Rabbit’s hole

All kinds of bugs

While playing a little Heroes 5 last night and battling a generously cheating computer oponent I encountered a very frustrating bug.

Before I explain it, here’s the deal with Heroes - in case you aren’t really interested in computer games or programming, you can skip the entire post - it is a fantasy turn based strategy - you have a few heroes (duh!) and try to conquer some land. The battles are in a chess like manner - on a grid you can use the creatures your hero calls an army and fight the opposing hero’s army.

The bug was a very frustrating and at the same time very weird - I had almost won an incredible 40 minutes battle involving my best army - and as a final desperation act the computer casts “Revive” on one of his creatures - whose remains happen to be under one of my creatures ! And here it goes weird - the spell DID work but my creature wasn’t touched. Instead, his newly revived minion is now COMPLETELY invisible ! I can’t see it, my units can’t see it, practicly nobody can attack it but altough ALL the computer’s units are distroyed (along with 90 procent of mine) the battle still goes on. This means the computer can still attack my remaining forces (a 1K skeleton) and slowly distroy it.

At this point I will like to thank the producers of the game - no matter how much I have searched I couldn’t find a way to end a fight defending a castle ! So now I’m stuck with either AltCtrlDeleting it and losing all my progress from my last save (quite a few turns ago) or by waiting and witnessing the agonizing death of my hero and consequitely losing the game.

After another ten gruelling minutes (and 300 skeletons fewer) I get THE idea - what if I would put my unit next to the spot his invisible wonder was resurected ? Well, it works - now the computer AND an invisible unit attack my feeble army ! However the beauty of retaliation shows to brighten my day - after a few turns his unit is dead and I finally win the game after an entire hour spent defending a castle !

Besides being annoyed, I still don’t really understand how they coded the main loop - even my automatic driven units couldn’t detect the little aberation, but it still functioned correctly - it attacked, it had a correct number of hit points and it died

And on the subject of bugs - I found Saturday the first ethernet bug - it had crowled in a switch port and died lonely and miserable while trying to go online.