What were some of the more interesting, creative, or just absolute pain-in-the-butt bugs that you've had to deal with in the past?

One definitely stands out. Recently we've had quite an amusing one with the room system, because we found that we were getting some room system crashes when people were doing stuff with the inventory, and that doesn't make any sense, they're completely unrelated. Eventually, after a lot of pain, we figured out that it was to do with helmets. When you drag a helmet out of the inventory and it goes as a preview on your head, well, a helmet has a room inside. But it's not a real room when it's just the UI preview. It's the hologram UI helmet. But the room inside the hologram was still trying to talk to the real room system and going horribly wrong because of that. So we had ghost rooms from helmets.

There's a room inside the helmets?

A room is anything that contains atmosphere to breathe from.

I think we had some interesting ones when we added refueling. That was another feature I worked on. Mostly about the docking, because up until then, docking was something that happened between the stations, which are static and have infinite mass for all purposes, and a ship that is also not trying to move away. But once refueling came in, people were trying to quantum travel with ships, were catapulting ships: you extend the arm, accelerate to cruise speed, and you release the fighter and it goes spinning, stuff like that. The code was supposed to handle that. It was supposed to break, it was supposed to punish the players. It didn't. So we were getting some pretty funny situations where ships would start clipping back and forth inside the Starfarer. Hopefully you guys are not seeing that so much these days, but it was pretty funny to debug.

One of my favorite classic bugs was way back in Arena Commander days. I think this predated the PU. Ships like Hornets would just explode randomly. Sometimes they would explode after two minutes of flight, sometimes after eight minutes of flight, and it was so hard to replicate. Some people could fly forever and be fine. Eventually what they determined was the old flight suit had a flashlight that hung on the belt. And because of the physicalized nature of the thing, when you were doing certain moves, hitting certain Gs, the flashlight was dinging the side of the ship for one point of damage, one point of damage, one point of damage, until eventually the ship exploded. And there was no predicting it. It was impossible to track because everybody flies differently and pulls different moves. So that was my awakening to, holy crap, these things can come from anywhere, even from a stupid flashlight.

I think we still have that one, but for mining ships: the mining consumables that you can put on the heads tended to detach without inheriting the speed. So if you were cruising through the Yela asteroid belt after mining a rock and suddenly one of your modifiers expires and tries to detach itself from the ship, you would suddenly have a collision at a thousand meters per second. I'm really sorry for all the mining players out there.