Why the bug I wrote became a core gameplay mechanic?!
Chapter 486 - 469: 0.1+0.2≠0.3

Chapter 486: Chapter 469: 0.1+0.2≠0.3

Without time to think too much, Zhuge Jun headed straight to the boss room and then successfully took down the boss.

He had no choice, the difficulty was just too low. As a player on his second playthrough who had already mastered most bosses’ GP timing, taking on a boss at the lowest difficulty was a walk in the park for Zhuge Jun.

After the fight, Zhuge Jun checked the changes in the Dynamic Difficulty value.

Although he still carelessly took two or three hits, the difficulty was now 1 (1200 points), which was still considered "lowest difficulty"!

This was important as it determined the margin of error allowed during the boss fight.

If being hit once would knock him out of difficulty 1, then the error margin would be too low and the bug would be hard to exploit.

However, evidently, difficulty 1 ranged from 0 to 5000 points, and being hit by the boss only added between 200 to 500 points depending on the move. This meant even if a player accidentally messed up during a boss fight, it wasn’t a big deal; they could still maintain difficulty 1.

Of course, if you made a huge mistake, like getting comboed to death by the boss, that wouldn’t work. Because once you died and respawned at the gas lamp, the difficulty would revert to the default level 3.

So, to say this method was completely brainless? That wasn’t quite the case.

The time between bosses remained quite dangerous.

If a player defeated a current boss and then died on the way to the next one, it meant they would have to maintain difficulty 3 for a long time, which didn’t meet the requirements for the God-making ending.

Regardless, this mechanism was a significant advantage for players.

For players determined to achieve the God-making ending, they usually had a good grasp on their gameplay. In a scenario where the bosses’ attack desire drastically decreased and only simple moves were used, maintaining a high GP success rate wasn’t hard.

Even if they failed, players could find a Fanatic again and brush up their difficulty points to the limit of 4999.99, and then rechallenge the boss.

After defeating the boss, they could maintain that difficulty level and continue forward.

Zhuge Jun decided on the spot to share his major discovery online!

He had the confidence that after some attempts, he could achieve the Divine Ending, but even in the best-case scenario, it would still take at least ten hours.

Moreover, as a gamer, it was natural to share something beneficial to the public right away!

All he needed to do was simply edit the gameplay video and add some commentary.

As for the title, it was simple: "Shocking! The universally detested Fanatic is actually the key to the ’Blood of Lies’ Divine Ending!"

Just thinking about it felt exciting!

Originally, Zhuge Jun was discouraged by the bizarre requirements for the Divine Ending, but now, he was filled with renewed vigor.

Regardless of whether it was a bug or a hidden mechanic, players longing for the Divine Ending had salvation!

In the evening, Lilith appeared on time, looking in a great mood.

Although "Blood of Lies" had encountered some minor setbacks in the last two days, it was still within her expectations overall.

In fact, according to Lilith’s original plan, players were supposed to spend more time searching for the conditions to achieve the Divine Ending.

But Lilith didn’t anticipate one thing, that the hacker would act prematurely!

If the hacker hadn’t released that video, the Divine Ending of "Blood of Lies" could have remained a secret for at least a week or even half a month. Relying on players to search manually, this lengthy period would have been enough to harvest a substantial amount of negative emotions.

Unfortunately, the hacker’s single video greatly accelerated this process.

Initially, Lilith found it somewhat unacceptable, but she soon adjusted her mindset.

Upon reflection, though she lost some negative emotions, it wasn’t a significant amount.

If the hacker hadn’t intervened, players might have searched for a longer time, but it was also very likely that many would give up or quit, and they wouldn’t necessarily be willing to persist that long.

The hacker, by spoiling the solution, gave many players a clear goal, speeding them on the path of attempting the Divine Ending with no return.

The players’ attempts were also an important opportunity to generate massive negative emotions.

So Lilith got over it, realizing that it was unrealistic to have everything go perfectly. As long as the negative emotions continued to grow, that was good enough.

"Let’s see, how many streamers broke down trying the Divine Ending today?"

Lilith opened the live streams with a happy hum, got her Diet Coke, snacks, and sunflower seeds ready, and prepared to enjoy.

However, just a few seconds into viewing, she realized something was off.

"Gu Fan! What is going on!!"

Gu Fan hurried over and saw Lilith angrily pointing at the screen inside the live streaming room, voicing her accusation.

The video featured a small-time streamer, whose live stream boasted only a few thousand viewers.

Because Lilith’s previous plan had nearly captured all the popular big-name streamers online, making them de facto plants for Nitiandang, she now had to place her hopes on these smaller streamers.

However, the content that the small streamer was broadcasting nearly made Lilith spew a mouthful of blood.

He started by seeking out a Fanatic, purposely getting hit by a skill, then entered the boss fight, which immediately turned to difficulty level 1. Effortlessly defeating the boss, he then hurriedly moved on to the next key plot point.

