Welcome to MSDN Blogs Sign in | Join | Help

Do not underestimate the power of the game Deer Hunter

During the run-up to Windows XP Service Pack 2 Beta in December of last year, there was a list of five bugs that the release management team decided were so critical that they were going to slip the beta until those bugs got fixed.

The third bug on the list: Deer Hunter 4 won't run.

Deer Hunter has the power to stop a beta.

Published Friday, June 04, 2004 7:01 AM by oldnewthing
Filed under:

Comments

# re: Do not underestimate the power of the game Deer Hunter

Friday, June 04, 2004 7:10 AM by asdf
Don't keep me in suspense. Why didn't deer hunter run?

# re: Do not underestimate the power of the game Deer Hunter

Friday, June 04, 2004 7:18 AM by Raymond Chen
Its copy protection was crashing.

# re: Do not underestimate the power of the game Deer Hunter

Friday, June 04, 2004 7:27 AM by learner
*silence* do not underestimate copy protection too I gather..

# alcy.net » Deer Hunter has the power…

Friday, June 04, 2004 10:33 AM by TrackBack
alcy.net » Deer Hunter has the power…

# re: Do not underestimate the power of the game Deer Hunter

Friday, June 04, 2004 7:57 AM by Brian
From similar posts in the past, I assume that the copy protection was relying on some undocumented "feature" of previous Windows versions. Is this right, or was it a legitimate bug in XP sp2?

# re: Do not underestimate the power of the game Deer Hunter

Friday, June 04, 2004 8:04 AM by Raymond Chen
I don't know; I didn't work on this bug. I just saw it on a list. My guess is that the copy protection was relying on intentionally illegal operations failing in a very precise way. Whether they were right to rely on that I do not know.

# re: Do not underestimate the power of the game Deer Hunter

Friday, June 04, 2004 8:12 AM by Luke Reeves
You know, I'm actually not surprised in the least.

# Do not underestimate the power of the game Deer Hunter

Friday, June 04, 2004 11:31 AM by Groovy Links
"Deer Hunter has the power to stop a beta."...

# re: Do not underestimate the power of the game Deer Hunter

Friday, June 04, 2004 8:35 AM by Erbo
You know there's a very obvious reason why breaking Deer Hunter is a showstopper bug. Think about the kind of people that would play a game like Deer Hunter. Think about the likelihood that said people would have (a) a short temper, and (b) access to REAL firearms. I leave the rest as an exercise for the reader. :-)

# re: Do not underestimate the power of the game Deer Hunter

Friday, June 04, 2004 10:00 AM by B.Y.
Haha, you know what they say: a man with a gun is a citizen, a man without a gun is a subject. It applies to computer game players too.

# re: Do not underestimate the power of the game Deer Hunter

Friday, June 04, 2004 10:53 AM by Marc Wallace
I'm not particularly surprised by this. It's not too much different from some of the other backwards compatibility bits and pieces that were saved over the years.

I *am* surprised that anyone would play Deer Hunter. I saw the first one. It was... well, let's be polite and say "not good".

# re: Do not underestimate the power of the game Deer Hunter

Friday, June 04, 2004 11:18 AM by K Bashaw
Video games like Deer Hunter and Who Wants To Be a Millionaire sell millions to the masses. Quite a huge profit margin seeing as those games don't have as much money put into them, especially compared to games like Halo and Diablo 2. You can make lots of money making simple, easy games your neighbors want to play.

# re: Do not underestimate the power of the game Deer Hunter

Friday, June 04, 2004 2:30 PM by Keith Moore [exmsft]
Erbo is probably right. I suspect someone on the XP SP2 team received "fan mail" from J*hn...

# re: Do not underestimate the power of the game Deer Hunter

Friday, June 04, 2004 8:26 PM by downunder
But data corruption and deletion bugs reported early in Windows Media Player 9's beta were never fixed for final release. (I guess that development team were busy playing Deer Hunter?)

