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The game is still buggy. It still doesn't always clear a pile the instant a 12 is played. It gets around to it eventually.

You did get it fixed so it keeps track of the value of the top card on the pile, but if 1 or more cards get played atop a 12 when the game finally realizes a 12 was played, the cards played atop the 12 are invisible. With the speed the AI can play cards it can throw down up to 3 cards over a 12 before the game clears the pile.

A bug I haven't seen in a while is dealing the player 6 cards instead of five.

HOWEVER you've introduced a bad bug into at least one of the medium level AI players. The one on the left very often gets dealt up to 8 cards! They're laid out to the left in a continuation of the arc the normal five are. I have a screenshot.

So it appears your coders are still having problems with the concept of hard limits on variables and testing variable values to branch to the routine(s) that are supposed to be triggered by the variables reaching their upper limits.

As for the piles not always clearing at 12 (that's far more common now than when it would also rest the pile variable to 0) that appears to be a race condition, and whatever was done to fix the pile variable monitoring made the graphics problem much worse.

What it needs is a non-interruptible trigger so that the instant a 12 is played BAM it jumps to the routine to reset the pile to zero AND run the pile clearing animation. No exceptions. 12 = JUMP NOW.

As for the cards dealt to each player. The number of the counting shall be five. Six though shalt not count...

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  • scarnold2013 commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    When will the problem with piles reaching 12 and starting over going to be fixed? It's been months since it's been reported and I see I'm not the only one who has reported it. It's very annoying.

  • Anonymous commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    That's better than when it would also reset the pile to empty when it would realize there were cards on top of a 12.

    When you play VS the AI players, watch their hands. The leftmost one on Medium, with all three AI players on Medium, often gets dealt more than 5 cards, I've seen it get up to 8 cards.

    These bugs are things programmers should learn to not do when they start out. If they were properly taught, they shouldn't be able to make such bugs without intentionally doing so as a demonstration of how a race condition causes trouble or how not properly monitoring variables and not setting up non-interruptible or non-maskable interrupts makes a program fail.

    A race condition is when you have two or more processes going on simultaneously, and for the program to function correctly the processes must complete in a specific order, or one process must not interfere with another.

    What appears to be going on is some process in Skip-Bo is running and the game is paying attention to it 'too well'. When that process is doing X, it 'blinds' or masks the code that is watching for the piles to reach 12. So when that code says "Hey, over here! TWELVE!" it gets ignored instead of the subroutine(s) to do the clearing animation and reset the pile variable to 0 or empty being jumped to.

    What they have done is changed something to keep track of how many cards get stacked on top of a 12 so that when the game gets around to "Oh, I wasn't paying attention!" it clears out the 12 'cards' on the bottom of the pile and leaves the pile value at whatever is the highest card atop 12. A crude patch instead of a proper fix! It makes the card tracking work, for low values of 'work' but still leaves the visuals a mess.

    If you want a terrifying read of how dangerous a software race condition can be, look up the report of what went wrong with the Therac 25 cancer treatment machines. Fortunately the people doing this game aren't writing code for medical equipment. *eek*

  • Beth commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    Same here! It is really confusing and makes playing difficult and you end up wasting skip bo’s to see if the empty spot starts with a 2 or 5 or what number!

  • anon commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    seems to be some sort of glitch. games start with normal piles but after a while piles will leave board at 1 or 2 instead of 12 and piles will start on 2 or 3 instead of 1.

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