Insightful error message from Unreal Tournament  10 October 2004

keywords: blog, fun, design, Unreal Tournament, simulation, discrete time, tick, actors


Recently when playing unreal tournament, I got this insightful error message:

General Protection Fault! ... followed by what looks like a stack trace out of a main event loop for a simulation.

Look at those nice, meaningful names in the error message. It looks like they model the state of a game (the "world") over a number of discrete timepoints where each "actor" in the game computes its state. Input received at time t might well be used to determine the known state of actors at time t+1. Hmmm.