# Software Karma

Saturday, June 05, 2004 3:47 AM by Ed
In my experience there's some kind of universal karma field for software bugs. One implication is that as soon as a bug is discovered in one remote corner of the world, within hours it will occur everywhere, sort of like the software version of the hundredth money theorem. I've discovered problems during development that have been in the code for years, yet before I have a chance to communicate them to anyone, the phone is ringing because someone on the other side of the world is running into that very problem.

The second implication is that if you decide to release with some rare, unreproducible bug, you can't assume that it will never occur in real life. It will usually turn out that some combination of factors makes it happen much more frequently in the real world outside of the lab.

As a result, when deciding on release criteria, you need to consider not just the immediate implications of the bug, but what related problems there could be. Perhaps Deer Hunter 4 by itself is not a big deal, but how many others of the tens of thousands of PC games might have similar problems?

# re: Do not underestimate the power of the game Deer Hunter

Saturday, June 05, 2004 6:45 AM by Tim Smith
If Deer Hunter 4 used a common copy protection system such as SecuRom, then it is in Microsoft's best interest to fix the problem. A problem with SecuRom would cause a whole series of games not to run on XP/SP2. Deer Hunter 4 just might have been the game that triggered the bug report.

Then again, I could just be pulling all of this out of my butt.

# Never underestimate the power of Deer Hunter 4

Saturday, June 05, 2004 12:11 PM by Lee Packham's Corner

# re: Do not underestimate the power of the game Deer Hunter

Sunday, June 06, 2004 5:04 PM by Justin Steventon
Tim is quite right, you want to at the very least understand every regression of this class.

Copy protection mechanisms are also tricky, because they are constantly changing so that someone can't write a one-hack-for-all type fix. Since test lists are limited, even a single broken application is likely to mean that dozens more are broken.

However, Raymond's point about Deer Hunter being important is well taken. For XP, we had to make sure every 'Hunter' game was working. And there are lots of them (Shark Hunter, Turkey Hunter, ...)

# What is it exactly that you *do* here?

Sunday, June 06, 2004 10:28 PM by KC on Exchange and Outlook

# re: Do not underestimate the power of the game Deer Hunter

Monday, June 07, 2004 4:13 AM by Edward
Theres quite a few copy protection schemes that only work if the user is an Administrator, even if the game itself would work under a Limited user account, something to do with wanting to have RAW access to the CDRom itself. Surely it's not a good idea to have to be an administrator just to play a computer game. I'd rather they forgot about the protection and just made sure the game worked under a limited account.

I suppose the alternative is for the game to install a service or driver with a higher privilege level that lets it communicate with the CDRom, but I'm not sure I like that idea much either.

# re: Do not underestimate the power of the game Deer Hunter

Monday, June 07, 2004 5:03 AM by Jan Söderback
It amazes me that publisher are still using these horrible slow and crashy copy protection schemes. It's gotten to the point that I wont buy a game if I can't find a crack to disable the protection program.

# re: Do not underestimate the power of the game Deer Hunter

Monday, June 07, 2004 6:10 AM by Mat Hall
And of course "warez" versions of the game have no protection anyway, so (like product activation and other horrors) the only people who are inconvenienced are those that own legitimate versions. And even worse, some games now won't run if they detect CD emulation software (Daemon Tools, Alcohol, etc.). I go to a lot of LAN parties, and rather than run the risk of losing or damaging CDs I run them from MDS images, which apparently means I'm a pirate.

# re: Do not underestimate the power of the game Deer Hunter

Monday, June 07, 2004 6:30 AM by Tim Smith
Copy protection is a fact of life if you do business in Europe. Retailers will purchase substantially more copies of a game when they have copy protection. Why? I really don't know.

We could get rid of a whole series of bug reports if publishers didn't require us to use copy protection.

