Using % while registering your name in Select screen can glitch

Bug still occurs in 492 and below.

First, while registering your name, hold shift and press 5 to to insert a %. No percent character. Second press a number or more. Third press a letter. You will see the glitch with so many characters, messing with the death counter and even worse, you see too many hearts.

*tries it out*

Whoa. 😮dd:
It doesn't just corrupt the death counter, it screws up that entire save game slot:

(IT'S STILL TWENTY-FOUR NINETY-FIIIIIIIIIIVE~)

Obviously I'd never played that save before, let alone for almost 104 days. o.O
In fact, I couldn't play it at all: trying to start it gave me the "New quest version; please restart game" error. I guess the corruption got into that part of the save as well...

Bug still occurs in 500. I think that many people don't intend to use % anyway. But still, using % is very serious glitch. Any plans?

I messed with it a bit and never managed to get the kind of corruption you got.
Inserted a % a few times to get it to show up and had no problems.

After restarting ZC a few times I had only managed to get the name to corrupt itself.
Odd bug. Would be easiest to block those chars from the name list though since almost no one would use them.

use numbers And the percent sign.

I typed a % twice. A percent character appears, then I typed about three letters. Then I typed a %, then numbers and letters. Glitch came up and when I contunued typing even when reached the 8-character limit, ZC crashes.

most likely treats the name as a mathematical sum of some sort when a percent sign is used thus making the program leak memory till it crashes.

I just tried this out, and I know exactly what's going on.

If you type in "%f", then "0.00000" appears in it's place. If, instead, you do "%s", then a bunch of weird characters appear. If you continue to add "%s" to the string, a bunch more stuff will get added, until, on your fourth "%s", it'll crash.

Clearly, the name is being passed through sprintf() for some reason. This bug can be resolved by not using sprintf for raw user input.

Edit: Although I did not see the corruption mentioned, I imagine that if an integer on the stack happened to be used as a pointer to a string (via %s), and the string in question were long enough, you could overwrite just about anything.

Edit 2: If you type in "%1000f", then it'll write out "0" as a decimal to 1000 digits, which nicely reproduces Hypercrash's screenshots

If you type %f%s, you will see "null" on the right.

If you type %#a, you would see a white box character you never seen before in ZC. (where # is 0-9 and a is any letter)

I beleve using % makes the program act like a calculator. If you make a really bad calculation, ZC crashes.

Developers, fix that problem in the next build so that when you insert a %, it will just show the %. Bug is confirmed fixed when any tester manages to put in %%%%%%%% in the name. Remember that the bug refers to the - S E L E C T - screen and using "Register Your Name."

zcAmazing wrote:I beleve using % makes the program act like a calculator. If you make a really bad calculation, ZC crashes.

Not at all. If you read the page I linked in my previous post, you'll see that sprintf is a string formatting function. The "%whatever" stuff are placeholders in the string.

Example, where sprintf is used for translation.

sprintf("You age is %d.", age);

sprintf("Votre �ge est %d.", age);

Note that the string with "%d" is the only thing that changes, and %d is replaced with the contents of the variable 'age'.

In the case of a player's name, there are no placeholders, it's just raw text that the player enters. It should not, nay, must not be run through sprintf! I already demonstrated one way to corrupt the save file that can easily be fixed by removing sprintf.

Right, I will learn this

110th quest??? :lol: THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS 110th QUEST!!! This is what happens when you registered that, then you quit and run ZC again.

OK PEOPLE REST NOW, STOP GOING ON ABOUT IT.

i think there is more then enough info on this in this thread so calm down and wait for the developers to fix it please.

zcAmazing wrote:
Notice the first picture, 110th quest??? :lol: THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS 110th QUEST!!!

I find it amusing that there is code to display "th", when, at most, it needs "st", "nd" and "rd". I guess they're forward thinking to a time when there's four or more official quests.

franpa wrote:OK PEOPLE REST NOW, STOP GOING ON ABOUT IT.

i think there is more then enough info on this in this thread so calm down and wait for the developers to fix it please.

I know for a fact that there is no such thing as too much information.

Yeah, I remember some official ZC text somewhere...maybe the old website? saying that they wanted to do some more quests. That was before the 3rd quest contest, though...

LOL, I'd sure like to try playing a 110th quest. I imagine that by that point in the difficulty, all the enemies would, like, kill you instantly or something. 😛

or quests would take years to complete (playing them not building them)

Cute bug. Fixed in the next build.

Bug confirmed fixed in 508. Typing %%%%%%%% is possible. May the bug rest in peace.

Anybody that had posted pictures, if hosted in a file space sites that can be deleted to save space, delete them now. I always delete my posted pictures when the bug is fixed in the next build.

With all due respect, I think people can decide when to delete their pictures on their own. I personally leave screen shots up forever (or, as long as I control the web space they are on), so that, 10 years from now (when we're controlling our computers telepathically), I can look back, and say "Wow, that was a silly bug."