When I write a bug it becomes the core gameplay.

Chapter 394 Archives and Character Files

While Zhang Qifeng continued to play "Heartbeat Dreamland" in depth, more negative news about the game appeared on the Internet.

It has to be said that the activity of "Heartbeat Dreamland" is really too big. Every time players feel that they have reached the limit of the activity against heaven, the next new content can still refresh their cognition.

In addition to the many previous problems, players soon discovered that the game's use of fake-AI had also reached an insane level.

Logically speaking, this should not happen, because the best manufacturer in China that uses fake-AI technology is Nitiantang.

From "The Legend of the Condor Heroes" to "The City Forsaken by Gods", Against the Heaven's Glory has reached perfection in the use of fake-AI. It can even be said that it has become a part of the core gameplay of the game and an extremely powerful hidden mechanism in the game.

When many players first heard that "Tokimeki Dreamland" also used fake-AI technology, they were full of expectations for it.

After all, judging from the level demonstrated by Against the Heaven before, how exciting would it be to use this technology to make a love game?
These girls, who all have real emotions, have a passionate love affair with the players. Just thinking about it is exciting!

But after actually playing it, I found that the touching love story I expected did not appear at all, and instead it took a sci-fi style.

Although the girls in this film are cute and well-behaved, and will pursue men, there are no particularly outstanding lines or plots. In general, it is still the normal level of other manufacturers using fake-AI to write plots, and there is nothing special about it.

In the context of love games, it can only be considered passing.

Although players can unlock the girls' realism to a certain extent by continuing to challenge horror content, making their speech less sci-fi, and causing them to lose some favorability or become jealous, to put it bluntly, it is still at the normal level of love games, and it is not "unique".

What’s even more frustrating is that as players continue to experience the game in depth, they have discovered another fatal problem with this fake-AI technology.

That's a contradiction!
As players gain deeper experience with horror content, the horror levels will gradually upgrade.

For example, when Instructor Ding first saw Alvette, she was a faceless, horrible monster. As the player clears more levels and the triggered scenes become more horrifying, Alvette's appearance will become more terrifying.

At first, she could barely be considered a humanoid creature, but soon, her body began to undergo more and more changes. For example, a huge snake head grew on her back, a bit like the legendary world serpent Jörmungandr. On her shoulders grew the heads of the three-headed hellhound Garm. She also developed some monster features of the giant wolf Fenrir and the Kraken...

In short, the further you go, the more thrilling it becomes!
As the level progresses, Alvette will continue to speak some lines. At this time, an unbearable situation occurs. She will speak the terrifying lines about chasing the player while speaking the lines about love...

This is quite difficult to handle. Not only does it ruin the show, but it also further exposes the shortcomings of fake-AI.

It is obvious that when Against the Heavens was making this game, the use of fake-AI was not as serious as in previous games.

And the longer the game runs, the more often this kind of confusing AI dialogue will occur.

This is clearly due to obvious problems with fake-AI's internal logic algorithm, and the programmers of Against the Heaven did not write the rules carefully or do deep tuning.

Many players were looking forward to it: Although the NPC has changed and is chasing me, when she speaks the love lines, will the good side of her heart prevail? Will approaching her at this time trigger some hidden plot?
As a result, as soon as he turned around, he was eaten by the monster, and it tasted like crispy chicken.

The original two lines were a good design. If the NPC's inner pain and struggle could be added, it could enhance the depth of the plot, further increase the player's sense of involvement, and even expand some hidden plots.

But the players tried for a long time before finding out that these were all gone!
No matter what the NPC says, it has no effect on its behavior and it will continue to chase the player.

This makes the players even more dissatisfied. Does it mean that imagining the high-end operations of Against the Heaven is completely wishful thinking on our part?
Nothing, right?

What’s the difference between this and those crappy game companies that just shove fake-AI into the game and leave it all up to fate?
Of course, there are also a small number of "Nitiantang filial sons" who are still stubborn and say things like "Nitiantang must have a deep meaning in doing this", "We are used to every Nitiantang game being in a big disadvantage as soon as it comes out", "Just waiting for the reversal", "It doesn't matter, the bugs will take effect", etc., which have attracted ridicule from netizens.

……

"Error in file: 'characters/Sakura.chr', the file may be missing or corrupt."

"Oh my god, here we go again!"

Zhang Qifeng pounded the desk again angrily.

He has seen this error message many times, or in other words, every player who has played the official version of "Heartbeat Dreamland" should have seen this message, but the key words are different.

For example, what Teacher Ding saw was "characters/Alvet.chr", and the English word is Alvet.

The word Zhang Qifeng saw was sakura, because the female character he chose was a Japanese girl in the game, with the classic name "Ying".

But no matter what character you choose, this error message will inevitably appear.

"I'm really confused. What does this bug mean? How can there be such a bug?
"From the format, isn't this a character file?"

This bug is very simple and is basically 100% reproducible. That is, when the player encounters the suspected bug of "the heroine's face changing" several times before, an error message will be displayed when the player wants to load the latest save file into the game again.

The solution is also very simple, just read the previous save file.

Therefore, most players, including Instructor Ding, did not think too much about it. After all, although there are not many games with corrupted files, there are still some. Although reading the previous files will waste a little time, it is still acceptable.

However, as a game editor, Zhang Qifeng does have some professional knowledge.

He was keenly aware of a problem: this path looked a bit strange?

Generally speaking, game save files are basically stored in folders like "data", and the word "characters" means characters.

Judging from the path on the prompt, it seems that the missing file is the character file, not the save file.

