Whenver I encounter an error like that, I assume it's me and keep hacking away. Only after exhausting the likely possibilities, do I move on to the improbables, the bugs in the code I'm coding in.

I've been bit more than a few times but implementation defects. My first (and worst) experience was a 3d renderer I was working on. I was only programming a few years at the time.

It used "psuedo-raycasting" to draw textured map roads (a racing game). Thousands of lines of C && Assembler (386, everthing was unrolled). I kept getting garbage at the horizon. It would just randomly change heights. I poured over and over the code, making sure it wasn't a "1 off" error. I just couldn't solve it. After a month of beating my head of the wall, I switched to other projects, periodically coming back to it and repeating the cycle.

Then a few months later I came bace and fixed it in 10 minutes. The solution? I entered a blank line in the C source (to make an expression easier to grok). That's it. No other changes. I still don't understand exactly how it was breaking it but the source file's layout hit the compiler just so that it would cause it to compile slightly different even though the text (minus the newline) was exactly the same. After that, nothing is beyond suspicion. :)

-Lee

"To be civilized is to deny one's nature."

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