Devlog · tag
silent-failure
27 entries tagged “silent-failure”.
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Empty Sleeves
A garment loaded in Marvelous Designer 2026.1.149 sits above the avatar with both arms
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Collapsed to a Point
A mesh that imports into Unreal Engine 5.8 with smaller bounds than the file it came
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The First Time Anybody Looked
A day of green numbers on the snooker club - 30,009 rules checks passed, 139 voice
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Agreeing on the Wrong Answer
A frame of snooker that looked like a close game turned out to be two players
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Two Kinds of Black
A Wollaton-style manor went from a scoped idea to a quay, a boathouse and a
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The Probe Said It Was Open
A corner pocket that measured shut, a probe that fired off the table and called it
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A Gap Down Each Side
A Sunday spent on a secret society. Fourteen men who drove themselves in, parked
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Named for What It Wasn't
A Saturday that ran from a riverbed to a secret society. Landscape grass standing
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The River Went Black
A Thursday that ran past one in the morning on three faults with the same shape. Grass
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The Fix That Emptied the Street
A Thursday spent putting gutters, downpipes, chimney pots, aerials and satellite dishes
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Standing Up and Going Nowhere
A sit-and-stand bug that had been shrugged off in the pub for weeks turned out to be
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Four Centimetres Under
A man stood outside the depot having a cigarette and James asked whether he was on
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It Was Never the Frame Rate
A nine-second shot of a man in a lorry cab looked like it was running at fifteen
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The Man Who Does It for a Living
A refuse loader who does the job for a living watched the bin round and said the
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Forty-Five Listeners
Taking out a fishing rod switched the head torch off, because one key was feeding
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The Box That Was Not a Box
A day building the physical kit for the eBike food-delivery gig - a top box, a paper bag, a rear rack and a branded courier jacket on a MetaHuman. Four things went wrong and every one of them passed a check first: a box whose faces all pointed inwards, a wheel radius three separate maths fits got wrong, materials that reported themselves bound while the mesh shipped grey, and a logo that was invisible because it was plugged into the wrong colour layer.
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Signs in Mid-Air
Fitting out the bookies on the corner - carpet, wallpaper, a lowered branded ceiling raft, a counter and two fruit machines - and the four traps that made it take twice as long. A centre-pivot cube that threw the ceiling signage into mid-air, a rug that shipped as the engine checkerboard while every readback insisted it was perfect, a second run that refused to wallpaper the walls it had just papered, and an editor that reported an actor missing right up until two of them turned up in play.
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Zero Bytes
A one-line find-and-replace destroyed 155 KB of hard-won build notes on a project with no version control, because opening a file for writing empties it before anything can go wrong. Ninety-six per cent of it came back out of the AI agent's own session transcripts, and the recovery had four wrong turns of its own. Also - the fruit machine that paid nothing because a perfectly correct function was called by absolutely nobody.
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A Different Culprit Every Week
Six weeks of frame-rate work on an open-world Unreal project, three confident diagnoses, and the real answer was that the editor was open the whole time and holding most of an 8 GB graphics card. Closing it moved GPU time from 1038 ms a frame to 14.5. Also - why the frame rate limit in your config file has never once taken effect.
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Two Ways to Draw Nothing
A train exhaust plume refused to draw for an entire session. There were two independent faults and either one alone produces an identical, perfectly silent blank, so fixing one changed nothing and the bisect read as noise. The system reported zero errors and UpToDate the whole time. The day's other lesson was that almost every instrument used to check the fix was quietly lying - the screenshot tool, the viewport reporter, and a property readback that echoed my own words back at me.
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Seven Metres Above the Road
A town bus that hovered over its own route and froze behind pedestrians turned out to be three unrelated faults - a baked height array that had gone stale under a re-carved road, an interpolation target twelve metres too far ahead, and two waiting conditions with no timeout. Includes the ground-trace fix that looked obvious and turned out to be impossible.
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Pressing It Did Nothing
Three teleport keys in the game were dead for months while every automated check said they were fine - because the test that "proved" the binding worked injected the action and skipped the keyboard entirely. Plus the key-availability audit that lied twice, in two different ways.
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Nobody Walked In
Four sessions of navmesh work built a correct route from the street to the bar, and the NPC spawner never put a single body on it - plus the voxel arithmetic that stops stairs meshing, a door leaf that eats a doorway, and a coverage figure that read 100% because the question was wrong.
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Thirty Defects in One Sitting
A human drove the game while an agent fired 2560x1440 captures and read every frame as it landed. It found about thirty defects in one sitting, closed a bug that had been open for twelve days, and - just as usefully - produced three confident diagnoses that a readback then demolished.
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OK at Every Step
A tool that returns the wrong shape instead of an error took a live email signup form down, and reported success while doing it. What went wrong, how it was found, and the guard that now catches it.
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Twelve Hours on the Grass
A day spent making 98 hectares read as a parkland golf course. The grass layer took twelve hours, got fixed, and was then deleted on purpose - what actually sold the course was 274 trees, 2,180 shrubs, 212 gorse bushes, 79 molehills, a fence, and a flock of rooks that first appeared eight centimetres underground.
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Three Success Messages
A script tagged 186 placed props, read every one back, verified them, called save and wrote nothing at all - two independent faults, three success messages, and one file timestamp that finally told the truth.