Nipplegate, unoptimised fish and the Kayran's evil twin
The current issue of CD-Action has an article with stories of weird bugs and other assorted madness encountered Polish developers and distributors. Three of those cases are related to the Witcher games:
- During presentations of The Witcher 1, the game suddenly started crashing. It turned out that the reason was... fish, which had too many polygons. This meant if the camera was trained at some fish, the game would crash. As the problem could not be solved on the spot, people playing the demo had to do everything to keep fish off the screen.
- While the japanese PC version of The Witcher 2 had no trouble getting published (the PC is practically nonexistent as a gaming platform there), the X360 version required overtime from the devs again. The whole affair, dubbed - quite aptly -"Nipplegate" by CDP, started when CERO (roughly the equivalent of PEGI) sent the Poles a long list of "things allowed and not allowed". The team faced considerable the task of removing female nipples from the game. They started with extending the design of some of the cutscenes, to include, say, beer mugs that would hide the breasts. Some ladies suddenly became shy in Geralt's presence and covered themselves up, and Triss even came to sport a stylish bikini in the elven bathhouse scene. Even more interesting was the story of Yennefer - her breasts first became pixellated, but ithen the devs were told that the japanese found this sort of censoring arousing... they just removed the sorceress' nipples altogether.
- Agnieszka Szóstak: "We had a series of important presentations promoting The Witcher 2", during which we showed the fight with the kayran. Of course, we had tested the sequence a dozen times before, but suddenly something started going awry. Once in a while the fight would just bug out, and no one knew why. Typical random bug without a clear cause. We started digging through the code, checking the build and eventually it turned out... there were two kayrans. The game would pick one at random before the fight, and one of them was incorrectly tagged. Easy to fix, but very difficult to identify, which cost us all a few grey hairs."
The current issue of CD-Action has an article with stories of weird bugs and other assorted madness encountered Polish developers and distributors. Three of those cases are related to the Witcher games:
- During presentations of The Witcher 1, the game suddenly started crashing. It turned out that the reason was... fish, which had too many polygons. This meant if the camera was trained at some fish, the game would crash. As the problem could not be solved on the spot, people playing the demo had to do everything to keep fish off the screen.
- While the japanese PC version of The Witcher 2 had no trouble getting published (the PC is practically nonexistent as a gaming platform there), the X360 version required overtime from the devs again. The whole affair, dubbed - quite aptly -"Nipplegate" by CDP, started when CERO (roughly the equivalent of PEGI) sent the Poles a long list of "things allowed and not allowed". The team faced considerable the task of removing female nipples from the game. They started with extending the design of some of the cutscenes, to include, say, beer mugs that would hide the breasts. Some ladies suddenly became shy in Geralt's presence and covered themselves up, and Triss even came to sport a stylish bikini in the elven bathhouse scene. Even more interesting was the story of Yennefer - her breasts first became pixellated, but ithen the devs were told that the japanese found this sort of censoring arousing... they just removed the sorceress' nipples altogether.
- Agnieszka Szóstak: "We had a series of important presentations promoting The Witcher 2", during which we showed the fight with the kayran. Of course, we had tested the sequence a dozen times before, but suddenly something started going awry. Once in a while the fight would just bug out, and no one knew why. Typical random bug without a clear cause. We started digging through the code, checking the build and eventually it turned out... there were two kayrans. The game would pick one at random before the fight, and one of them was incorrectly tagged. Easy to fix, but very difficult to identify, which cost us all a few grey hairs."
