Hoekstraa
commented
1 day ago Hi there!
Let me dissect your message and answer question individually. I'm responding from my phone/e-mail, so please excuse poor formatting and any terse language.
- I'm getting most of my money from Hacknet, what's up with that?
If you're early game, this usually indicates the player being new to scripting, having invested their money poorly, needing to adjust their programming style or doing a particular 'run' where they limit themselves to certain gameplay features.Hacknet (at the beginning) has relatively low value. So it's worth focussing on optimizing scripts if you have the time and mental bandwidth. One critical thing I did wrong as a beginner was to only run the game while actively playing. This meant that half of my (short) playtime would be with scripts in organized disarray. This way earns you very little money for your efforts. So keep the game running, it's an idle game at heart.
- The game says I have an infinite loop, but I don't. Why do I get this message?
Make sure you have an await ns.sleep(X) inside long running loops. The reason for this is a quirk that originates from using a single threaded runtime where the programs are in control of the timesharing. Think of it like an OS that isn't timeslicing, but hops between programs whenever the program is awaiting.If you don't give control back to the OS every once in a while, the game will freeze, as the GUI, game calculations, etc. all run on the same thread as your program.Due to a lack of ns.sleep() in loops in user programs usually being the culprit and this game is often played by folks new to programming, we've tried to insert as many helpful messages as we can. Albeit wrong in edge cases sometimes, but we hope you know what you're doing then.
- The game runs badly in terms of runtime performance (when running scripts), how come?
Well, like I alluded to just now: We're running on the browser JS runtime. Meaning, it's essentially a single-threaded JIT-compiled environment. When done properly, depending on your computer specs, you can run thousands of scripts in Bitburner nowadays.That does require a little thought however, due to the restrictions the game has to deal with (and by extension, you too as it's player).
- I've found an issue! What do I do now?
If you run into a bug, which happens often enough with such a codebase, you can report it at https://github.com/bitburner-official/bitburner-src. Make sure to include steps on how to reproduce the issue if you can. If you have troubles with that or you're not sure if it's a bug, you can ask in the official Bitburner Discord for help. I hope that answers the most pressing questions. If there's anything I missed, feel free to respond!
seannaquah
Caldwell-74
d0sboots
I got this bug telling me that I had an infinite loop and asking me if i had forgotten to use ns.sleep(n);
Now, I personally take this as an insult. I have never in my entire life programmed an infinite loop by accident. I'm an extremely particular, cautious, and meticulous programmer who didn't even have any bugs whatsoever in their assignment programs, nor in their final year project, because I personally debug every single bloody bug out of my programs as much as possible. Of course, that's impossible for larger programs, but for such tiny programs, it's a piece of cake to make it 100% bug free. And I spend tons and tons of effort and time doing so. I'm an expert at finding bugs and errors, being a gamer and having coded since I was 6 years old when PCs first came out. I used a very simple but efficient script. And I made sure there were no bugs. Plus I'm have OCD, and you should know that OCD makes you worse than a perfectionist. I've spent my whole life trying to overcome my OCD. And definitely NO infinite loops. I just ran many of them because your game requires running of many scripts and threads, etc. to earn any money at all from scripts. I find myself usually getting most of my money from the Hacknets, Isn't that defeating the purpose of the game? Aren't you supposed to learn how to optimize your scripts more and more and earn most of your money from there? Or is it just me who's thinking like a programmer? Anyway, the script had an:-
await ns.sleep(<insert your number of milliseconds of at least 20 here>);
But your game lagged because well, it's JavaScript. It's written in JavaScript, right? Anyway, the JavaScript in Bitburner, is it interpreted or compiled? Because if it's interpreted, it's going to lag like hell. Like where Abaddon lives. At the very bottom. Also, I decided to do my own troubleshooting, and unticked the "kill all scripts" and restarted. and it blanked out and jammed. So I decided to force shutdown Bitburner and give it a cold restart WITHOUT killing the scripts, just a normal cold restart. And suddenly, WALLAH! No infinite loops. And in fact, I even added on another few thousand threads of the same script and there were no problems. Your game is mistaking lag for infinite loops.