I bet I can guess what's in it!
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An email from a customer debugging issues with our support organization. ('dbc' here is a quick way to run a database command.)
RESULTS:
- dbc "select * from blah where blah and user_defined = 0;" >> /tmp/test.txt
Resulted in a empty text file. The file is attached.
...
- dbc "select * from blah where blah and user_defined = 0;" >> /tmp/test.txt
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You see, this isn't just any empty file. This one's special!
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@fennec said:
An email from a customer debugging issues with our support organization. ('dbc' here is a quick way to run a database command.)
RESULTS:
- dbc "select * from blah where blah and user_defined = 0;" >> /tmp/test.txt
Resulted in a empty text file. The file is attached.
...
Flashbacks to game testing, where the developers wouldn't accept "the screen turns black" in a bug report without a screenshot. They didn't seem to notice that I made the screenshot in Paint, though.
- dbc "select * from blah where blah and user_defined = 0;" >> /tmp/test.txt
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@blakeyrat said:
Flashbacks to game testing, where the developers wouldn't accept "the screen turns black" in a bug report without a screenshot. They didn't seem to notice that I made the screenshot in Paint, though.
Sidetrack: Wait - you mean there are games for which testing was actually conducted?
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This reminds me of when dhromed tried to give me his dick in a box.
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@too_many_usernames said:
@blakeyrat said:
Flashbacks to game testing, where the developers wouldn't accept "the screen turns black" in a bug report without a screenshot. They didn't seem to notice that I made the screenshot in Paint, though.
Sidetrack: Wait - you mean there are games for which testing was actually conducted?
Oh, definitely. I used to do some Xbox testing a few years back, before I managed to land a real job as a programmer. Oh, the WTF-filled stories I could tell about that, if it wasn't for the exceptionally strict NDA we had to sign.
Suffice it to say that if I ever had any reason to want to buy an Xbox before, I don't now.
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@too_many_usernames said:
Sidetrack: Wait - you mean there are games for which testing was actually conducted?
Yep: I can vouch for testing the Pro Pinball series. Damned excellent games, too. (Speaking as the guy who wrote the manuals for two of 'em.)
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@Cad Delworth said:
@too_many_usernames said:
Sidetrack: Wait - you mean there are games for which testing was actually conducted?
Yep: I can vouch for testing the Pro Pinball series. Damned excellent games, too. (Speaking as the guy who wrote the manuals for two of 'em.)
I got my name in the Gears of War credits. Kind of ironic, since I spent the vast majority of my testing time on Crackdown-- and didn't get my name in the credits. :(
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@blakeyrat said:
Flashbacks to game testing, where the developers wouldn't accept "the screen turns black" in a bug report without a screenshot. They didn't seem to notice that I made the screenshot in Paint, though.
Now watch their frustration as they can't find the game state information that should be encoded in the lowest bits of the RGB values of certain pixels in each screenshot, and try to figure out why that basic functionality wasn't working.
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@lolwtf said:
@blakeyrat said:
Flashbacks to game testing, where the developers wouldn't accept "the screen turns black" in a bug report without a screenshot. They didn't seem to notice that I made the screenshot in Paint, though.
Now watch their frustration as they can't find the game state information that should be encoded in the lowest bits of the RGB values of certain pixels in each screenshot, and try to figure out why that basic functionality wasn't working.I was going to make fun of that concept. But recently I learned that Champions Online actually stores character appearance/costume information encoded in a .jpg. If you view the jpg, all you see is a preview image of the character, but Champions can read the same file and pull out all the costume bits out of it.
Now... *why* they do this, that I can't answer. (My guess: really bored programmer who works with either meta-data or steganography code in his spare time.)
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@blakeyrat said:
@lolwtf said:
@blakeyrat said:
Flashbacks to game testing, where the developers wouldn't accept "the screen turns black" in a bug report without a screenshot. They didn't seem to notice that I made the screenshot in Paint, though.
Now watch their frustration as they can't find the game state information that should be encoded in the lowest bits of the RGB values of certain pixels in each screenshot, and try to figure out why that basic functionality wasn't working.I was going to make fun of that concept. But recently I learned that Champions Online actually stores character appearance/costume information encoded in a .jpg. If you view the jpg, all you see is a preview image of the character, but Champions can read the same file and pull out all the costume bits out of it.
Now... *why* they do this, that I can't answer. (My guess: really bored programmer who works with either meta-data or steganography code in his spare time.)
Spore stores data in image files too.
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Now question is whether they use some weird steganography-style in-pixel encoding or not. You can trivially attach (not HIDE) data in a jpg by appending it, I don't remember, probably at far end after the JPG EOF marker, but might actually have to be before it; the header stores image dimensions, so nothing past the size ain't rendered as graphics. PNGs actually have a record-oriented structure, and anyone can add a custom field to it.
Speaking of, I love how Adobe's apps store kilobytes of metadata in PNGs, even exported via save for web. In cases of small nav elements, the metadata can be larger than image itself. Fortunately, XnView has "Erase Metadata" on its batch processing action list.
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@bannedfromcoding said:
I love how Adobe's apps store kilobytes of metadata in PNGs, even exported via save for web.
"kilobytes"? Not Photoshop CS3, in any case.
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@blakeyrat said:
I was going to make fun of that concept. But recently I learned that Champions Online actually stores character appearance/costume information encoded in a .jpg. If you view the jpg, all you see is a preview image of the character, but Champions can read the same file and pull out all the costume bits out of it.
Is this data encoded in the pixel values or simply as standard JPEG metadata?
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@OzPeter said:
@blakeyrat said:
I was going to make fun of that concept. But recently I learned that Champions Online actually stores character appearance/costume information encoded in a .jpg. If you view the jpg, all you see is a preview image of the character, but Champions can read the same file and pull out all the costume bits out of it.
Is this data encoded in the pixel values or simply as standard JPEG metadata?The game isn't good enough to be worth re-installing to check.
