Just for nostalgia, I'd like to shake the hands of the programmer/team who added the code allowing cheatcodes.
God mode for example, that allows to fly through the map, is the OG of fast travel.
Nowadays computers are so powerful you can have full blown editor doing essentially all the cheat codes, but back in the day, you'd want to be testing the construction of X, something you don't have money for, so you'd press a few keys to change hex values and you'd have (maxvalue - current cash) instantly, so you could test more effectively.
Cheat codes would be hidden enough that regular players wouldn't find them but not impossible that players could use them.
I think the logic is, you've paid for the game, you should be able to access all the content.
Nowadays, since games are such big business, it's all too serious.
It was a TSR (terminate and stay resident, esentially a background process) that you'd load before firing up the game.
Once in the game, at any time you could press a hot key (F12, I think) and it would freeze the game and open a TUI with a hex editor where you could search for values (money, number of lives, whatever else you could think of), change them and go back to the game.
Fun days!
That kind of fiddling was such a big part of my developing an interest in computers and building a solid understanding of how all the magic works internally, it's a bit of a shame that kids nowadays can't really jump into fiddling around like that since the devices they'd play games on are much better locked down (or on PC, require you to already know what you're doing to be able to snoop around in another program's memory).
But for stuff where exact matching wasn't practical like say a more or less continous health-bar, you could instead filter by searching for values that decreased / increased / didn't change.
Of course you would also have to guess at the data type but there weren't that many likely choices.
Either that, or you'd just go about trying one by one until you found it, then tried to figure out a pattern of what was around it and make notes on a paper for next time.
These days multiplayer is always roped into it like with GTA V just so they can milk those sweet microtransactions.
Interesting enough, you can often find the equivalent of cheat codes in the accessibility settings. Celeste is a good example.
Another reason for cheat codes: you can give them to reviewers, so they can look at all the content, without having to beat the game the normal, slow way.
- shoot. loot.
- fast travel, dump loot, fast travel return.
- shoot. loot.
...
Also, BL guns have lots of hidden parameters which may or may not correspond to (or be enhanced by) your build. Playing by green arrows alone is pretty… casual.
I like borderlands but good god is it a slog for me to play because I have to pick up ALL the loot and kill ALL the things and do ALL the side quests so now I'm 40 hours in on my first play through and haven't even beaten the game yet while all the normal people are talking about the new mechanics in super ultra extra hardcore vault hunter mode newgame++++
I downloaded a mod for Fallout 4 to make most things weightless so I could actually play the game instead of picking up every single 10mm round when I don't even use pistols.
> The collision in a game is usually different from the visual polygons. This is because collision detection is relatively slow. A building with 10,000 visual polygons may have only 1,000 collision polygons. As a consequence, the map may have holes that you cannot see. This is what's going on when you fall through the map.
> This makes it very hard for the testers to test the collision on the map. During gta4, the testers found it particularly hard as characters could fall through the map depending on their animations and there was no way they could touch every bit on the map.
> This is why they asked for a rag doll gun. Alexander Roger created a special gun that instead of bullets would fire rag doll characters. The testers could go round the map and fire rag dolls at every building and hill side. --https://insiderockstarnorth.blogspot.com/2023/11/bugs-bugs-b...
Only later did I realize that stuff like model viewer, events viewer, stage select, etc. was all stuff developed for/by the QA team.