The worst part: Based on what I remember and what I could find about it, the calculator did actually function correctly in all regional versions of Diamond, Pearl and Platinum.
@@bigbadgammagnome Or in the case of tons of titles now, never gets fixed because they can't be bothered because they made their money and the game was 'good' enough that the whales will just buy the next one.
@@bigbadgammagnome I think for me, it’s about priority. I don’t care about an exploit like Backwards Long Jump in Mario 64, because the game is complete as a package with or without that. But BDSP in its vanilla form doesn’t have proper music. It’s missing important parts of the complete package. That’s where it’s an issue. The big issue is really that a day will come when the servers offering the patches will go down. And thus some games will live incomplete in their original form. It’s short sighted.
I know expensive software that has problems from this very problem class and the bugs remain for over a decade. Note the plural. The most stupid thing is, that the software "sometimes" uses comma and "sometimes" dot as canonical decimal separator and "sometimes" it accepts both and autoconvertes.
In particular, if the original source was written in C, localization was a feature that was likely either unused and/or not implemented in the standard C library or DS system code (neither has facilities for decimal floating point numbers either), so code similar to this never came even close to assuming to see decimal commas.
This is why I feel so stupid as a programmer sometimes. Not because my code doesnt work, its never a big bug that destroys it, its always something dumb like miss parsing a decimal symbol
I'm just a minecraft datapack maker and I SWEAR commas are 94% of the reason why my stuff fails (with 3% being "it's not supported on your version, goober, you were using the latest release's docs and asked the game about a non-existent function") At this point I've gone past feeling stupid and I swear the commas are my archnemesis.
My phone language is in French which uses the comma as a decimal instead of period, and I have ran into some weird issues on apps and websites that expect a period but the phone forces a comma. Makes me wonder how many other systems only function within the culture they were designed in
@@ambozz3726 French Canadian is wierd. We use commas for decimals, but it's definitely not everyone who does so. But technically, it should be commas, so we should have that issue.
English in Canada use periods or full stops as decimal points. And unlike Americans we don't use commas to denote new scales of numbers. Like, "1 000 000" is written without commas or any marks
@@velvetbutterfly Though that does depend on whos doing the writing. Officially, we use commas. Unofficially, we are way to lazy to actual write them unless numbers get huge.
As a programmer I am pretty confident 95+% of ict systems only work in their designed locale. So many things can go wrong, but mainly: - wrong translation. translation whose text does not fit in the designed space - number formatting - currency conversion - imperial/metric units - and most importantly timezones
Meanwhile, I have finally learned of the term "nerd sniping" and my god if this is not dangerous af for someone like me. I'm gonna have to be careful from now on
Isnt "nerd sniping" the same as "starting an interesting conversation"? Like whats the issue here, that if you start an interesting conversation with someone unaware while theyre standing in the middle of a road they might get hit by a car? lol
@@jek__ No, nerd sniping is coming across a problem or question so interesting that you're compelled to suddenly stop what you're doing and drop everything to work on it--potentially to your detriment. I guess a conversation could nerd snipe you, but that hook could come from anywhere really. In the xkcd comic it comes from (you can pause when he brings up nerd sniping), the guy in the hat is holding up a sign that has a simple-looking (but actually very complicated) electrical problem on it, and the physicist crossing the road gets so distracted trying to solve it that they stop and get hit by a truck.
Back when I worked in QA, we would be given a stack of different region carts/a spindle of different region discs. These days, I figure you just flip back and forth through the regions on the Switch itself. Now, most people who QA aren't as anal as I or some of the others who worked with me were. We would sit there and prod something for hours trying to see if it could bend or crack. A tiny little calculator app that doesn't really matter? You'd think even the most dedicated QA tester wouldn't mess with it. ...but if you were in the game long enough, you'd know this was a common issue between regions due to the decimal point difference. The first thing you'd check wouldn't be '2+2? 4? Alright, it works.' No, it would be popping in that EU-GER cart then dividing something. Now, one thing I keep seeing people repeating is 'how didn't anyone at ILCA catch this?' The truth is, they probably did. Then the dev team labeled that shit as having least priority and never fixed it before shipping. Every game I worked on had major problems labeled as none issues and ignored until it bit them in the ass. The dev management treated us QA as the enemy almost. I straight up got told to my face 'Stop trying to ruin MY game!" by multiple dipshit managers over the years. And when you look through the comments here, it's no wonder QA testers don't last long. Dudes like me who worked QA over a decade were mostly psychos who hated ourselves enough to sit through getting shit on by the dev team, getting shit on by fans, getting shit on by reviewers, and not even being paid or credited like we worked on the game. Oh, and guess what? When layoffs came by, it was QA that was first to go a lot of the time. If you managed to survive your first game launch, you were likely to be let go at the end of it anyway cause you're disposable and some bright-eyed kid will gladly get paid worse than you to do your job and two other people's. Cause working in games is your dream, isn't it? You should feel lucky to do it.
At my company we've recently slipped into an odd situation involving QA. The devs and QA/QC work together just fine (oddly enough). This time it's release management saying that if we schedule a hotfix window after a new update (for any one of our twenty to thirty big software packages) that's a defeatist attitude. In truth QA isn't magic and our software vendors simply don't have the manpower to work out all the bugs the testers and users will find before a release. Sometimes the issues are minor - "if we do things from this menu the application freezes for a minute but we can do it from the other menu and it goes just fine" - other times they're mayor - "whenever we process a customer onboarding form database errors happen". To see devs, operations, and QA/QC team up against release management is a sight to behold.