# re: Do not underestimate the power of the game Deer Hunter

Monday, June 07, 2004 8:22 AM by Scott
"the only people who are inconvenienced are those that own legitimate versions." It does prevent simple friend-copying, where one copy of a CD gets shared among a group of physical people.

# re: Do not underestimate the power of the game Deer Hunter

Monday, June 07, 2004 11:50 AM by mat
"the only people who are inconvenienced are those that own legitimate versions." It does prevent simple friend-copying, where one copy of a CD gets shared among a group of physical people.

Ya, and people burn CD's. So what? Sneakernet is not worth destroying, given the goodwill it trashes.

I think it would be interesting to put out a game that had an activation feature that says you can install up to 3 times a month legally. So you give it to two buddies... so what? I bet oodles of peeps would "go in" and buy it. The best games are often the cheapest.

# re: Do not underestimate the power of the game Deer Hunter

Monday, June 07, 2004 12:07 PM by Mike Hearn
Copy protection causes major pain for us in Wine (Windows-emulation-on-Linux) land. Systems like SafeDisc enjoy making assumptions about the exact place a process that is created suspended will actually be suspended at, as well as thinks like the timing profiles of CD drive seeks. They also have a tendency to load drivers to check for debuggers (we load them in userspace and use instruction emulation to deal with that).

# re: Do not underestimate the power of the game Deer Hunter

Monday, June 07, 2004 3:48 PM by gregs
""the only people who are inconvenienced are those that own legitimate versions." It does prevent simple friend-copying, where one copy of a CD gets shared among a group of physical people"

The copy protection on UT2003 didn't let you install it from a DVD-ROM (this is the EU version). I had to install it over the network from a machine with a CD writer:(

# re: Do not underestimate the power of the game Deer Hunter

Tuesday, June 08, 2004 12:18 AM by Peter Evans
Out of morbid curiosity Raymond, what were the other four bugs on the list? Ummm, that is if you care/can disclose. Were they all as intriguing as custom copy protection schemes?

Good to see that contemporary mass market software impact is still a show stopper.
"----- Hunter X products weigh heavily upon Microsoft's Windows XP SP2 Beta" Can't wait for the blog about "Madden XXXX" holding up a RC. :)

# re: Do not underestimate the power of the game Deer Hunter

Tuesday, June 08, 2004 12:19 AM by Raymond Chen
Honestly, I forget. The others were rather boring.

# Tim Danner » Do not underestimate the power of the game Deer Hunter

Saturday, June 12, 2004 10:24 AM by TrackBack
Tim Danner » Do not underestimate the power of the game Deer Hunter

# re: Do not underestimate the power of the game Deer Hunter

Monday, June 21, 2004 10:29 AM by Raymond Chen
Commenting on this article has been closed.

# What is it exactly that you *do* here?

Wednesday, July 14, 2004 4:04 PM by KC on Exchange and Outlook

# re: Sometimes the bug isn't apparent until late in the game

Friday, September 10, 2004 12:35 PM by The Old New Thing

# re: Sometimes the bug isn't apparent until late in the game

Friday, September 10, 2004 12:36 PM by The Old New Thing

#

Wednesday, October 06, 2004 1:58 PM by joannejacobs.net
As the smell of smoke has permeated my appartment as a result of the fire on Mount Coot-tha just down the road, I can't sleep. As a result, I have elected to use my time more efficiently and have responded to some emails and finally got a chance to do some reading. Thanks to Westy for a series of links that have proved most informative. Firstly, the research conducted on internet deprivation was fascinating for its identification of the reliance many now place on these technologies. *looks at self* Hmm. A few years back I might have felt a tad reliant on internet connectivity. Lately though I think I could well go without it for a fortnight. I'd just hate to come back to my email!!! And this link to a discussion of bug fixing for Microsoft operating systems explains just how hard it is to find all the various nuances of program functionality in updating system activities. At least it's good to know there are those out there who are dedicated enough to gaming to fix some problems! :) And finally this link to...
New Comments to this post are disabled
 
Page view tracker