Today I Learned - Rocky Kev

TIL Morrowind would reboot the XBox if it ran out of memory and hide it behind a loading screen

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Todd Howard: "One of my favorite tricks for Morrowind is that if you are running out of memory [on Xbox], you can reboot the Xbox without the user knowing. So if you had a really long loading time, that was us rebooting the Xbox."

via this tweet & youtube video

How does it work?
Edit: And Microsoft considered it 3 OS'. The Hypervisor runs on the metal, then the game OS and the "shared" OS which runs the dash and apps. But personally I wouldn't really consider the hypervisor an OS, it's only job is to manage the other 2 and allocate resources to those VMs

via TH3_ST0CK's comment

Some bonus game hacks:

Game Dev Trivia: To create the effect of an ammunition pack exploding and sending bullets everywhere when a backpack weak spot is destroyed in Tom Clancy's The Division, a tiny invisible AI enemy is attached to the backpack, shoots wildly all around and then suicides.

via this tweet

More war stories about video games: https://arstechnica.com/video/series/war-stories


Related TILs

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TIL Korok seed puzzle pattern

Why I love this is that the designers thought up a few puzzle categories, and sprinkled the open world with these. It creates a very effective piece of optional game play.

TIL Morrowind would reboot the XBox if it ran out of memory and hide it behind a loading screen

One of my favorite tricks for Morrowind is that if you are running out of memory [on Xbox], you can reboot the Xbox without the user knowing. So if you had a really long loading time, that was us rebooting the Xbox.

TIL about AutoHotKey

When you're getting annoyed at running the same commands over and over again.