I don’t even work in game dev but I work on an understaffed team with many high priority bugs, and I can confirm that if we have a user report a bug like this we would mark it as low priority and probably never get around to fixing it.
Ah yes, locale dependent number parsing issues strike again. You'd be surprised how common this is. A year or so ago I reported a bug to Apple causing some UI elements to go missing on macOS with the framework we were using - the culprit was that any SVG image containing a decimal point would fail to parse in locales that use commas, because whoever wrote the parser for those in the OS forgot to specify the locale when parsing the numbers in the file.
I'm not sure whether to be impressed or disgusted that a coding program sold for less than 20 dollars can automatically detect and warn about an issue that evaded the coder, UI dev, and beta tester(s) (though those were probably 0, or 1 for JP and 1 for EN only). Like, that borders on impressive just how overlooked it was.
Maybe only the EN and JP testers were the only one who tested the calculators, the rest may have decided "Oh! A calculator *1+1*. Well, it works! Time to never use this again, not that it matters! I trust that GameFreak (Edit: ILCA developed this rather than GameFreak, my bad) can build a basic calculator."
omg I always say that BDSP always looks like it is "baby's first unity project" but holy moly it's actually true, it baffles me how they couldn't go for the Let's go engine, if that game was made to the same level of care as the lets go games it would be so incredibly memorable.
@@snintendog How did they even end up using a comma as a decimal point anyways? I mean it's literally called a decimal POINT. Commas are blatantly not points. That's just as stupid as us Americans sticking adamantly to our imperial measurements.
@@AliceErishech Surprise: its not called decimal point in german, but literally just comma. Its annoying that we dont have a unified system - But your reasoning isnt good lmao
@@AliceErishech Imperial Measurements are slowly falling away in the US in a lot of engineering and architecture so it's not as stubborn as you think. But as for the comma crap all I can see is the Need to be different all programing follow the UK Us Asian math system and it's literally 4th world countries that are doing this so why are we capitulating to them? (4th world country a country that Willingly gimps itself.)
@@mariocamspam72 Speaking of access violations, didn't the original Crash Bandicoot override system memory? The past was, as the kids say, a whack place.
@Lind Morn Gamefreak didn't even make this game, it was outsourced to a different company... Though honestly I wouldn't blame the devs for failing to catch the bug - the fact that the decimal point can be something other than a dot is not exactly a well-known fact outside of the countries that do use a comma, and I'm pretty sure any CS101 version of such a program would have far worse bugs (especially around floats) than this
Look, no, this is the easiest project possible stop defending it. If there were bugs or would’ve been in implementing it into the poketech or the actual UI not it’s functionality. If someone cannot code a calculator’s functionality then go back to school cause you learn that in coding camp from middle school, this is just much more variable management, it’s also in C# one of the easier languages to use. I’ll nerd out a little as a cs grad. So for something like this program you don’t even need to pay $20 for a program, there are many packages and apis that will do it for you for free. Even if you don’t want to use those, since there are only 2 different types of numbering systems , and . You can write 2 methods let’s call printdot and printcomma, do all the original math normally, pass the answer into those methods depending on your region selected, and reconfigure the , into .. Now a issue that people might say is oh what if put the number in using . easy, write a third method called readdot and send it into the normal calc. The bigger thing people will bring up is, “they don’t have the time” no, they do, writing these 3, no 2 methods will take maybe 30 minutes at most, basically if they hired an extra highschool intern. So yeah, no excuses
@Lind Morn The Pokemon Company (The company that actually owns the rights to Pokemon) is owned 50% by Nintendo and 50% by GameFreak. They have access to more then enough money to actually make a good game if they wanted to.
@@maverillion4610 my brother in christ, this bug could be easily resolved if they actually had time to test the game and every single thing in it, which take more than 30 minutes
Knew as soon as you mentioned "region" that it'd be a locale issue with period/comma. Every newbie programmer's nightmare, surprised to see such an issue in such a highly regarded franchise though, I guess an extremely small portion of their budget is going to developers lol
I cannot imagine the thought process behind this code. Why didn't they just turn the number into a string to send to sendnumimage? It would've been simpler, faster, and less buggy. This was either programmed by somebody who didn't know how to iterate over a string, or is some weird hold over from the GBA.
@@HenryLoenwind then just render 10 digits starting from the left side if the string is longer than 10 digits, and check if the number's value is too high to display. Then write some code to remove the 0s at the end if there's a decimal point. Problem solved
I imagine that there was no thought process behind this code; not only should the developer not have used the default culture, they should not have used the default format either, since they already knew how many digits they wanted. And they definitely should not have required so many conversions just for one number display routine.
I thank you for this video. I use the exact same approach since february to do various unity reverse engineering projects and data mining. And I didn't know that I could also parse and use the header file in ghidra. This would have made so many things so much easier. Until now, I had to manually rename function parameters and figure out when a field of the current class instance was referenced. Great content, keep it up, and leave some of those information in the videos to maybe help others that stumble over your content. Have a great day :)
OK, I’m at 9:17 currently and I’m *betting* this has something to do with the fact that German uses the comma (,) as the decimal separator. Some locale-dependent parsing or formatting function is getting called and it’s not outputting what the rest of the code expects. EDIT: I was right, but wow, I’m surprised this code doesn’t crash
I am very happy TH-cam recommended this to me, this is a great video! Learning about how games can be reversed engineered almost makes me want to try it, but I'm terrible at reading code so I'll stick to dumping games and getting their music files instead.
