The state of affairs you describe isn’t really smooth locking. What you’re describing is the participant getting, to make use of the extremely technical time period, caught. That stated, there are plenty of attainable conditions the place the participant achieves a state the place they can not play the sport. Whereas the general outcome would possibly look comparable, the causes are often very completely different and thus require differing types of options.
#1: Freeze or Onerous Lock
This happens when all seen exercise for the sport stops – no extra display updates, enter doesn’t work, nothing in any respect. Onerous locks often happen when the sport has crashed and might’t clear up the remainder of this system. As an alternative, it simply sits there in system reminiscence, perpetually unchanged till you reset the system or externally terminate it. The answer to that is to search out the code that was executing whereas it crashed and both repair the code itself so it doesn’t crash, or repair the circumstances that brought about the code to crash (e.g. invalid asset knowledge).
#2: Gentle Lock
A smooth lock happens when the sport is unresponsive and unplayable, however the display continues to replace. Animations nonetheless play, sound nonetheless performs, UI nonetheless updates, timers should tick down, however the recreation is not going to reply to any participant enter. That is often attributable to particular person methods within the recreation turning participant management/enter off with a view to ensure that they don’t do bizarre stuff throughout transitions (e.g. after getting into a brand new zone however earlier than the zone is absolutely loaded and prepared, or not letting gamers transfer their characters within the background whereas opening up a UI menu) after which lacking a case to show it again on once more. The answer to smooth locks like that is often to determine what was locking participant enter and discovering the corresponding case the place management ought to be returned to the participant.
#3: Caught
Generally, when navigating the sport environments, gamers will get caught on issues. Because of this they’ll be trapped within the stage someplace and be unable to maneuver. Possibly that’s as a result of the world geometry has put them right into a perpetually-falling state so that they don’t have any management, or as a result of they’ve one way or the other clipped into part of the extent that shouldn’t be accessible. Massive 3D environments are particularly identified for this drawback occurring very often. This additionally applies to gamers falling out of the world or getting caught outdoors of the world (e.g. behind partitions) the place they could be capable to transfer, however can not play the sport. We’ve a few methods to resolve this drawback. Clearly, the primary repair is to have stage design repair the offending stage geometry in order that the participant can’t get caught there anymore. Nonetheless, this could turn into problematic in video games with actually giant environments, as a result of testing each sq. inch of each surroundings in an open-world recreation like Horizon Zero Daybreak or Breath of the Wild is a monstrous activity for QA. Usually we have now a secondary resolution for getting caught in video games like this – we attempt to retailer the final identified “good” place for the participant after which teleport the participant to that place in the event that they get caught. If that doesn’t work (e.g. the final identified good place isn’t so good), we are able to teleport the participant to their respawn location as if they’d died.
#4: Damaged
Usually in video games the participant is required to perform sure duties or purchase sure objects to progress. If these duties should not marked as full or these objects should not obtainable, the participant is barred from progressing. On this case, we name it a damaged state – the sport will be performed however can’t be accomplished. One thing crucial for the participant to proceed within the recreation is one way or the other unobtainable. The answer to that is often to determine what the participant is lacking from the factors and monitor down what was alleged to grant the lacking aspect to the participant. It’s often one thing small, like a foul set of situations, an improper quest set off, or only a misspelling of a selected quest variable identify.
Every of those sorts of issues will often trigger our recreation to fail certification (although some small quantity of damaged content material is usually acceptable if they’re sufficiently small and aren’t on the sport’s crucial path) if found, so they’re all fairly excessive precedence fixes once we discover them. Every kind of fail state typically falls to completely different disciplines on the staff – freezes and smooth locks are often dealt with by programmers whereas caught or damaged bugs are sometimes dealt with by designers because of their frequent causes.
The FANTa Mission is presently on hiatus whereas I’m crunching at work too busy.
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