I wrote MacTetris[1] when I was in high school. This made the computer lab a whole lot more popular during free periods than it had been previously.
Two interesting bugs that I recall:
* Mathematically rotating pieces around an axis was a terrible idea, but it produced some entertaining artifacts (and made placement much harder!). I replaced the math by precomputed rotation maps for each piece, which was much better. My first pass at the maps introduced a displacement bug, so you could spin the pieces counterclockwise and they would walk in the negative X direction.
* I got an angry bug report in the lunch room from a kid who had no reason to know my name. He was having a really great game, and then his score started decreasing with every piece. He felt like his record high score had been stolen from him, and he was upset! I asked "what was your score??". He said "I don't know, but by the time I noticed, it was over 30,000 but it was going DOWN!". Aha..[2] :)
[1] I'm sure the statute of limitations has expired on my appropriation of copyrights and trademarks.
[2] Back in the day, "int" meant "signed 16-bit integer", which is not the proper data type for a score counter.
And it brings back a fun memory:
I wrote MacTetris[1] when I was in high school. This made the computer lab a whole lot more popular during free periods than it had been previously.
Two interesting bugs that I recall:
* Mathematically rotating pieces around an axis was a terrible idea, but it produced some entertaining artifacts (and made placement much harder!). I replaced the math by precomputed rotation maps for each piece, which was much better. My first pass at the maps introduced a displacement bug, so you could spin the pieces counterclockwise and they would walk in the negative X direction.
* I got an angry bug report in the lunch room from a kid who had no reason to know my name. He was having a really great game, and then his score started decreasing with every piece. He felt like his record high score had been stolen from him, and he was upset! I asked "what was your score??". He said "I don't know, but by the time I noticed, it was over 30,000 but it was going DOWN!". Aha..[2] :)
[1] I'm sure the statute of limitations has expired on my appropriation of copyrights and trademarks.
[2] Back in the day, "int" meant "signed 16-bit integer", which is not the proper data type for a score counter.