Funny to see pros making a similar mistake to what I did before! I had to replace "ToString();" with "ToString(System.Globalization.CultureInfo.InvariantCulture);" in some of my code to make the commas/dots not change. Lucky that I was using two computers with different locales, otherwise I would have missed the bug.
I'm more impressed that this thing still gives the right answer sometimes. Aside from the locale thing it looks like they treated C# like assembly. Impressive how much you can overcomplicate a calculator.
Changing the operator mid calculation is the same way a lot of built in calculator apps work. You could reasonably call that a feature rather than a bug.
It's incredible that I know nothing about game dev, have never used unity, and haven't looked at C++ code in five years and I knew the second you mentioned the problem was with certain regions that it was comma-related. Such a remarkably obvious oversight and the fact that nobody ever thought about it prior to release is jarring.
Within the first minute, I knew exactly what happened. It actually happened to me in a mod from Vampire The Masquerade Redemption. The mod included a launcher that let you set some percentages of gameplay elements and they completely broke in my spanish PC. So the aesop is: pay attention to the goddamn locale when you're coding an app that is meant to be globally distributed.
This reminds me that a game dev youtuber I follow had a similar problem. On one cutscene, the characters would teleport to coordinate "1.000", which worked well on some PC's, but caused the player to end out of bounds on other cases. It was due to the country you had your PC set on. Very interesting, honestly. This video goes more in depth, which is something I, as a junior programmer, find very nice.
Wow, great video. When I watched Matt's original video, I thought the problem is probably somehow related to the calculator parsing the locale dependent string representation of the number and then searching for a "." character specifically to split the number into an integer and decimal part. But I had no idea why it would do that instead of just displaying the string directly and after watching your video I still have no idea :D
I really enjoyed this video and dive into some of the broken code in the Pokémon games! There’s plenty of it & I’d love to see more some day! Thank you for making this video :D Keep up the astounding work!
They probably added a check if the integer part is longer than 10 digits. And as 7/3 is repeating, and they count everything as "the integer part", it most certainly is longer than 10 by an infinite number of digits.
@@jhgvvetyjj6589 You don't actually need to fit it into memory. Calculating the digits and counting them would be enough, and would keep the machine busy until the end of the universe. There's enough RAM to store a really huge number. However, for knowing that an infinite string of digits is longer than 10 digits, stopping after the 11th digit is quite sufficient.
@@HenryLoenwind I don't think there even is that kind of abstraction in the language, it's most likely doing double precision so the default conversion to string would be up to 17 significant digits at most.
Reminds me of a bugreport I saw a couple years back, where in the minecraft mod Astral Sorcery, a turkish player either got a crash or was missing an item. The culprit was that the upper/lowercase conversion functions in java are, again, locale specific with most regions having I/i paired, but turkish has I/ı and İ/i, which caused the failure.
The funny thing is that the way SetNumImage is coded is an amazing portrait of a confused dev who is sort of reimplementing the modulo operator from scratch, rather just using the modulo operator. So even though that function is "correct" as far as I can tell, it could have been so much shorter and simpler: private void SetNumImage(UInt64 num, int digit, int dispIndex) { for (int place = 0; place < digit; place++) { var placeIndex = dispIndex + place; numImage[placeIndex].enabled = true; numImage[placeIndex].sprite = (CalcCode)(num % 10); num /= 10; } }
On one hand, I really don't blame them too much for failing to grasp localization as that is a genuinely hard thing to wrap your head around. On the other hand I am dumbfounded by the fact they used strings to store numeric values.
This could have been avoided several different ways. There should be no reason to convert it to a string at all, but if they're going to do it, they should at least search for the localized decimal separator (you can query your locale to find out which separator is valid) rather than hardcode a specific character :/
I think that videos showcasing BD/SP’s absolute mess of game design + coding is a genre that needs more appreciation. Love the in-depth explanations and ESPECIALLY the hand-written captions, MUCH appreciated!
Seems unbelievable they made such a simple mistake. That's probably somewhere near the top of a "falsehoods programmers believe in" list. Highly recommend reading through those, by the way.
I would put this onto the list "things programmers micro-manage in a completely convoluted way". Instead of writing a format string for format() that matches their limited display space (which is exactly what format() was made for), they mix 3 different ways of handling a number. Although, the list "what happens when programmers combine alternative ways to do things instead of sticking to one of them" also is a good candidate.
How the machine parses language is something so easy to trip over when you don't think about how each line will work in each language. I don't blame the person that made the calculator, but at the same time, it really should have been something they saw coming.
Man he confirmed he's doing Crystal for the ranking series! I hope you eventually earn enough from TH-cam that you can purchase a good computer specifically to run the simulations. That would be awesome for speeding things up!
Oh the shining pearl/diamond games are unity/c#? That makes the cause of the problem fairly straight forward if it happens only in german regions. At least in theory: The calculator and the ui probably use . as decimal separator, but the german locale for string parsing uses a , for that. That should probably cause an error, but it just probably interprets the result/input as integers instead, which at least explains why 5/2 is 2 instead of 2.5
9:05 german here, the a in Taschen- and e's in rechner are not silent, e's are rarely silent in german at all they only are when a u follow because eu is a specific sound. strahlender was almost right but you didnt pronounce the first r for some reason? And Diamant was perfect.
I hope you see this but I really like the music you chose. The creator of the music you used however has hundreds of videos- what songs did you choose? Can you list them?
You would think by now these few countries would use a period as a decimal point. Comma as the separator. No way they are not aware of the flaw in the flipped used.
