"We all know what language the pokemon games were programmed in." "Japanese." "Unity." "Oh right."

no, that's just how math works in germany

The worst part: Based on what I remember and what I could find about it, the calculator did actually function correctly in all regional versions of Diamond, Pearl and Platinum.

thank you so much for including manual captions. youtube's auto captions would have absolutely mangled this script.

My phone language is in French which uses the comma as a decimal instead of period, and I have ran into some weird issues on apps and websites that expect a period but the phone forces a comma. Makes me wonder how many other systems only function within the culture they were designed in

This is why I feel so stupid as a programmer sometimes. Not because my code doesnt work, its never a big bug that destroys it, its always something dumb like miss parsing a decimal symbol

Meanwhile, I have finally learned of the term "nerd sniping" and my god if this is not dangerous af for someone like me. I'm gonna have to be careful from now on

This reminds me of a really unfortunate week at my previous job as live-ops programmer at an indie game company. I needed to update our Unity version to function with several new plugins we planned to use for a game that I was supporting (side note: the game was made a couple years before I joined, and the developer went on temporary leave but then just never returned, so I was just solo supporting the project with no guidance from any devs who actually worked on the game). We QA'd without issue, but after the update the game started to crash for a small number of users, and we started to receive negative reviews almost daily. I spent nearly a week testing, reading error logs, adding and removing plugins, and could not for the life of me find the issue. Then, as the reviews rolled in, I was going over them and I realized that the negative reviews were written almost entirely in russian, french, spanish, and other such languages. I switched my device language, but the bug still didn't occur. Samsung has this amazing thing called "remote test lab" where you can test physical phones in different regions, and I used that to test our game on some Russian phones--lo and behold, a reproduction of the dreaded bug! Best feeling as a dev is finally getting a reproduction on a bug. As it turned out, updating Unity updated the version of C# .Net that Unity ran on, and .Net updated their spec for their `Single.Parse` function, which reads reads text into a number. Instead of using the build locale for `Single.Parse` by default, it would now use the device locale. So, when parsing some level data at runtime, it was throwing an error when parsing data formatted like "123,456.78" but only for people whose device locale was in certain regions (i.e. people who were in Canada but wrote French reviews weren't getting the error!). All I had to do was add a single `CultureInfo.InvariantCulture` to the `String.Parse` line of code, and everything was fixed.

Back when I worked in QA, we would be given a stack of different region carts/a spindle of different region discs. These days, I figure you just flip back and forth through the regions on the Switch itself. Now, most people who QA aren't as anal as I or some of the others who worked with me were. We would sit there and prod something for hours trying to see if it could bend or crack. A tiny little calculator app that doesn't really matter? You'd think even the most dedicated QA tester wouldn't mess with it. ...but if you were in the game long enough, you'd know this was a common issue between regions due to the decimal point difference. The first thing you'd check wouldn't be '2+2? 4? Alright, it works.' No, it would be popping in that EU-GER cart then dividing something. Now, one thing I keep seeing people repeating is 'how didn't anyone at ILCA catch this?' The truth is, they probably did. Then the dev team labeled that shit as having least priority and never fixed it before shipping. Every game I worked on had major problems labeled as none issues and ignored until it bit them in the ass. The dev management treated us QA as the enemy almost. I straight up got told to my face 'Stop trying to ruin MY game!" by multiple dipshit managers over the years. And when you look through the comments here, it's no wonder QA testers don't last long. Dudes like me who worked QA over a decade were mostly psychos who hated ourselves enough to sit through getting shit on by the dev team, getting shit on by fans, getting shit on by reviewers, and not even being paid or credited like we worked on the game. Oh, and guess what? When layoffs came by, it was QA that was first to go a lot of the time. If you managed to survive your first game launch, you were likely to be let go at the end of it anyway cause you're disposable and some bright-eyed kid will gladly get paid worse than you to do your job and two other people's. Cause working in games is your dream, isn't it? You should feel lucky to do it.

