Fixing Path of Exile's Mangled Text Bug

awesome read as a fellow software dev

RIP Mangled Text: April 25th, 2016 - May 30th, 2022. Well done, really appreciated the write up.

Thank you for the detailed write up! Fascinating stuff. I just wish this had been investigated and resolved sooner or that there were more userland tools available to help making reproducing the issue clearer for you all.

As a result of this, are there more opportunities to add debug/tracing tools on the developer side of the game to better and more quickly understand and reproduce bugs like this? It sounds like this required a lot of manual or blackbox reproduction to get moving, rather than a code-first or automated-testing approach.

Likewise, are there continual code reviews and/or test harnesses being written to look for cases where unsafe pointer references might exist elsewhere in the code..?

It's been a while but once upon a time, I used valgrind to semi-automate locating in c code bases where potential unsafe pointer references might exist, in attempts to squash potential buffer overflow conditions.. so I have some (likely, outdated experience) in that area.

Again, thanks for the detailed write up and of course thanks for finally squashing the bug!

Thanks for the effort. I'll miss Tibbs brother Tleev, tho.

Nice job, that was pretty cool to see, now I wish you people to improve the current map conversion system for standard.

such a cool writeup

Great writeup, its pretty hilarious how badly memory allocation messes things up.

interesting read. As a fellow programmer I can relate to the many issues caused by those pesky pointers, haha.

More posts like this pls! very nice read

Awesome writeup. I was surprised GGG are still using GDI and Uniscribe instead of something like DirectWrite. I'm sure the text renderer has been around awhile, so I can see updating the renderer really doesn't gain anything for them. Hey it works now, no reason to update. (especially now with the cache fix!)