Google Docs Sheets is full of similar bugs. Comma separators are replaced with semicolon ; as separator for ... half the people in the world? Well, many features become completely broken as app general user code correction enforces ; but the features expect the US , separator.
"Not paying for IDA"... Looking at compiled C# in IDA is like staring into the abyss anyway. They give you decompiled bytecodes, while other disassemblers (even free ones) can at least regenerate C# syntax. It may work well with the transmogrified code though.
I love these!!! Could you do the same thing for "Mario Kart 8 Deluxe", by any chance, if you have that game? That's my favorite Nintendo game for the Switch. I love how the thing plays, and I'd love to at least try to get an understanding of how the antigravity mechanic works under the hood.
It's so weird, send like they wrote the code to parse the localised value turning 2,5 into 2.5 but then reference the localised value for the display rather than the parsed one? Why even parse it at that point?
TLDR; Because the code wasn’t fixed for countries that use commas instead of full stops, it messes up the code for the calculator and tries its best to give an answer according to the buggy code
I'm pretty sure you can just use dnSpy to decompile Unity C# code and get near-perfect working code files already, you don't have to look at the compiled code.
Admittedly it's been a while since I've used a pocket calculator, but I feel like for the vast majority, when you enter a second operator it'll show the result of your first one and then let you enter a third number. This calculator just overwrites that first operator.
sorry for not being able to pick this up, but what was the correct value of parsedNumber supposed to be, 12? and if so, what's the point of using the parsed one rather than integerPart? I'm especially confused because the draw function used decimalPart...
"We all know what language the pokemon games were programmed in."
"Japanese."
"Unity."
"Oh right."
...more like C#, but Unity as a Game Engine existing on many platforms, ..uhh, yeah.
Had the exact same thought xD
Had the same thought.. And I'm a programmer. I am ashamed of myself... LOL
The worst part: Based on what I remember and what I could find about it, the calculator did actually function correctly in all regional versions of Diamond, Pearl and Platinum.
That was back when you were required to release finished games though.
@@bigbadgammagnome Or in the case of tons of titles now, never gets fixed because they can't be bothered because they made their money and the game was 'good' enough that the whales will just buy the next one.
@@bigbadgammagnome
I think for me, it’s about priority. I don’t care about an exploit like Backwards Long Jump in Mario 64, because the game is complete as a package with or without that.
But BDSP in its vanilla form doesn’t have proper music. It’s missing important parts of the complete package. That’s where it’s an issue.
The big issue is really that a day will come when the servers offering the patches will go down. And thus some games will live incomplete in their original form. It’s short sighted.
I know expensive software that has problems from this very problem class and the bugs remain for over a decade. Note the plural. The most stupid thing is, that the software "sometimes" uses comma and "sometimes" dot as canonical decimal separator and "sometimes" it accepts both and autoconvertes.
In particular, if the original source was written in C, localization was a feature that was likely either unused and/or not implemented in the standard C library or DS system code (neither has facilities for decimal floating point numbers either), so code similar to this never came even close to assuming to see decimal commas.
thank you so much for including manual captions. youtube's auto captions would have absolutely mangled this script.
Yes.
It's one of those things that doesn't often get much attention, but including captioning is always appreciated.
Any TH-camr who makes manual captions are based.
+1 !
+1 for manual captions 🧡
I've had to unsub from people who keep captions off, upload auto captions months after posting, etc... I need them
no, that's just how math works in germany
incredible username
Dopio
It's how math works in the entirety of Europe.
Source: I'm Dutch.
@@gerbentime4175 I can confirm
Source: I'm british
BMW owners: "Makes sense"
This is why I feel so stupid as a programmer sometimes. Not because my code doesnt work, its never a big bug that destroys it, its always something dumb like miss parsing a decimal symbol
I'm just a minecraft datapack maker and I SWEAR commas are 94% of the reason why my stuff fails (with 3% being "it's not supported on your version, goober, you were using the latest release's docs and asked the game about a non-existent function")
At this point I've gone past feeling stupid and I swear the commas are my archnemesis.
@@neoqwerty what about the other 3%?
@@neoqwerty yeah those damn json and their stupid commas lol
@@fatsu Thats the space for problems we know must be there but we havent encountered yet
@@jek__ Or the problems we have encountered and can pinpoint to a specific location but don't know why they happen. I hate those.
My phone language is in French which uses the comma as a decimal instead of period, and I have ran into some weird issues on apps and websites that expect a period but the phone forces a comma. Makes me wonder how many other systems only function within the culture they were designed in
French Canadian would not have these issues, I presume.
@@ambozz3726 French Canadian is wierd. We use commas for decimals, but it's definitely not everyone who does so. But technically, it should be commas, so we should have that issue.
English in Canada use periods or full stops as decimal points. And unlike Americans we don't use commas to denote new scales of numbers. Like, "1 000 000" is written without commas or any marks
@@velvetbutterfly Though that does depend on whos doing the writing. Officially, we use commas. Unofficially, we are way to lazy to actual write them unless numbers get huge.
As a programmer I am pretty confident 95+% of ict systems only work in their designed locale.
