By observing what Devil May Cry 3 was doing when the player interacted with a divinity statue, which didn’t cause a crash, maybe it’d inform what was causing them.Īs it turns out, the game accesses certain files during that interaction, and when serpentiem loaded up the files in question, it was no great shock to discover they were related to the various styles. This involved more detective work, with serpentiem leveraging a piece of software called Process Monitor, which allowed them to see what files Devil May Cry 3 was interacting with while the game was active. That research prompted serpentiem to try and understand why, on a technical level, Windows was choosing to terminate the game, and causing the frustrating crashes. I documented everything I tried and everything that could potentially work.” I'm a science guy, so I started to treat this like research. “I never considered giving up though, because I knew it's not magic-it has to work somehow. “No matter what I tried it would always result in a crash,” said serpentiem. And while they were able to find more variables specifically related to how the game dealt with styles, none managed to address the same issue that kept cropping up. Suddenly, serpentiem had been into an unpaid QA tester.

Overcoming one obstacle had only led to another. I'm a science guy, so I started to treat this like research.'īut now, the original problem returned: the game kept crashing. Over the next three months, serpentiem meticulously sorted through the stack, and eventually, there was a genuine eureka moment, and Dante switched styles in real-time.īecause the PlayStation 2 game was harder to work with-limited memory, code that was more difficult to parse-serpentiem eventually moved back to the compromised PC version. “I had to bite the bullet and check every last one of them,” they said.

Millions would’ve proven too much for a single person, but 10,000? Still overwhelming, but the kind of overwhelming that can, in time, be dealt with. This was actually an improvement, if you can believe it prior to this figuring out the specific points that shifted during an interaction with a divinity statue, serpentiem was trying to sift through millions of different variables.

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