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The mangled text bug in Path of Exile has been slain. After six years, there is a fix for the infamous mangled text bug that players have been encountering in the game way back in 2.3.0 back in 2016. There is a new devblog from Ben, a UI programmer, detailing the journey to fixing this infamous bug.
Because this bug had been in the game for so long, there has been interest from the community in learning just how they actually got to the bottom of this and fixed it. If you’ve played Path of Exile, you’ve almost certainly encountered it.
“The bug has been known by a few different names, referred to by things such as “jumbled”, “corrupted” or “krangled” text. Internally we mostly referred to it as being “mangled” so that’s what I’ll be calling it.”
First ticket for this text bug came almost exactly six years ago, on June 4th, 2016. Text would be squished together and sometimes overlapping other text. Sometimes characters had the wrong glyph show up.
So what spurred the team back into action on this by-then common bug? It started getting reported more often. This began with the release of Scourge. However, other than simply playing the game for a long time, it was really hit-or-miss and they couldn’t replicate it. Eventually, a particular function that was not working correctly was found, and the bug was successfully replicated.
He goes into the technical details, so if you are familiar with programming you can learn from just what that documentation showed. For everyone else, Ben says that the root cause of this bug “wasn’t that interesting” but because it had become so common and gone six years without a fix, “This bug will stick around in my memory though due to the particularly strange symptoms, being really annoying to track down and even just the notoriety of having stuck around for so long”.
You can read the full blog over at Path of Exile.
