My Biggest Programming Fear

I have encountered some very strange bugs in my programming career. And most of them have been in BrainWorks, being by far the most complicated piece of software I've ever written. One of the worst involved a build that only crashed when run on someone else's system. On my system it was fine, but it would crash on my friend's system. It wouldn't crash right away, mind you. Sometimes it would take up to two minutes, so even testing to see if the bug was fixed took time. Oh, and his computer was in London while mine was in Los Angeles. Not exactly the easiest problem to solve.

I solved it by compiling in debug flags that would turn on or off entire sections of code and then had him run it. "Okay, load bots but turn off all movement, scanning, and aiming. Does it crash now? What about when Item Pickup is turned off?" Through the course of four builds that gradually narrowed in on particular blocks of code, we eventually found the offending bug.

(If you're curious what caused it, an uninitialized value was improperly being treated as an address, crashing the program whenever it was accessed. Because his machine's memory layout was different from mine, it would occasionally access invalid memory and the operating system would kill the program. For whatever reason, the uninitialized values that showed up on my system always happened to refer to memory BrainWorks was allowed to access, so it never crashed for me.)

It took about eight hours to do, but once you've solved a bug like that, you feel cabable of tackling any bug. Bugs bother me, but they don't frighten me. Know what my biggest programming fear is?

0 total errors

Any time I've spent over two hours working on a particular feature and attempt to rebuild the code base, I expect to see at least one error. I'm a good programmer, but that doesn't mean I'm perfect. I'm a good programmer because I know I'm not perfect. Good programmers assume they will make mistakes-- that's why they add all those safety error checks. If some other piece of code does the wrong thing, their error checks will contain it.

Last week I spent four hours tracking down the issues with bots overvaluing the shotgun. The problem was that the estimation of fire frequency wasn't precise enough. I spent another three hours analyzing the similarities between estimating the chance of hitting with a weapon (hits divided by attacks) and the chance of firing a weapon (attacks divided by potential attacks) and designing functionality that merged the two concepts. Actually writing the code took another 2 hours. Nine hours total including changes that could totally break the AI's ability to even attack, and here I am looking at the results from my very first recompile:

0 total errors

I haven't run it yet, but I'm terrified. Zero errors on the first try? That never happens. That's not even supposed to happen. Odds are the code I wrote has an error somewhere; I just don't know where.

At any rate, I plan to test it this upcoming week and get a new release out this weekend. Hope you enjoy it.