What's more, there is no numeric suffix like 123 on this path, which is not normal.

Because there are ten default save files in "Heartbeat Dreamland", five of which are automatic save files and five are manual save files.

If it were in other similar love games, ten save slots might not be enough, because players might need to repeatedly use the SL method to activate various endings and try multiple options.

But for "Heartbeat Dreamland", there is actually no need for so many save slots, because there is basically no either-or option in the game. No matter what the player chooses, it will not cause any fatal consequences, so the SL method naturally has no place to use.

And speaking of which, since there are ten save files for the game, there should also be ten save files in the root directory of the game, such as save file 0, save file 1, all the way to save file 9.

If a certain save file is damaged, it should report an error saying "Save file 1 is damaged" instead of reporting that the character is damaged, right?
"My scalp is so itchy, I feel like I'm going to grow a brain."

Zhang Qifeng scratched his head in annoyance, unable to figure out what was going on.

Was it intentional on Nitiantang’s part?
Don't mention it, this sentence has almost become a meme recently. No matter how disgusting the game Against Heaven is, there will always be meme kids commenting "Maybe Against Heaven did it on purpose", so much so that many people are also commenting on this sentence now, and it's almost worthy of being included in the meme encyclopedia. In the past, this sentence was used to praise the unexpectedness of the game Against Heaven, but now it is used to mock the filial son of Against Heaven.

Therefore, even if many players have doubts about this game, as soon as they raise them, they are drowned out by criticism.

But Zhang Qifeng still felt that there was something strange here, because it was indeed different from regular games.

"Let me take a closer look."

Zhang Qifeng is a man of action. In fact, it is very simple to verify his guess: just find the root directory folder.

Check to see what files are in the folder, where the save files are, and where the character files are. Although this may not necessarily answer the question, it will definitely eliminate some incorrect options.

Thinking of this, Zhang Qifeng went straight to the desktop, opened the game's root directory, and searched through it.

Soon, I actually found the folder "characters".

It’s just that the files in this folder are not what he expected.

The English names are arranged in an orderly manner, there are Elliot, Alvette... In short, most of the characters in the game have a file here.

Except for Sakura who reported an error before.

There is more than one "characters" folder. It has upper-level folders, and judging from the structure of the upper-level folders, it looks more like an archive file.

“That is to say, this character folder exists in the save folder.

"No wonder this file only affects one save file after it goes wrong."

Zhang Qifeng roughly confirmed his guess.

If the game really damages the character file, the entire game will definitely crash and be unable to run, not just one save file.

After all, a large number of places in the game will call upon the character's related resources, and one move will affect the entire body.

If some minor bugs appear in the game and cause an insignificant underlying file to be damaged, it is possible that the game will crash and can never be opened again, requiring the client to be repaired. What about something as important as a character file?

Therefore, this file structure is most likely intentionally done by the authorities.

The upper layer is the archive file, and the lower layer is the character file. When the character file in each archive file is damaged, it will only affect this archive file but not other archive files.

So the question is, what is the point of doing this?

Most games integrate all kinds of data into archive files and do not allow players to access them separately. There is no need to make them replaceable folders, and there is no need to take out the character data from the archive separately.

What's more, even if this is done, won't the player still be able to play the game the same way if they switch to the previous save file?
Moreover, the corruption of the save file seems to have a certain randomness, just like the triggering of horror content has a randomness.

If you play for a long time, it will definitely be triggered, but will it be triggered in five minutes, ten minutes or an hour? The internal rules of this thing have not been studied yet.

"Eh? Wait.

“This file has indeed disappeared.

"What if I copy a file from another archive and put it in here?"

Zhang Qifeng stroked his chin and put forward such a conjecture.

Logically speaking, there should be no essential difference between the sakura.chr in the two files.

Maybe the progress of the relationship is different, maybe some data of the fake-AI has changed, but these changes should not cause any particularly serious malicious bugs.

Even if a bug is triggered, it doesn't matter, because according to the data structure of this game, no matter how much you mess with it, it will only destroy this one save file, and other save files will not be affected.

Zhang Qifeng did it right away. He copied the sakura.chr file from another folder and pasted it into the latest automatic archive.

Then he returned to the game and read the save file.

As expected, the game loaded normally!
However, nothing particularly worth mentioning happened after loading. The game did not report any errors or crash. The horror plot may still be triggered after playing for a while, and the game may still cause file corruption after crashing.

It's just that the specific time when the file is damaged has a random shift.

It's like the system inexplicably discovered after a while that the file was not deleted completely, and then deleted it again.

But there is really no fundamental change in the gaming experience.

"Hmm... am I worrying too much?"

Zhang Qifeng fell into deep thought again. Although his operation was successful, it did not produce the kind of effect that made him exclaim "amazing". This obviously did not satisfy him.

“Hey, wait.

"If the character files in this archive can be copied and pasted at will, does that mean that the character files in all archives can be copied and pasted at will?
“You can even delete it yourself?”

In theory, this operation is impossible to do in other games. The reason is very simple. The save files of other games are basically impossible to edit. Even if you can copy the save files through some special tools, it is difficult to make precise adjustments.

However, the unique underlying data structure of "Heartbeat Dream" provides players with the possibility of low-cost operation.

No special tools or specific archive files are required. You can copy characters from one archive to another by simply deleting or copying and pasting.

From a programming perspective, this is a bit of a gimmick.

Why would Nitiantang do this?

Zhang Qifeng had some vague guesses, but they cannot be verified yet.

(End of this chapter)