When I first heard of the comma vs period issue with the calculator I was hoping someone would be enough of a nerd to dig through the files and figure out what was going on. Thanks!

Honestly didn’t even know that the calculator was broken outside of the US and Japan but it makes a lot of sense why it was broken

I'm not sure whether to be impressed or disgusted that a coding program sold for less than 20 dollars can automatically detect and warn about an issue that evaded the coder, UI dev, and beta tester(s) (though those were probably 0, or 1 for JP and 1 for EN only). Like, that borders on impressive just how overlooked it was.

omg I always say that BDSP always looks like it is "baby's first unity project" but holy moly it's actually true, it baffles me how they couldn't go for the Let's go engine, if that game was made to the same level of care as the lets go games it would be so incredibly memorable.

Ah yes, locale dependent number parsing issues strike again. You'd be surprised how common this is. A year or so ago I reported a bug to Apple causing some UI elements to go missing on macOS with the framework we were using - the culprit was that any SVG image containing a decimal point would fail to parse in locales that use commas, because whoever wrote the parser for those in the OS forgot to specify the locale when parsing the numbers in the file.

I practice nerd sniping in work. It's the easiest way to get the more senior members of the team busy for a couple hours. "Hmm, it's weird that we have to do this manually, surely it wouldn't be too hard to at least automate ______, right?", then I can just do my work at my pace while he spends the next 5 hours in python debugging loops to automate a process that takes maybe 12 seconds.

"They don't actually know what language this game was written in" I thought it was obvious they wrote it in japanese

Literally a CS101 project and they managed to do it this badly in a game from the highest grossing franchise ever.

imagine the broken calculator becoming an all-new arbitary code execution glitch

Man i love how casually programmer guys talk about using like 12 programs consecutively to see raw text and read it

Not a crossover I expected, but one I'm very glad to see. It makes a lot of sense that the extra zeroes are caused by repeatedly divided by 10 and taking the lowest digit.

I'm mostly just surprised that they wrote this code by hand. I'm sure there's some open source code that handles all of this perfectly.

Knew as soon as you mentioned "region" that it'd be a locale issue with period/comma. Every newbie programmer's nightmare, surprised to see such an issue in such a highly regarded franchise though, I guess an extremely small portion of their budget is going to developers lol

I didn’t know the calculator wasn’t correct. That’s absolutely hilarious lmao

Cannot believe how fast your turnaround on a video like this! Overjoyed to get to watch a new video of yours like always :)

Thank you for indulging the nerd snipe and sharing your results, you've saved me from diving into this myself! Funny how something we consider so simple as a calculator is actually far more complicated than expected!

I cannot imagine the thought process behind this code. Why didn't they just turn the number into a string to send to sendnumimage? It would've been simpler, faster, and less buggy. This was either programmed by somebody who didn't know how to iterate over a string, or is some weird hold over from the GBA.

from bulbapedia: "In Pokémon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl, [the calculator] has been reported to exhibit wonky behavior."

I thank you for this video. I use the exact same approach since february to do various unity reverse engineering projects and data mining. And I didn't know that I could also parse and use the header file in ghidra. This would have made so many things so much easier. Until now, I had to manually rename function parameters and figure out when a field of the current class instance was referenced. Great content, keep it up, and leave some of those information in the videos to maybe help others that stumble over your content. Have a great day :)

damn, i guess that was an oversight for different regions, still within the realm of buggy pokemon features, if im not mistaken both sword and shield and BDSP had their intended shiny increasing odd methods completely broken or coded in but not called, i sort of rememer reading that when they released

Excellent video! You did a great job explaining everything to be understandable without overly bloating the details.

I want more videos like this, explaining exactly step-by-step what went wrong in the logic of the code

Seriously, well done on this video! Greatly informative and entertaining.

A new piman video is always sure to be quality content

OK, I’m at 9:17 currently and I’m *betting* this has something to do with the fact that German uses the comma (,) as the decimal separator. Some locale-dependent parsing or formatting function is getting called and it’s not outputting what the rest of the code expects. EDIT: I was right, but wow, I’m surprised this code doesn’t crash

I find commans being used for thousands and periods for deciamals to be more consistent with language. Commas are used for short stops, while periods are used for long ones.

