When I write a bug it becomes the core gameplay

While Zhang Qifeng continued to play "Heartbeat Dreamland" in depth, more negative news about this game appeared on the Internet.

It has to be said that "Heartbeat Dreamland" is really a big deal. Every time players feel that they have reached the limit of the game, the next new content can still refresh their cognition.

In addition to the many previous problems, players soon discovered that the application of fake-AI in this game has also reached a crazy level.

It should not be, because the best manufacturer in China for fake-AI technology is Anti-Heaven.

From "The Legend of the Dragon" to "The City of God Forsaken", Anti-Heaven's use of fake-AI has reached perfection, and it can even be said that it has become a part of the core gameplay of the game and an extremely powerful hidden mechanism in the game.

When I first heard that "Heartbeat Dreamland" also used fake-AI technology, many players were full of expectations for it.

After all, judging from the level shown by Anti-Heaven before, how exciting would it be to use this technology to make a love game?

The girls who have almost real emotions, and the players have a passionate love affair, this kind of thing is exciting just to think about it!

But after really playing it, I found that the expected touching love story did not appear at all, but a sci-fi style.

Although the girls in it are also well-behaved and cute, and they will chase after the girls, there are no particularly outstanding lines and plots. In general, it is still the normal level of other manufacturers using fake-AI to write plots, and there is nothing special.

In the love game, it is at most considered to have passed the passing line.

Although players continue to challenge horror content, they can unlock the realism of the girls to a certain extent, make them speak less sci-fi, and have some performances of losing favorability or jealousy, but to put it bluntly, it is still the normal level of love games, and it is not "unique".

What is even more frustrating is that as players continue to experience the game in depth, they have discovered another fatal problem of this fake-AI technology.

That is self-contradiction!

As players experience horror content more deeply, the horror levels will gradually upgrade.

For example, the Alvette that instructor Ding saw at the beginning was a faceless horror monster. As the player clears more levels and the triggered scenes become more terrifying, Alvette's appearance will become more terrifying.

At the beginning, she could barely be considered a humanoid creature, but soon, her body would have more and more changes, such as a huge snake head growing on her back, a bit like the legendary world serpent Jörmungandr, a three-headed hellhound Garm's head growing on her shoulders, and some monster features of the giant wolf Fenrir and the North Sea giant kraken...

In short, the more you go back, the more terrifying it is!

As the levels progress, Alvette will continue to say some lines, and at this time, an unsettling situation will appear. She will say the horror lines of chasing the player while saying the lines of love...

This is quite unsettling, not only very out of play, but also further exposes the shortcomings of fake-AI.

Obviously, when making this game, Ni Tian Tang did not use fake-AI as seriously as in previous games.

And the longer the game runs, the more often this kind of AI dialogue confusion will occur.

This is obviously a problem with the internal logic algorithm of fake-AI, and the programmers of Ni Tian Tang did not seriously write rules and do deep tuning.

Many players originally had some expectations: Although the NPC has mutated and is chasing me, when she said the love line, did the kindness in her heart prevail? Will approaching at this time trigger any hidden plot?

As a result, as soon as I turned around, I was eaten by the monster, and it tasted like crispy chicken.

Originally, the two lines were a good design. If the pain and struggle in the heart of the NPC could be added, the depth of the plot could be strengthened, and the player's sense of substitution could be further increased, and even some hidden plots could be expanded.

But the players tried for a long time before they found that none of these were there!

No matter what the NPC said, it did not affect the NPC's behavior at all, and it continued to chase the player.

This makes the players even more dissatisfied. It seems that we are just wishful thinking to imagine the high-end operation of Against Heaven?

There is nothing, right?

What is the difference between this and those scumbag game companies that just put fake-AI into the game and leave it to fate?

Of course, there are also a small number of "Against Heaven's filial sons" who are still stubborn, saying things like "There must be a deep meaning behind Against Heaven's doing this", "I am used to seeing that every game of Against Heaven is not in a big disadvantage when it comes out", "Wait for a reversal", "It doesn't matter, the bugs will work hard", etc., which have attracted ridicule from netizens.

…

"File error: 'characters/Sakura.chr', the file may be lost or damaged."

"Damn, here we go again!"

Zhang Qifeng pounded the desk again in anger.

He has seen this error prompt many times, or in other words, every player who has played the official version of "Tokimeki Dreamland" should have seen this prompt, but the keywords in it are different.

For example, what Teacher Ding saw was "characters/Alvet.chr", the English word is Alvet.

The word Zhang Qifeng saw was sakura, because the female character he chose was a Japanese girl in the game, with the classic name "Sakura".

But no matter what character he chose, this error message would inevitably appear.

"I'm really confused, what does this bug mean! How can there be such a bug!

"From the format point of view, isn't this a character file? ”

This bug is very simple, and it is basically 100% reproducible. That is, when the player encounters the suspected bug of "the heroine's face changing" several times before, if he wants to load the latest save file again to enter the game, an error will be reported.

The solution is also very simple, just read the previous save file.

So most players, including Instructor Ding, did not think too much about it. After all, although there are not many games with damaged files like this, there are still some. Although reading the previous file will waste a little time, it is still acceptable.

However, as a game editor, Zhang Qifeng still has some professional knowledge.

He keenly realized a problem, that is, this path looks a bit strange?

Generally speaking, the game's save files are basically stored in folders such as "data", and the word "characters" means character.

