the code. The dev might tell you what happened if they solve it, but very possibly, it'll just get set aside as one of those things (and only revisited if we actually get more data points on it).

Please understand, my first post was an immediate surprised and puzzled reacting to what had just happened. I wrote it within minutes of discovering the oddity, and thus my original post did not comprise the entirety of my thoughts on the matter

I agree - the inability to replicate the bug will likely have this one end up as a mystery bug.

I hope this unusual and non-replicable bug does not prevent the game from moving out of Beta (At least one person suggested that something like this should be expected in a Beta game).

I still find it an intriguing bug, mainly because I am wondering whether it was some sort of overall system glitch (which I agree is dull and not all that noteworthy, as long as it is very rare, which I believe we have all ascertained it is), or, whether the executable code specific to Aquatica somehow caused the problem (which, to me, would be very interesting).

The consensus seems to be that this is not an Aquatica bug, per se, and so, it will likely remain a mystery, just as with a Chess bug in which something similar occurred (which I have never heard of, but perhaps has happened on occasion?).