celeste 💫 @caprisun@shrike.club

#ranma

ITS JOEVER https://x.com/JoeBiden/status/1815080881981190320

i think a lot about the dolphin progress update blog posts where they talk about a game that was completely unplayable in dolphin, constant crashes and stuff. and when they peeked at the memory they discovered that the physics engine was spitting out NaNs all over the place

(NaN values have a tendency to propagate, if you do math to a NaN you get a NaN out, so one NaN sneaking into your calculations can flood into all the values that rely on them)

their immediate, obvious instinct was "we're emulating some rare instruction wrong". this happens sometimes, some instruction that very few games use has an edge case that's not being treated correctly and it's not immediately obvious until they find a game that it breaks. something like "spitting out a NaN in the middle of what's supposed to be a physics calculation" feels a lot like some instruction is doing something wrong

and then in the next blog post they revealed: "it turns out the game is just like that"

check it out I'm in the house like karkat