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[Christian Knudsen]

A couple of years, probably. I would sometimes get reports about my game crashing in weird ways. I managed to pin down the crashes as having to do with music playing or switching to a new song. I tried everything: loading music in a different way, storing information about the music files differently, encoding the music files in various formats. Every time I thought I'd finally nailed it, I would get a new crash report some days after. It was driving me mad. I would just ignore the bug for long stretches of time, as the crashes only happened very rarely. But it was always there on my list of unfixed bugs. In the end, it turns out there was a bug in the SDL_music library.

Whenever I come across a hard bug to track down, there's always a voice in the back of my head saying that it might be a bug in the compiler or some libraries, and not in my code. 99.9% of the time, the bug is of course in my code, so I've trained myself to ignore that voice. This time, though, it was right.

[brog]

Years.  I just fixed a graphical bug that I noticed maybe three years ago, but hadn't gotten around to trying to fix (it was easy).  I've had a worse bug that I actually actively tried to fix every few months or so for a couple of years though - and I'm not sure if I've fixed it yet or not.  Horrible.

[bateleur]

What counts as a bug?

Recoding to improve something that needed improving has on several occasions taken months. Proper code bugs, on the other hand, I don't think I've ever spent more than a week on. Once a debugging effort gets to a certain point it's better to rewind to the previous working version and try again.

[Robotacon]

Years.
Who the hell writes bug free code?

[G-Factor]

Probably about 4-5 hours. The stuff I write is fairly simple though. I'm thinking that things like multi-threading + networking in complex systems would be a nightmare.

[namragog]

um, about 5 days on this one old game I had. the jumping system (it was a platformer) had SO many bugs, including floating through the floor on impact. (that could be a cool game mechanic though  )

[Nitromatic]

Today, it took me few seconds to figure out what to do with that bug. Smacked it good.. Oh, game bugs. 2 or 3 hours perhaps?

[supershigi]

After 3 days of trying to fix a bug in a boss battle, I got fed up with it and ignored it for a month... then came back to it and asked for help.  Even with help though it took another 6 hours to solve. 

[VomitOnLino]

Umm I think almost a year, or so:

In one of my games, "Earth is a 3D Planet", power-ups would behave weirdly sometimes, de-spawning too early - not spawning at all etc. But only if certain hard-to-reproduce conditions were met. So, after an unsuccessful 8hour bug-hunt, I just kind of walled the bug in (forced some variables urgh.) and called it a day.

It was weird bug in my DIY game-framework, in the part which handled spawning of items with a limited lifetime (i.e. Power-ups, Particles etc.) - I found it just recently when writing my new game "Invaders: Corruption". So I had a look at that section of code. Either I've been on crack or completely sleep deprived when I coded that up. The latter being very likely, as I had to code Earth3D with an insane deadline. I made repeat calls to the same function, did weird things with returns, defined variables out of scope - it was horrible. And it's all clean now.

I rolled back the fixed framework with some other fixes into my old game. Which, of course, immediately broke it.... 

[Toeofdoom]

Longest time? Not a bloody clue. It took a week or more to get the J2ME sound API playing nice.

Today though, it took a couple of hours to finally track down a number of silly maths errors. 5 lines of code changed to go from broken in at least 3 ways to fully functional.

[mewse]

Longest time on a single bug was about 8 hours nonstop.  It was in one of the release candidates of a fairly high-profile Wii game, and resulted in a crash if:

• You were playing a retail copy of the game AND
• You were playing it on a test kit (not a devkit) AND
• You were playing using a retail memory footprint AND
• You were playing it off of a burnt disc AND
• It was a european build of the game AND
• You played through three quarters of the game in a single sitting AND
• You visited a particular cutscene within a particular level in a particular order AND
• The language was set to German.

It was a very esoteric memory initialisation bug; a byte of memory that was read from but was never actually being written into after being allocated.  If the value in that particular byte of memory happened to be any value other than zero, then the game would work correctly.  But under that list of situations (retail, not debugging, etc) then memory happened to be allocated in such a way that in that one specific instance, the uninitialised memory in that byte just happened to have a value of zero.

I was a cross mewse, that day.   

[AndrewFM]

Continuously (as in not placing the bug to the side to work on other things), I think the longest was about 3-4 weeks. It was early on in the production of a game, and was basically one of the core mechanisms of the game's engine that was giving me trouble. This was a pain, because I couldn't even move on to something else to take my mind off of it, since the problem area was a prerequisite for everything else. So it was just straight work on that glitch for a while, until it eventually drove me insane, and I scrapped the project

[Paint by Numbers]

I was a cross mewse, that day.   

Oh man, that's terrifying! You say that you managed to figure it all out in one day...?

[mewse]

Oh man, that's terrifying! You say that you managed to figure it all out in one day...?

Well, it from from about about lunchtime to nearly midnight on a day when we needed to get a build out the door, so I guess it was a bit more than eight hours, but yeah, all in one day.

Most of the time went into figuring out how to make the bug occur on a development kit, so that I could debug it properly (and recruiting a couple people from QA to play through the game up to that point).  After that, it was just a matter of struggling with the "clever" code which appeared to have been intentionally written to simultaneously require the worst ratio of code:functionality possible, as well as to make it as difficult to debug as possible.

If the responsible programmer had been on my team, I would have been ethically obliged to smack him around a little - though not too much, because I'm firmly opposed to needless violence.   

[ionside]

If the responsible programmer had been on my team, I would have been ethically obliged to smack him around a little - though not too much, because I'm firmly opposed to needless violence.   

"Needless"?
I've had many bugs take me more than a few days to fix. But it's mainly due to my inexperience in programming and sub average intellect in logic. In fact I have no idea what I just wrote.

[AntiPseudonym]

It was a very esoteric memory initialisation bug; a byte of memory that was read from but was never actually being written into after being allocated.  If the value in that particular byte of memory happened to be any value other than zero, then the game would work correctly.  But under that list of situations (retail, not debugging, etc) then memory happened to be allocated in such a way that in that one specific instance, the uninitialised memory in that byte just happened to have a value of zero.

I was a cross mewse, that day.   

Uninitialized booleans are such a pain in the ass. Pointers? Just crash on dereference. Ints? At least you should be able to see that the memory pattern is way off. Bools? Christ.

Buffer overruns have to be the worst, though. You mean my value was overwritten by a piece of code that's probably completely unrelated to what's going wrong? Fantastic!

I actually managed to solve a buffer overrun in just under an hour the other day. Thank god for data breakpoints is all I can say.

[Ben_Hurr]

Thank god for languages where its impossible to have buffer overuns unless you go out of your way to make them. 

[ink.inc]

Thank god for Python.

[theweirdn8]

I am not sure if alot of time was spent fixing a bug is the same as finding a simple bug and fixing it in 10 seconds....

[DangerMomentum]

I just solved a bug that took upwards of 20 hours this week. That's what I get for trying to do bit manipulation in Javascript...