Chapter 394: Archives and Character Files

Chapter 394: Archives and Character Files

 Chapter 394 Archives and Character Files

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

It has to be said that the activity of "Heartbeat Dreamland" is really too big. Whenever players feel that they have reached the limit of the game, the next new content can still refresh their understanding.

In addition to the many previous problems, players quickly discovered that this game’s application of fake-AI has also reached a crazy level.

Logically speaking, this is very inappropriate, because currently the domestic manufacturer that best uses fake-AI technology is Nitiantian.

From "The Legend of Destiny Crouching Dragon" to "The Abandoned City of Gods", Nitian's use of fake-AI has reached such an advanced level that it can even be said to have become part of the core gameplay of the game, and has also become an extremely powerful hidden mechanism in the game.

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

After all, judging from Nitiantian’s previous performance, how exciting would it be to use this technology to make a love game?

Girls with almost real joys, sorrows, sorrows and joys will have a vigorous love affair with the players. This kind of thing is exciting to think about!

But after actually playing it, I discovered that the touching love story that I was looking forward to did not appear at all. Instead, it took on a science fiction style.

Although the girls here are well-behaved and cute, and can chase after each other, they don’t have any particularly outstanding lines or plots. Generally speaking, they are still at the normal level of other manufacturers using fake-AI to write plots, and there is nothing special about them. at.

In a romance game, it would be considered passing at best.

Although players continue to challenge horror content, they can unlock the realism of girls to a certain extent, making them speak less sci-fi, and may appear to be slightly less favorable or jealous, but to put it bluntly, they are still at the normal level of romance games. That's it, it's not "unique".

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

That is a contradiction!

As players experience more horror content, the horror levels will gradually upgrade.

For example, the Arvite that Professor Ding saw at the beginning was a terrifying monster without a face. As the player clears more levels, the more terrifying scenes are triggered, and the appearance of Arvite will become more terrifying.

She can barely be regarded as a humanoid creature at first, but soon, her body will show more and more changes, such as a huge snake head growing out of her back, a bit like the legendary world snake Ye Meng. Gad, the head of the three-headed hellhound Garm will grow on her shoulders, and she will also grow some monster features of the giant wolf Fenrir and the Kraken...

In short, the further back you go, the more terrifying it becomes!

As the level progresses, Arvette will continue to say some lines. At this time, an embarrassing situation occurs. She will say terrifying lines about chasing the player while saying lines about falling in love...

This is quite frustrating. Not only is it very dramatic, but it also further exposes the shortcomings of fake-AI.

Obviously, when Nitiantian was making this game, the use of fake-AI was not as carefully tuned as in previous games.

And the longer the game runs, the more often this kind of confusing AI lines will appear.

This is obviously an obvious problem with the internal logic algorithm of fake-AI, and the programmers of Nitiantian did not carefully write the rules and do in-depth training.

Many players originally had some expectations: Although the NPC had mutated and was chasing me, when she said the love lines, did the kind side of her heart prevail? Will approaching at this time trigger any hidden plot?

As a result, as soon as I turned around, I was eaten by a monster, which tasted like crispy chicken.

The original two lines are a good design. If the inner pain and struggle of the NPC can be added, the depth of the plot can be enhanced, the player's sense of involvement can be further increased, and some hidden plots can even be expanded.

But after trying for a long time, the players discovered that there were none of these!

No matter what lines the NPC says, it does not affect the NPC's behavior at all, and it will continue to chase the player.

This makes the players even more dissatisfied. Is the high-end operation of Nitiantian totally based on our wishful thinking?

Nothing, right?

What's the difference between this and those scumbag game companies that just throw fake-AI into the game and forget about it, relying entirely on God's will?

Of course, there are also a small number of "Guitian's filial sons" who are still arrogant, saying things such as "Guitian's actions must have deep meaning", "Which game of Nitian is not used to the headwind when it comes out", "Just wait and wait for the reaction" Words such as "Redirect" and "It doesn't matter, the bug will work" attracted netizens to laugh.

…

"File error: 'characters/Sakura.chr', the file may be missing or corrupted."

"I'll wipe it, come again!"

Zhang Qifeng punched 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 keywords in it are different.

For example, what Professor 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 neon girl in the game, with the classic name "Sakura".

But no matter what role you choose, this error message is bound to appear.

"I'm really confused, what does this bug mean? How come there is such a bug!

"Judging from the format, isn't this a character file?"