Your work is just incredible, just mind blowing stuff

Great work! You probably already figured it out but... The repeated question marks occur when the displayed string is longer than the max displayable characters. Trying to perform maths on a value already above the 10 digit limit sets it to 0, hence some extra weirdness that was noted in the original video. This is all based on NDS research but I would assume it carries over to the unity remake, as it looks like identical behaviour and the devs reused a lot of the logic present in the NDS games.

Something a modder said was that the entire backend code of BDSP was simply copy pasted from the DS games. This means that some things broke like the calculator because of the new regional functionality of C# but also that glitches from the DS games (suction cups fishing for instance) are still there. The lack of care is pretty disappointing

Amazing, would love to see more of this stuff

Truly impressed with this video, great content and you deserve more subscribers and likes. Commenting for the algorithm, good luck with your channel

the recommendation algorithm was good today. very satisfying being able to see this video just a day or two after matt's!

Oh dude, you're the ranking the trainers guy? I'm glad you're still doing well. Hope I come across another one of your videos some day!

I am very happy KZfaq recommended this to me, this is a great video! Learning about how games can be reversed engineered almost makes me want to try it, but I'm terrible at reading code so I'll stick to dumping games and getting their music files instead.

That's the quality I expect from 'modern' pokemon releases. What I am way more surprised about is how relatively easily you were able to actually get a chunk of extracted Code out of the game, in readable format :O

Funny to see pros making a similar mistake to what I did before! I had to replace "ToString();" with "ToString(System.Globalization.CultureInfo.InvariantCulture);" in some of my code to make the commas/dots not change. Lucky that I was using two computers with different locales, otherwise I would have missed the bug.

Wow, great video. When I watched Matt's original video, I thought the problem is probably somehow related to the calculator parsing the locale dependent string representation of the number and then searching for a "." character specifically to split the number into an integer and decimal part. But I had no idea why it would do that instead of just displaying the string directly and after watching your video I still have no idea :D

I really enjoyed this video and dive into some of the broken code in the Pokémon games! There’s plenty of it & I’d love to see more some day! Thank you for making this video :D Keep up the astounding work!

I highly appreciate you not treating me like I'm stupid! This topic is so interesting. Great video!

Okay analysis video! Thanks for uploading! Looking forward to the Crystal-based video! Thanks for uploading!

i thought i get bored as hell, but even me as a programmer must say you made a intressting vid, nice work!

Excited for the pokemon crystal ranking coming out

Didn't even realize you were they guy that did the SMO videos. Fantastic content

Great video, great channel. Subscribed!

This reminds me that a game dev youtuber I follow had a similar problem. On one cutscene, the characters would teleport to coordinate "1.000", which worked well on some PC's, but caused the player to end out of bounds on other cases. It was due to the country you had your PC set on. Very interesting, honestly. This video goes more in depth, which is something I, as a junior programmer, find very nice.

I'm more impressed that this thing still gives the right answer sometimes. Aside from the locale thing it looks like they treated C# like assembly. Impressive how much you can overcomplicate a calculator.

Hah, saw that prior video too. I barely understand either the math or the coding, but it's fun to watch these kinds of videos regardless.

That's why I'm subbed to this channel.

After seeing some content mills recycle your ideas into trash, I'm really reminded how outstanding your content is. Not only is there real substance, but the presentation and editing is top notch.

Changing the operator mid calculation is the same way a lot of built in calculator apps work. You could reasonably call that a feature rather than a bug.

We have multiple shared recommended videos. Nice. Anyways, excellent video!

Nice upload schedule

It's incredible that I know nothing about game dev, have never used unity, and haven't looked at C++ code in five years and I knew the second you mentioned the problem was with certain regions that it was comma-related. Such a remarkably obvious oversight and the fact that nobody ever thought about it prior to release is jarring.

