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Bugs vs Glitches


bmn

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I'd normally head off to Google instead of posting something like this here, but it's been no help to the great B'man despite there being plenty of discussion on the subject.

So - and this is something that's confused me for a while - just what differentiates between bugs and glitches?

I've seen three definitions that actually make sense (the rest say the two are different, then give long-winded definitions that pretty much say they're the same thing -_-), and one is the one I've subscribed to for years.

One, the simplest one, is that bugs and glitches are two different words for the same thing.

Another says that a bug is the actual badly-produced code, and the glitch is the effect produced by the bug.

The definition I've followed is the most complex one, but it makes the most sense to me. It says that a bug is an effect caused by erroneous code, and that a glitch is an effect produced by "good" code - that is, code that doesn't contain errors. If that's confusing to you (and it's still a little confusing to me), then the wall-zipping and the like in the early Sonic games is a glitch (or rather a number of glitches) by this definition, caused by code that doesn't contain errors, but is simplistic enough - necessary because of the relative weakness of the hardware - to allow unintended effects in particular situations. On the other hand, a bug might be something like the problems in the original release of Metropolis Street Racer, where saves would be corrupted, you could get through championships without enough points, and Tokyo would constantly be at night.

The MSR example is of effects that can be - and were - rectified by fixing the errors in the underlying code that caused them, hence bugs. In the Sonic example, however, stopping these effects from happening would require wholesale changes to the way the game runs, as it's actually the correctly-functioning system in place that causes them, hence glitches.

So, what do you guys think when you see "bug" and "glitch" bandied around? And does anyone out there have a better definition for me?

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