DOOM Game Engine Bug Confirmed After 2.5 Years of Continuous Runtime
By
minki_the_avali
Looks the part, but the middle's still raw. Chew with caution.
Summary
A software enthusiast conducted a 2.5-year real-world experiment to test a bug in the original DOOM game engine where a demo tracking variable would increment indefinitely. The variable was compared with its previous value and would eventually overflow, causing the game to crash. The experiment confirmed that this overflow condition does occur after extended runtime, validating the theoretical bug in actual hardware conditions.
Key quotes
· 4 pulledTwo and a half years ago, I started my now longest real-world software experiment
The issue here being, each incrementation would cause the variable to slowly get closer to an overflow
realistically this would never happen in a normal scenario, although it got me curious on just how long it would take until the game would crash due to this
I did a few calculations
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