To achieve a God-making ending, simply defeating the boss wasn’t enough; one also had to lie correctly at certain key junctures. Judging by the expertise of the streamer, smoothly achieving the God-making ending shouldn’t have been a problem.

This was clearly the complete opposite of what Lilith had envisioned!

Gu Fan too was perplexed, "President Li, what’s wrong?"

Lilith angrily slapped the desk, "What’s wrong? Everything is wrong! Didn’t you notice that the Dynamic Difficulty level is completely off!!"

This small streamer had also downloaded the plugin that shows the Dynamic Difficulty level in real-time, so the specific Dynamic Difficulty value was clearly displayed on the screen.

In fact, after Zhuge Jun discovered the bug, even without the plugin, it didn’t affect the players’ ability to achieve the Divine Ending.

Because as long as you were under the Fanatic’s skill for a certain amount of time, the Dynamic Difficulty value would inevitably become 4999.99. Therefore, players didn’t need the plugin to be certain of the specific change in difficulty value.

Many people used the plugin just for convenience and to give themselves some psychological comfort.

At this moment, this plugin-using streamer had inadvertently helped Lilith more quickly identify the problem.

"Who did this? Who’s responsible for this!"

Lilith realized that this streamer was clearly following someone else’s strategy, which seemed to have been thoroughly exploited and impeccably perfected.

Before fighting the boss, they would first get a hug from a Fanatic, then defeat the lowest difficulty boss, maintaining the lowest difficulty level for the next boss. If they were hit on the way, they’d find another Fanatic for a hug, just to be safe, and continue this endless cycle until achieving the God-making ending.

Thanks to the excellent map design of "Blood of Lies," and because nearly every region had a Fanatic, players could quickly remedy any mistakes.

This was obviously not what Lilith wanted to see!

Gu Fan quickly turned on the computer, started a search, and soon pinpointed the culprit—the video released by Zhuge Jun.

In the video, Zhuge Jun provided a detailed explanation on how to replicate the bug.

This quickly caused a huge commotion among the player community. Soon after, players collaborated and not only confirmed the reality of the bug but also completed the entire routing for the God-making ending.

Some content creators were even already working on producing video guides on the quickest way to achieve the God-making ending using this method.

Once a video guide was made, the difficulty for players to achieve the God-making ending would undoubtedly decrease significantly!

For Lilith, this was nothing short of catastrophic news!

"Why would such a strange bug appear!!

"Gu Fan, find out! Dig deep and find out for me!"

Lilith was infuriated, utterly unable to comprehend the situation.

However, this time, Gu Fan didn’t even bother looking at the code but immediately gave a rough diagnosis.

"This looks like... it’s probably a classic bug caused by floating-point arithmetic error, which is the result of a small oversight in the conversion between integer and floating-point operations.

"The Dynamic Difficulty happened to produce a special fraction that, during system refresh, got stuck at a critical point and turned into data the system couldn’t recognize correctly, leading to an erroneous response and automatically lowering the game’s Dynamic Difficulty to the lowest level."

Lilith was bewildered, "...Speak in layman’s terms!"

Gu Fan coughed lightly, "Alright, then let me explain it in simpler terms.

"But before that, I think it’s necessary to enlighten you, President Li, on some basic programming knowledge. Otherwise, even if I exhausted explanations, you wouldn’t understand why such a ridiculous bug would occur just because of a decimal number.

"First of all, President Li, do you know that in programming, 0.1 + 0.2 ≠ 0.3?"

Lilith opened her mouth in shock, "Why, why not?"

Gu Fan explained, "In reality, of course, 0.1 + 0.2 equals 0.3, but in programming, it doesn’t, because programming is binary. To convert a decimal to binary, we use the ’divide-by-2’ method, which means if you want to convert the decimal number 8 to binary, you would divide by 2 four times, with remainders of 0, 0, 0, and 1 respectively. Therefore, the resulting binary number is 1000.

"But that’s conversion for whole numbers, when it comes to negative numbers or fractions, things are a bit different.

"I won’t go into details here. In short, to convert a decimal fraction to binary, we use the ’multiply-by-2’ method. We first convert the whole number part from decimal to binary, then convert the fractional part from decimal to binary, and finally merge the two binary results to get a binary representation of a fraction.

"However, there’s a problem here. Only a very few fractions can be perfectly converted by this ’multiply-by-2’ method, with a large number of numbers resulting in endless loops when converted to binary.

"For instance, the decimal 0.1 when converted to binary becomes 0.0001100110... and since the computer’s resources are limited, we can’t directly record this long string of numbers. Thus, we only record the binary number that most closely approximates 0.1, which leads to a loss of precision."

As Gu Fan spoke, he rapidly calculated on the computer to help Lilith understand.

And Lilith’s brows were tightly knitted; her brain clearly overloaded. Yet she managed to grasp the gist of it through Gu Fan’s patient step-by-step explanations.

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