So many things can go wrong, but mainly:
- wrong translation. translation whose text does not fit in the designed space
- number formatting
- currency conversion
- imperial/metric units
- and most importantly timezones
Meanwhile, I have finally learned of the term "nerd sniping" and my god if this is not dangerous af for someone like me. I'm gonna have to be careful from now on
wtf is nerd sniping
@@wackyanimations3326 look up XKCD comic 356
Isnt "nerd sniping" the same as "starting an interesting conversation"? Like whats the issue here, that if you start an interesting conversation with someone unaware while theyre standing in the middle of a road they might get hit by a car? lol
@@jek__ No, nerd sniping is coming across a problem or question so interesting that you're compelled to suddenly stop what you're doing and drop everything to work on it--potentially to your detriment. I guess a conversation could nerd snipe you, but that hook could come from anywhere really.
In the xkcd comic it comes from (you can pause when he brings up nerd sniping), the guy in the hat is holding up a sign that has a simple-looking (but actually very complicated) electrical problem on it, and the physicist crossing the road gets so distracted trying to solve it that they stop and get hit by a truck.
Back when I worked in QA, we would be given a stack of different region carts/a spindle of different region discs. These days, I figure you just flip back and forth through the regions on the Switch itself. Now, most people who QA aren't as anal as I or some of the others who worked with me were. We would sit there and prod something for hours trying to see if it could bend or crack. A tiny little calculator app that doesn't really matter? You'd think even the most dedicated QA tester wouldn't mess with it.
...but if you were in the game long enough, you'd know this was a common issue between regions due to the decimal point difference. The first thing you'd check wouldn't be '2+2? 4? Alright, it works.' No, it would be popping in that EU-GER cart then dividing something.
Now, one thing I keep seeing people repeating is 'how didn't anyone at ILCA catch this?' The truth is, they probably did. Then the dev team labeled that shit as having least priority and never fixed it before shipping. Every game I worked on had major problems labeled as none issues and ignored until it bit them in the ass. The dev management treated us QA as the enemy almost. I straight up got told to my face 'Stop trying to ruin MY game!" by multiple dipshit managers over the years. And when you look through the comments here, it's no wonder QA testers don't last long. Dudes like me who worked QA over a decade were mostly psychos who hated ourselves enough to sit through getting shit on by the dev team, getting shit on by fans, getting shit on by reviewers, and not even being paid or credited like we worked on the game. Oh, and guess what? When layoffs came by, it was QA that was first to go a lot of the time. If you managed to survive your first game launch, you were likely to be let go at the end of it anyway cause you're disposable and some bright-eyed kid will gladly get paid worse than you to do your job and two other people's. Cause working in games is your dream, isn't it? You should feel lucky to do it.
At my company we've recently slipped into an odd situation involving QA. The devs and QA/QC work together just fine (oddly enough). This time it's release management saying that if we schedule a hotfix window after a new update (for any one of our twenty to thirty big software packages) that's a defeatist attitude. In truth QA isn't magic and our software vendors simply don't have the manpower to work out all the bugs the testers and users will find before a release. Sometimes the issues are minor - "if we do things from this menu the application freezes for a minute but we can do it from the other menu and it goes just fine" - other times they're mayor - "whenever we process a customer onboarding form database errors happen".
To see devs, operations, and QA/QC team up against release management is a sight to behold.
well said
I don’t even work in game dev but I work on an understaffed team with many high priority bugs, and I can confirm that if we have a user report a bug like this we would mark it as low priority and probably never get around to fixing it.
Sorry it sounds like you had such a rough experience
Ah yes, locale dependent number parsing issues strike again.
You'd be surprised how common this is. A year or so ago I reported a bug to Apple causing some UI elements to go missing on macOS with the framework we were using - the culprit was that any SVG image containing a decimal point would fail to parse in locales that use commas, because whoever wrote the parser for those in the OS forgot to specify the locale when parsing the numbers in the file.
I'm not sure whether to be impressed or disgusted that a coding program sold for less than 20 dollars can automatically detect and warn about an issue that evaded the coder, UI dev, and beta tester(s) (though those were probably 0, or 1 for JP and 1 for EN only). Like, that borders on impressive just how overlooked it was.
Maybe only the EN and JP testers were the only one who tested the calculators, the rest may have decided "Oh! A calculator *1+1*. Well, it works! Time to never use this again, not that it matters! I trust that GameFreak (Edit: ILCA developed this rather than GameFreak, my bad) can build a basic calculator."
The biggest ever franchise in the world missed all of this and its only getting worse
@@Gold_Yoshi Game Freak deserves all the hate, but BDSP was developed by ILCA, not Game Freak.
@@Gold_Yoshi The plugin is usually used by professionals developing stuff in Unity but ILCA were new as hell to coding and probably did not get that.
@shinydragon69 but game freak hired them to do their job, I blame gamefreak for giving them a task that couldn't be handle
omg I always say that BDSP always looks like it is "baby's first unity project" but holy moly it's actually true, it baffles me how they couldn't go for the Let's go engine, if that game was made to the same level of care as the lets go games it would be so incredibly memorable.
Honestly didn’t even know that the calculator was broken outside of the US and Japan but it makes a lot of sense why it was broken
Europe Ruins Everything by not following basic standards part 761
@@snintendog How did they even end up using a comma as a decimal point anyways? I mean it's literally called a decimal POINT. Commas are blatantly not points. That's just as stupid as us Americans sticking adamantly to our imperial measurements.
@@AliceErishech As a fellow programmer in Europe, I personally see the , as cursed and use . as much as I can.
@@AliceErishech Surprise: its not called decimal point in german, but literally just comma. Its annoying that we dont have a unified system - But your reasoning isnt good lmao
@@AliceErishech Imperial Measurements are slowly falling away in the US in a lot of engineering and architecture so it's not as stubborn as you think. But as for the comma crap all I can see is the Need to be different all programing follow the UK Us Asian math system and it's literally 4th world countries that are doing this so why are we capitulating to them? (4th world country a country that Willingly gimps itself.)
imagine the broken calculator becoming an all-new arbitary code execution glitch
Yeah! And it'd never happen because modern technology is strong!
