The PC port Horizon Zero Dawn launched a few days ago and fans have been wondering why it crashes so often – one person looked closer and was not happy with what they found.
The news comes from Reddit, where an anonymous programmer shared her findings after investigating the game’s ‘dump files’.
“So, as a programmer myself, I took the liberty to examine the dump files myself,” she wrote. “Let’s say the result is not very … promise.”
The poster goes on to record an image of a line from the game’s code that was screenshotted at the exact point where it crashed.
“What this piece of code means is that the computer is trying to write the value right to the memory address on the left, the problem is, the specified memory does not exist,” she wrote. “The program tries to directly access address 0, this will ALWAYS crash the game, and this is also a big NO.”
‘I have no idea how this happened, the program with a hard-coded 0 as memory address is clear how badly this was done, no well-made code (or just average really) would attempt to access 0 as memory address, could’ I have been a compilation bug, but I seriously doubt it, ‘they add.
They went on to make a few edits after other people started making the post, both of which came to the same conclusions.
“After a little while researching in a disassembler, I found 166 lines of the same instruction,” read the edited post. “They are primarily used in memory management and some uninstalled (for some reason) debugging features.”
“I deleted these instructions (node them) and well, the game crashes less,” it continues. “It’s far from an actual fix, I can not solve graphics problems, but at least it crashes now every 30 minutes, not 5.”
The post concludes by stating that this is clearly a debug build and should not be sent. If you are envious, you can check out some Horizon Zero Dawn gameplay for yourself.
Although fans were initially excited about how good the game looked, constant crashes and performance issues soon replaced that enthusiasm. These issues are, as the Reddit post indicates, relatively well explained by the fact that this port could still have aspects of a debug build on.