So in order to display a number as images they formatted it, parsed it, and then custom formatted it.. Why???

I went to a coding boot camp and got a job as a programmer about a year and a half ago. Your videos are making me better at my job😅

Dang, havent even really started the Video yet but that infinite resistor grid nerd sniped me. 😂

this is an example of why overcomplicating something can result to chaos

Man I love bugs like these they're so annoying but funny when you find them!

Nice video!

That suppressed laugh at 3:40 haha

Lmao that intro, if you have your camera towards your dude like that while climbing a ladder it gets creepy like that too 😂

o shit he's back

Reminds me of a bugreport I saw a couple years back, where in the minecraft mod Astral Sorcery, a turkish player either got a crash or was missing an item. The culprit was that the upper/lowercase conversion functions in java are, again, locale specific with most regions having I/i paired, but turkish has I/ı and İ/i, which caused the failure.

I was hoping someone would do this!!!

Within the first minute, I knew exactly what happened. It actually happened to me in a mod from Vampire The Masquerade Redemption. The mod included a launcher that let you set some percentages of gameplay elements and they completely broke in my spanish PC. So the aesop is: pay attention to the goddamn locale when you're coding an app that is meant to be globally distributed.

This is crazy. I didn’t know any of this was possible

You could make a whole series out of decompiling Pokémon bugs

Babe, wake up. A new vídeo released

Fantastic

as a german i see nothing wrong with that calculator. that's just how math works over here

Going to save this, a little ago I gave up on a RE project because I couldn't use the header on ghidra

This could have been avoided several different ways. There should be no reason to convert it to a string at all, but if they're going to do it, they should at least search for the localized decimal separator (you can query your locale to find out which separator is valid) rather than hardcode a specific character :/

it’s wild to me that you can just… do this. the tools are out there

Genuinely had no idea pokemon was made in unity Can't believe errors like this slipped through

wasn't expecting Neon White to pop up as the example of a C# game to reverse engineer, but I'm glad to see it get mentioned since I spent a good load of time poking through it in dnSpyEx :)

The fact that the new pkmn games are made in unity means that thousands of people could do (and maybe even have done) a much better job with way fewer issues

This was really rad even though I understand about half of everything being said

As soon as you typed 1.2.3 * 2 and got 2 4 6, I realized the issue immediately

The funny thing is that the way SetNumImage is coded is an amazing portrait of a confused dev who is sort of reimplementing the modulo operator from scratch, rather just using the modulo operator. So even though that function is "correct" as far as I can tell, it could have been so much shorter and simpler: private void SetNumImage(UInt64 num, int digit, int dispIndex) { for (int place = 0; place < digit; place++) { var placeIndex = dispIndex + place; numImage[placeIndex].enabled = true; numImage[placeIndex].sprite = (CalcCode)(num % 10); num /= 10; } }

Omg Pokemon crystal trainer matches is coming out!!!

I just now learned of this game being a unity engine based game. Honestly I cannot say I expected it to be one, but honestly I’m not suprised

I said under matts video that C# had a StringFormat thing that had region versions. I said that it could be that; had no idea it was written in unity

the song in the second half is called Dragon's Den (From "Pokémon Gold & Silver") by DJMykah

My wild guess is decimal points and commas. Oh, and the International Bureau of Weights and Measures officially recommends using spaces for digit grouping (like with thousands). Same with the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry and the American Medical Association.

Man he confirmed he's doing Crystal for the ranking series! I hope you eventually earn enough from KZfaq that you can purchase a good computer specifically to run the simulations. That would be awesome for speeding things up!

KZfaq fetched me the perfect video today, I assume!

By extension, this explains the ScarVi bugs a bit. The games are just pumped out too quickly without sufficient bug checking.

On one hand, I really don't blame them too much for failing to grasp localization as that is a genuinely hard thing to wrap your head around. On the other hand I am dumbfounded by the fact they used strings to store numeric values.

Classics never die

I did have fun and did learn something

1:49 YOOOO ACE ATTORNEY IN YOUR LIBRARY