Sadly the Switch has memory guards and rw protection and all, so no SNES-esque consequenceless access violations :(
@@mariocamspam72
Speaking of access violations, didn't the original Crash Bandicoot override system memory? The past was, as the kids say, a whack place.
@@klobiforpresident2254 how
Literally a CS101 project and they managed to do it this badly in a game from the highest grossing franchise ever.
@Lind Morn Gamefreak didn't even make this game, it was outsourced to a different company...
Though honestly I wouldn't blame the devs for failing to catch the bug - the fact that the decimal point can be something other than a dot is not exactly a well-known fact outside of the countries that do use a comma, and I'm pretty sure any CS101 version of such a program would have far worse bugs (especially around floats) than this
Look, no, this is the easiest project possible stop defending it. If there were bugs or would’ve been in implementing it into the poketech or the actual UI not it’s functionality. If someone cannot code a calculator’s functionality then go back to school cause you learn that in coding camp from middle school, this is just much more variable management, it’s also in C# one of the easier languages to use.
I’ll nerd out a little as a cs grad. So for something like this program you don’t even need to pay $20 for a program, there are many packages and apis that will do it for you for free. Even if you don’t want to use those, since there are only 2 different types of numbering systems , and . You can write 2 methods let’s call printdot and printcomma, do all the original math normally, pass the answer into those methods depending on your region selected, and reconfigure the , into .. Now a issue that people might say is oh what if put the number in using . easy, write a third method called readdot and send it into the normal calc. The bigger thing people will bring up is, “they don’t have the time” no, they do, writing these 3, no 2 methods will take maybe 30 minutes at most, basically if they hired an extra highschool intern. So yeah, no excuses
The code is fine except for a single fuckup that they missed. This is more of a QA issue than a coding one.
@Lind Morn The Pokemon Company (The company that actually owns the rights to Pokemon) is owned 50% by Nintendo and 50% by GameFreak. They have access to more then enough money to actually make a good game if they wanted to.
@@maverillion4610 my brother in christ, this bug could be easily resolved if they actually had time to test the game and every single thing in it, which take more than 30 minutes
Knew as soon as you mentioned "region" that it'd be a locale issue with period/comma. Every newbie programmer's nightmare, surprised to see such an issue in such a highly regarded franchise though, I guess an extremely small portion of their budget is going to developers lol
from bulbapedia:
"In Pokémon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl, [the calculator] has been reported to exhibit wonky behavior."
I cannot imagine the thought process behind this code. Why didn't they just turn the number into a string to send to sendnumimage? It would've been simpler, faster, and less buggy. This was either programmed by somebody who didn't know how to iterate over a string, or is some weird hold over from the GBA.
I guess they ran into some edge cases (e.g. integer part longer than 10 digits) and couldn't come up with a way to handle those in a sensible way.
DS*
@@HenryLoenwind then just render 10 digits starting from the left side if the string is longer than 10 digits, and check if the number's value is too high to display. Then write some code to remove the 0s at the end if there's a decimal point. Problem solved
he got paid per line
I imagine that there was no thought process behind this code; not only should the developer not have used the default culture, they should not have used the default format either, since they already knew how many digits they wanted. And they definitely should not have required so many conversions just for one number display routine.
I didn’t know the calculator wasn’t correct. That’s absolutely hilarious lmao
I thank you for this video. I use the exact same approach since february to do various unity reverse engineering projects and data mining. And I didn't know that I could also parse and use the header file in ghidra. This would have made so many things so much easier. Until now, I had to manually rename function parameters and figure out when a field of the current class instance was referenced.
Great content, keep it up, and leave some of those information in the videos to maybe help others that stumble over your content. Have a great day :)
OK, I’m at 9:17 currently and I’m *betting* this has something to do with the fact that German uses the comma (,) as the decimal separator. Some locale-dependent parsing or formatting function is getting called and it’s not outputting what the rest of the code expects.
EDIT: I was right, but wow, I’m surprised this code doesn’t crash
German, more like Europe
I am very happy TH-cam recommended this to me, this is a great video! Learning about how games can be reversed engineered almost makes me want to try it, but I'm terrible at reading code so I'll stick to dumping games and getting their music files instead.
A new piman video is always sure to be quality content
Funny to see pros making a similar mistake to what I did before!
I had to replace "ToString();" with "ToString(System.Globalization.CultureInfo.InvariantCulture);" in some of my code to make the commas/dots not change.
Lucky that I was using two computers with different locales, otherwise I would have missed the bug.
Excellent video! You did a great job explaining everything to be understandable without overly bloating the details.
I highly appreciate you not treating me like I'm stupid! This topic is so interesting. Great video!
I'm more impressed that this thing still gives the right answer sometimes.
Aside from the locale thing it looks like they treated C# like assembly.
Impressive how much you can overcomplicate a calculator.
Excited for the pokemon crystal ranking coming out
Changing the operator mid calculation is the same way a lot of built in calculator apps work. You could reasonably call that a feature rather than a bug.
