old questions, new questions

[FAdmiral]

Originally Posted by acid001

4. why does this game cause so many diffrent behaviors? example some people get stupid destroyers, while others get lethal ones,some ppl get periscope depth and crashdive no problem whiile others get a one way trip to the bottom of the sea?or diffrent behaviors on one machine from game to game? this confuses me greatly. i would think that a bug or issue would be experienced all the time on all machines (excluding diffrent platforms) . maybie diffrent processors?,example few years ago most games seemed to be written on intel chisets,i remember seeing patches from like amd i think it was the amd people hs to put out the patch,not the game s publisher is something simelar happeneing now?

please exuse a dumb old man and dont flame just answer please

Having had an install of SH4 that had everthing wrong and then the 2nd install
that had it all right would lead me to believe something went bad with
the first install. And you are not a dumb old man, you get smarter as you get
older. I should know cause I am 68....

JIM

[Dantenoc]

Answer to question 1:

Humans understand human languages such as English, Spanish, and so on and so forth. Computers do not.

Computers can understand low level languages, often called "machine code", which are basicaly a very ackward set of numeric values that represent instructions to the computer. Humans can not.

The solution: a compromise. Programs are written on high level programming languages like C# or Visual Basic which resemble the languages that humans can uderstand (Most are based on the english language), and afterwards, they are "compiled" (translated) into machine code so that it can then be executable on a computer. Once compiled (translated into machine code) a program is no longer understandable to a human being, and hence can not be realistictly expected to be able to modify it. To make matters worse, translation is, for the most part, one way only, so it cannot be "untranslated" back into a high level language. Only the owner of the original program before it was compiled (the "source code") can change it and then re-compile it again.

The issue is, of course, more complex than that, but that's the short explanation.