From the path in the prompt, it seems that the character file is lost, not the save file.

What's more, There is no number suffix like 123 on this path, which is not normal.

Because there are ten default saves in "Heartbeat Dreamland", five of which are automatic saves and five are manual saves.

If it is in other similar love games, ten save slots may not be enough, because players may need to use SL repeatedly to activate various endings and try multiple options.

But for "Heartbeat Dreamland", there is actually no need for so many save slots, because there is basically no such option of either this or that in the game. No matter how the player chooses, it will not cause any fatal consequences, so SL naturally has no place to use.

And then again, since there are ten saves in the game, there should be ten saves in the root directory of the game, such as save 0, save 1, and save 9.

If a certain save is damaged, it should report an error saying "save 1 is damaged", instead of reporting that the character is damaged, right?

"My scalp is itchy, I feel like I need to grow a brain. "

Zhang Qifeng scratched his head in annoyance, and couldn't figure out what was going on.

Did Nitian do it on purpose?

Forget it, this sentence has almost become a meme recently. No matter how disgusting the game of Nitian is, there will always be meme kids posting "Maybe Nitian did it on purpose", so much so that many people are posting this sentence now, and it can almost be included in the meme encyclopedia.

In the past, this sentence was used to praise the unexpectedness of the game of Nitian, but now it is used to mock the filial son of Nitian.

So even if many players have doubts about this game, they are drowned in scolding as soon as they raise them.

But Zhang Qifeng still thinks there is something strange here, because it is indeed different from regular games.

"Let me take a closer look. ”

Zhang Qifeng is a man of action. In fact, it is very simple to verify his guess: just find the root directory folder.

Take a look at what files are in the folder, where the save file is, and where the character file is. Although it may not answer this question, it can definitely eliminate some wrong options.

Thinking of this, Zhang Qifeng directly switched to the desktop, opened the root directory of the game, and searched all the way.

Soon, he really found the "characters" folder.

It's just that the files in this folder are not what he thought.

The English names are arranged neatly, there are Elliot, Alvette... In short, most of the characters in the game have a file here.

Except for Sakura who reported an error before.

And there is more than one "characters" folder. It has an upper folder, and from the structure of the upper folder, it is more like an archive file.

"In other words, this character folder exists in the archive folder.

"No wonder this file only affects one archive after the error."

Zhang Qifeng roughly confirmed his guess.

If the game really damages the character file, then the entire game will definitely crash and will not run, not just one archive.

After all, a large number of places in the game will call on the relevant resources of the character, and one move will affect the entire system.

Some small bugs in the game cause an insignificant file at the bottom to be damaged, which may cause the game to crash and never open again, and require the client to be repaired, not to mention something as important as a character file?

So this file structure is most likely done intentionally by the official.

The upper layer is the archive file, and the lower layer is the character file. When the character file in each archive file is damaged, it only affects this archive, not other archives.

So the question is, what is the point of doing this?

Generally, games integrate all kinds of data in the archive file, and players are not allowed to disassemble and access them at all. There is no need to make it a replaceable folder, and there is no need to single out the character data in the archive.

Even if this is done, won't the player still play the same game if they switch to the previous save file?

And the fact that the save file is damaged seems to have a certain degree of randomness, just like the randomness of the triggering of horror content.

It will definitely be triggered after playing for a long time, but is it five minutes, ten minutes or an hour? The internal rules of this thing have not been studied yet.

"Huh? Wait."

"This file is indeed gone.

"What if I copy a file from another save file and put it in?"

Zhang Qifeng stroked his chin and made such a guess.

In theory, there should be no essential difference between the sakura.chr in the two files.

Maybe the progress of love is different, maybe some data of fake-AI has changed, but these changes should not cause any particularly serious malicious bugs.

Even if a bug is triggered, it doesn't matter, because according to the data structure of this game, no matter how much you mess around, it will only destroy this save file, and other save files will not be affected.

He did it right away. Zhang Qifeng copied the sakura.chr file from another folder and pasted it into the latest automatic save file.

Then he returned to the game and read the archive.

As expected, the game loaded normally!

However, nothing particularly worth mentioning happened after loading. The game did not report an error or crash. After playing for a period of time, the horror plot may still be triggered, and the game may still cause file damage after the crash.

It's just that the specific time of file damage has a random shift.

It's like the system inexplicably discovered that the file was not deleted after a period of time, and then deleted it again.

But for the game experience, there is really no essential change.

"Hmm... Am I overthinking?"

Zhang Qifeng fell into deep thought again. Although his operation was successful, it did not produce the kind of effect that made him exclaim awesome, which obviously did not satisfy him.

"Hey, wait.

"If the character files in this archive can be copied and pasted at will, does that mean that all character files in the archive can be copied and pasted at will?

"You can even delete it yourself?"

It stands to reason that this operation is impossible in other games. The reason is very simple. The archive files of other games are basically impossible to edit. Even if you can copy the archive files through some special tools, it is difficult to adjust them accurately.

However, the unique underlying data structure of "Heartbeat Dream" provides players with a low-cost operation possibility.

No special tools or specific archive files are required. You can copy the characters in one archive to another archive by simply deleting or copying and pasting.

From the perspective of programming, this is a bit of a fart.

Why does Ni Tiantang do this?

Zhang Qifeng has some vague guesses, but they cannot be verified at present.