I think the only visible effect from that was the Engineer's metal, giving +40 or +41 from a small box, depending on the server platform (all classes technically do have metal, but the others can't use it).

It was always fun to play on a new server and check what OS it was running that way, too. :-)

I’m surprised to hear the ammo calculation code would use floats.

I'll make one that's the opposite (your post must be at least two paragraphs and an LLM is going to judge your text to make sure it's not lorum Ipsum) if you'll help me get users.

Do you actively want the linked thread to not exist? Because not having this posting option does not mean it would appear anywhere else.

Here’s a link with the thread unrolled onto a single page: https://mastoreader.io/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fmastodon.gamedev.p...

I don’t know about the beta, but there’s an excellent HL2 VR conversion mod you can play today. It feels just right and got me to play HL2 again after all these years.

There’s a great VR mod for Portal 2. Played it all the way through. Surprisingly comfortable to play too.

I think x87 fpu is the only 'weird' floating point units left. I think if you stick with 64-bit double precision floats or 32-bit single precision floats, where the registers are also 64 or 32 bits, all the modern stuff behaves the same. x87 is just weird because registers are 80-bits ... the idea was to have more accurate results from more precision, but it ends up weird because if you run out of registers and have to spill to memory, you typically lose precision.

It's probably because you have to have weird precision issues where the numbers are calculated ever so slightly differently, and some other effect like a guard being slightly too close and getting clipped by a door where that difference matters.

I debugged some software synthesizer code a while back (like 20 years or so now I think of it) where a build of it on one platform failed because of a precision bug. I can't remember the details, but there was a lot of "works fine on my machine" type discussion around it. Anyway it relied on a crude simulation of an RC circuit reaching very close to 0 asymptotically to trigger a state change, but on something like 64-bit Intel with a specific processor it never quite made it low enough to trip the comparison because of something to do with not flushing denormals.

From an electronic standpoint, making it simulate "it's high enough" as being about 0.7 and " it's low enough" being about 0.01 was far closer to the instrument they were trying to simulate, and making it massively imprecise like that got it going on everything.

nice detective work. Global FPU state had sure caused a lot of headaches.