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Some multiplayer real-time strategy (RTS) games used deterministic fixed-point maths and incremental updates to keep the players in sync. Despite this, there would be the occasional random de-sync kicking someone out of a game, more than likely because of bit flips.


For RTS games I wish we could blame bit flips, but more typically it is uninitialized memory, incorrectly-not-reinitialized static variables, memory overwrites, use-after-free, non-deterministic functions (eg time), and pointer comparisons.

God I love C/C++. It’s like job security for engineers who fix bugs.


Some games are reliable enough. I found out the DRAM in my PC was going bad when Factorio started behaving weird. Did a memory test to confirm. Yep, bitflips.




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