This bug is very simple, and it is basically 100% reproducible. When the player encounters the suspected bug of "the heroine changes her face" several times in the past, and wants to load the latest save and enter the game again, an error will be reported.

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

Therefore, the vast majority of players, including Professor Ding, did not think too much about it. After all, although there are not many games with file corruption leading to bad files like this, 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 still has some professional knowledge.

He was keenly aware of a problem, that is, this path looked a bit strange?

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

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

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

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

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

But for "Heartbeat Dreamland", there is actually no use for so many save slots, because there are basically no either-or options in the game. No matter what the player chooses, there will be no fatal consequences. SL Dafa Naturally, there is no use for it.

And having said that, since there are ten archives in the game, there should also be ten archives in the root directory of the game, such as archive 0, archive 1, and so on.

If a certain archive is damaged, an error should be reported saying "Archive 1 is damaged", but it should not be reported that the character is damaged, right?

"My scalp feels so itchy, I feel like I'm growing a brain."

Zhang Qifeng scratched his head irritably, wondering what was going on.

Did Ni Tiantian do this intentionally?

Don't say it, this sentence has almost become a meme recently. Anyway, no matter how disgusting the Nitiantian game is, there will always be memes saying "Maybe Nitiantian did it intentionally", so that As for now, many fun people are also using this sentence, and it is almost on the encyclopedia of memes. In the past, this sentence was used to praise Ni Tiantian's unexpected game, but now it is used to mock Ni Tiantian's filial son.

Therefore, even if many players have doubts about this game, they are drowned in curses as soon as they bring it up.

But Zhang Qifeng still feels that there is something weird here, because it is indeed different from regular games.

"Let me take a closer look."

Zhang Qifeng is considered an activist. In fact, it is very simple to verify his conjecture: just find this root directory folder.

Take a look at what files are in the folder, where the archive files are, and where the character files are. Although it may not be able to answer this question, it can definitely eliminate some wrong options.

Thinking of this, Zhang Qifeng directly switched to the desktop, opened the root directory of the game, and searched all the way.

Soon, I actually found the "characters" folder.

It's just that the files in this folder are different from what he thought.

The English names are arranged neatly one by one, including Arios, Arvette... In short, most of all 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 an upper-level folder, and judging from the structure of the upper-level folder, it looks more like an archive file.

“In other words, this character folder exists in the archive folder.

"No wonder after this file error, only one archive was affected."

Zhang Qifeng roughly confirmed his guess.

If the game really corrupts the character file, then the entire game will definitely crash and become unable to run, instead of just one save file.

After all, a large number of places in the game will use character-related resources, which can affect the whole body.

If there are some small bugs in the game that cause an insignificant file at the bottom to be damaged, it may cause the game to crash and never be opened again, requiring the client to be repaired again, not to mention something as important as a character file?

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

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, not other archives.

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

Generally speaking, games integrate all kinds of data into archive files, and players are not allowed to disassemble and access them at all. There is no need to create replaceable folders, and there is no need to pull out the character data in the archive individually.

What's more, even if you do this, won't the player still play the same game if he switches to the previous archive?

Moreover, there seems to be a certain randomness in the archive damage, just like the randomness in the triggering of horror content.

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

"Huh? Wait.

“This document has indeed disappeared.

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

Zhang Qifeng rubbed his chin and came up with such a conjecture.

It stands to reason that there should be no essential difference between the sakura.chr in the two files.

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

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

Just do it, Zhang Qifeng copied the sakura.chr file from another folder, and then pasted it into the latest automatic archive.

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

As expected, the game loaded normally!

However, nothing particularly noteworthy happened after loading. The game did not report an error or crash. After playing for a period of time, the horror plot may still be triggered, and the game may still cause file damage after crashing.

It's just that the specific time when the file was damaged has passed randomly.

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

But there really isn't any fundamental change to 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 awesome effect that made him exclaim, which 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 all character files in the archive can be copied and pasted at will?

"You can even delete it yourself?"

It stands to reason that this operation is impossible to do in other games, and the reason is very simple. The save files of other games are basically impossible to edit. Even if the save files can be copied through some special tools, it is difficult to make precise adjustments.

But the unique underlying data structure of "Heartbeat Dreamland" provides players with the possibility of low-cost operation.

There is no need for any special tools or specific archives. You can copy the characters in one archive to another archive by simply deleting or copying and pasting.

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

Why would Nitian do this?

Zhang Qifeng has some vague speculations, but they cannot be verified yet.

(End of chapter)