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Small differences can matter.

One that comes to mind for me is the old game Kohan: Immortal Sovereigns. There was a native Linux port for the game that could play online with the Windows machines. However, the pathfinding solution used floating point numbers to make the decisions. A very small difference in the way Linux and Windows rounded the numbers meant that an online game between a Linux and Windows host would de-synchronize after 15-30 minutes because a model that zigged on the Linux host would zag on the Windows host, and the game would detect the difference in state after a bit and kick one of the players out. There was no way to rejoin the game at this point either.

This bug was never fixed, and the company that made the port (Loki) went out of business.



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