Your work is just incredible, just mind blowing stuff
It's incredible that I know nothing about game dev, have never used unity, and haven't looked at C++ code in five years and I knew the second you mentioned the problem was with certain regions that it was comma-related. Such a remarkably obvious oversight and the fact that nobody ever thought about it prior to release is jarring.
this is an example of why overcomplicating something can result to chaos
Didn't even realize you were they guy that did the SMO videos. Fantastic content
Within the first minute, I knew exactly what happened. It actually happened to me in a mod from Vampire The Masquerade Redemption. The mod included a launcher that let you set some percentages of gameplay elements and they completely broke in my spanish PC.
So the aesop is: pay attention to the goddamn locale when you're coding an app that is meant to be globally distributed.
Dang, havent even really started the Video yet but that infinite resistor grid nerd sniped me. 😂
This reminds me that a game dev youtuber I follow had a similar problem.
On one cutscene, the characters would teleport to coordinate "1.000", which worked well on some PC's, but caused the player to end out of bounds on other cases.
It was due to the country you had your PC set on.
Very interesting, honestly. This video goes more in depth, which is something I, as a junior programmer, find very nice.
Wow, great video.
When I watched Matt's original video, I thought the problem is probably somehow related to the calculator parsing the locale dependent string representation of the number and then searching for a "." character specifically to split the number into an integer and decimal part. But I had no idea why it would do that instead of just displaying the string directly and after watching your video I still have no idea :D
the recommendation algorithm was good today. very satisfying being able to see this video just a day or two after matt's!
I really enjoyed this video and dive into some of the broken code in the Pokémon games! There’s plenty of it & I’d love to see more some day!
Thank you for making this video :D
Keep up the astounding work!
How come this calculator doesn't throw up the "????????" for 7/3 like in the original video? Was that a bug that was introduced in later patches?
Yeah, I haven't checked the code in the later patches, but I don't think there's any code in v1.0.0 that would make it display question marks.
They probably added a check if the integer part is longer than 10 digits. And as 7/3 is repeating, and they count everything as "the integer part", it most certainly is longer than 10 by an infinite number of digits.
@@HenryLoenwind It can't possibly be infinite since infinite string won't fit in the memory
@@jhgvvetyjj6589 You don't actually need to fit it into memory. Calculating the digits and counting them would be enough, and would keep the machine busy until the end of the universe. There's enough RAM to store a really huge number.
However, for knowing that an infinite string of digits is longer than 10 digits, stopping after the 11th digit is quite sufficient.
@@HenryLoenwind I don't think there even is that kind of abstraction in the language, it's most likely doing double precision so the default conversion to string would be up to 17 significant digits at most.
I just now learned of this game being a unity engine based game. Honestly I cannot say I expected it to be one, but honestly I’m not suprised
i thought i get bored as hell, but even me as a programmer must say you made a intressting vid, nice work!
Reminds me of a bugreport I saw a couple years back, where in the minecraft mod Astral Sorcery, a turkish player either got a crash or was missing an item. The culprit was that the upper/lowercase conversion functions in java are, again, locale specific with most regions having I/i paired, but turkish has I/ı and İ/i, which caused the failure.
The funny thing is that the way SetNumImage is coded is an amazing portrait of a confused dev who is sort of reimplementing the modulo operator from scratch, rather just using the modulo operator. So even though that function is "correct" as far as I can tell, it could have been so much shorter and simpler:
private void SetNumImage(UInt64 num, int digit, int dispIndex) {
for (int place = 0; place < digit; place++) {
var placeIndex = dispIndex + place;
numImage[placeIndex].enabled = true;
numImage[placeIndex].sprite = (CalcCode)(num % 10);
num /= 10;
}
}
the song in the second half is called Dragon's Den (From "Pokémon Gold & Silver") by DJMykah
Okay analysis video! Thanks for uploading!
Looking forward to the Crystal-based video! Thanks for uploading!
Now that I've fooled you with the cartoon creatures, let's talk about computer science.
That suppressed laugh at 3:40 haha
Truly impressed with this video, great content and you deserve more subscribers and likes. Commenting for the algorithm, good luck with your channel
Wait, so they do the arithmetic on numbers, then cast the result into a string, which they then try to parse to get back to the number from step 1?
On one hand, I really don't blame them too much for failing to grasp localization as that is a genuinely hard thing to wrap your head around. On the other hand I am dumbfounded by the fact they used strings to store numeric values.
Amazing, would love to see more of this stuff
Man I love bugs like these they're so annoying but funny when you find them!
That's why I'm subbed to this channel.
This could have been avoided several different ways. There should be no reason to convert it to a string at all, but if they're going to do it, they should at least search for the localized decimal separator (you can query your locale to find out which separator is valid) rather than hardcode a specific character :/
We have multiple shared recommended videos. Nice.
Anyways, excellent video!
I think that videos showcasing BD/SP’s absolute mess of game design + coding is a genre that needs more appreciation. Love the in-depth explanations and ESPECIALLY the hand-written captions, MUCH appreciated!
TH-cam fetched me the perfect video today, I assume!
I'm quite proud I figured this one out on my own, shows my degree wasn't completely worthless lmao
Seems unbelievable they made such a simple mistake. That's probably somewhere near the top of a "falsehoods programmers believe in" list. Highly recommend reading through those, by the way.
The professional cad software Altium Designer has this issue all over the place and that for over a decade.
So... I don't mind it in a pokemon game.
I would put this onto the list "things programmers micro-manage in a completely convoluted way". Instead of writing a format string for format() that matches their limited display space (which is exactly what format() was made for), they mix 3 different ways of handling a number. Although, the list "what happens when programmers combine alternative ways to do things instead of sticking to one of them" also is a good candidate.
