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Comment by pedropaulovc | Hacker News Reader

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pedropaulovc·

The bug lore came from Raymond Chen's blog post [1]

[1] Why was Pinball removed from Windows Vista? https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20121218-00/?p=58...

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This comment made me chuckle and also a bit sad:

> [...] we simply couldn’t figure out why the collision detector was not working. Heck, we couldn’t even find the collision detector!

And the continuation is:

"We had several million lines of code still to port, so we couldn’t afford to spend days studying the code trying to figure out what obscure floating point rounding error was causing collision detection to fail."

I'd say Ray is right, not lacking the skill, but lacking the time

To be clear I was sad about the lack of comments in the original code. It shouldn't be that hard to find where the collision detection occurs.

Ray wasn't about only to find the collision, but porting or not the game, meaning going through entire uncommented code of the game. And he said they made the executive decision not to port it.

Raymond's comment about not being able to find the collision code is a bit absurd. I can't recall if Danny or I named the top-level collision detection function, but it was just named 'pb_collide'.

It's nice to be able to point to this line: https://github.com/k4zmu2a/SpaceCadetPinball/blob/5947727f80...

And, while it is true that the code is sparsely commented, the geometry code that computes ray intersections is commented.

To be fair it's a huge undertaking to port any code of that size to 64 bits, be it fully commented or not. He probably remembers it vaguely and it might be a different function they had problems finding the exact location in the source code.

I'm curious, didn't they just call you or Danny (I believe that's Danny Thorpe, who is currently working for Microsoft) for assistance?

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