Dominions 3 - The Manual

[PhilD]

Gandalf Parker said:
Rip open box, snag manual, rush out the door, get in trouble for reading the manual instead of the important thing you were supposed to be doing. "Turkeys?!? Umm... I meant to say... I do."

That would be going to teach some class. I've actually been using the Dom2 story of battle replays being incompatible between OSes as an example of what can go wrong when programming and compiling for multiple platforms.

(For those who weren't around at the time: battle replays were inconsistent between Windows and, at least, Linux - despite the game using its own random number generator and not some library function. The bug was finally tracked down to some code lines that went something like:
Code:

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if (RollDie(x)<RollDie(y))...  

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and it turned out that the different compilers would make the left function call before the right, while others would do the reverse - something that, unless I'm wrong, isn't specified in the norm - and that was wreaking havoc with the random number generator reproductibility)

[Gandalf Parker]

Those werent inconsistancies. They were realistic commander reports. "Ummm we WON. Yeah thats it oh great god of destruction. We totally kicked their ahnks all over the battleground."

[SurvivalistMerc]

This is marvelous. One of my only pet peeves about Dom2 was that the manual was 20 pages of information then the popup help printed in a difficult to find and parse format. Strong. I look forward to reading your work.