1:49 YOOOO ACE ATTORNEY IN YOUR LIBRARY
Going to save this, a little ago I gave up on a RE project because I couldn't use the header on ghidra
How the machine parses language is something so easy to trip over when you don't think about how each line will work in each language. I don't blame the person that made the calculator, but at the same time, it really should have been something they saw coming.
Man he confirmed he's doing Crystal for the ranking series! I hope you eventually earn enough from TH-cam that you can purchase a good computer specifically to run the simulations. That would be awesome for speeding things up!
Babe, wake up. A new vídeo released
This is crazy. I didn’t know any of this was possible
Oh the shining pearl/diamond games are unity/c#? That makes the cause of the problem fairly straight forward if it happens only in german regions.
At least in theory:
The calculator and the ui probably use . as decimal separator, but the german locale for string parsing uses a , for that. That should probably cause an error, but it just probably interprets the result/input as integers instead, which at least explains why 5/2 is 2 instead of 2.5
this video literally deep dives into the code and literally shows not only why but also how it behaves that way
9:05 german here, the a in Taschen- and e's in rechner are not silent, e's are rarely silent in german at all they only are when a u follow because eu is a specific sound. strahlender was almost right but you didnt pronounce the first r for some reason? And Diamant was perfect.
I hope you see this but I really like the music you chose. The creator of the music you used however has hundreds of videos- what songs did you choose? Can you list them?
There's the Cerulean City remix, the Dragon's Den remix, and the Elm's Lab remix I commissioned for the Crystal video which he hasn't posted yet.
If it already generated the string in '_numDispString', why doesn't it just show that?
"if anyone asks I got this legally, here is proof I own the games"
Classic.
Nice upload schedule
Liking commenting and subscribing for Neon White.
Ghidra reminds me of movie/game hacking stuff. And that stuff is funny to me
decimal separator is still a thing in business software in 2022 also
it’s wild to me that you can just… do this. the tools are out there
You would think by now these few countries would use a period as a decimal point. Comma as the separator. No way they are not aware of the flaw in the flipped used.
Google Docs Sheets is full of similar bugs. Comma separators are replaced with semicolon ; as separator for ... half the people in the world? Well, many features become completely broken as app general user code correction enforces ; but the features expect the US , separator.
I remember liking your AI tournament videos
I will say I understood nothing about what you were saying but I did watch the whole video
the Taaschenreickner in Pokemon Stahlender Diaman
"Not paying for IDA"...
Looking at compiled C# in IDA is like staring into the abyss anyway. They give you decompiled bytecodes, while other disassemblers (even free ones) can at least regenerate C# syntax.
It may work well with the transmogrified code though.
I did have fun and did learn something
o shit he's back
I love these!!! Could you do the same thing for "Mario Kart 8 Deluxe", by any chance, if you have that game? That's my favorite Nintendo game for the Switch. I love how the thing plays, and I'd love to at least try to get an understanding of how the antigravity mechanic works under the hood.
There’s a version of the il2cpp dumper which makes a good c# decompilation, which is way better than hydra
...why are they converting their string to a number by method call and then manually converting that back into a string?
It's so weird, send like they wrote the code to parse the localised value turning 2,5 into 2.5 but then reference the localised value for the display rather than the parsed one? Why even parse it at that point?
I always complained about how stupid imperial system is, but using comma as decimal point is even worse to me lol
TLDR; Because the code wasn’t fixed for countries that use commas instead of full stops, it messes up the code for the calculator and tries its best to give an answer according to the buggy code
I'm pretty sure you can just use dnSpy to decompile Unity C# code and get near-perfect working code files already, you don't have to look at the compiled code.
Me who can barely make a functioning command-line dog year converter in C# watching this: 👁👄👁
Liked for manual captions
Germans when you call a calculator a calculator instead of "DASMATHENCALCULEN"
Clicking on a new operator and changing the current operation is pretty standard. I's viewed as correcting a mistake.
Admittedly it's been a while since I've used a pocket calculator, but I feel like for the vast majority, when you enter a second operator it'll show the result of your first one and then let you enter a third number. This calculator just overwrites that first operator.
I don't think it is.
With this calculator it's like:
1- input: 1, display: ": 1", memory: 1
2- input: +, display: "+: 1", memory: 1+
3- input: 2, display: "+: 2", memory: 1+2
4- input: "-", display: "-: 2", memory: 1-2
Here's what happens inside my phone's calculator when I do this:
1- input: 1, display: "1 (₁)", memory: 1
2- input: +, display: "1+", memory: 1+
3- input: 2, display: "1+2 (₃)", memory: 1+2
4- input: "-", display: "1+2-", memory: 1+2-
5- input: 3, display: "1+2-3 (₀)", memory: 1+2-3
And here's what happens inside my calculator app on my windows 10 laptop:
1- input: 1, display: ": 1", memory: 1
2- input: +, display: "+: 1", memory: 1+
3- input: 2, display: "+: 2", memory: 1+2
4- input: "-", display: "-: 3", memory: 3-
5- input: 3, display: "-: 3", memory: 3-3
This was really rad even though I understand about half of everything being said
Hey, I made this mistake too, in my first year of uni.
3:42 this dude just laughed at "dumper".
I laughed too, but I just wanted to point it out.
... I'm going to come back to this video any time I get imposter syndrome.
inb4 Nintendo sues you for showing Pokémon disassembly on the internet
sorry for not being able to pick this up, but what was the correct value of parsedNumber supposed to be, 12? and if so, what's the point of using the parsed one rather than integerPart? I'm especially confused because the draw function used decimalPart...