Just Cause 3 - The Big Glitch... except I can manually trigger it!
3A historic moment in Big Glitch history happened recently.
Out of the blue, and while I was unable to use my computer due to being in the middle of a move, prominent Just Cause 3 modder LukeJC contacted me out of the blue saying he'd found a way to manually trigger the Big Glitch, and an explanation for why it happens.
Here's his video explaining some aspects of it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4ILl8SJycc
All entities (NPCs, vehicles, weapons, buildings, etc) are made up of two parts - a data archive and a property file. The data archive is loaded first, which contains models, textures, particle effects, its name, etc. After that, the property file is loaded, which takes everything inside the data archive and actually turns it into what it's supposed to be.
He found that if the game can't load an entity's property file, it'll halt all other loading operations until it can, which is how the Big Glitch happens. There's no actual entity that lacks a property file, rather the game's property file loader occasionally lags behind and one property file gets infinitely stuck in a queue somewhere, causing the Big Glitch. This is also why it can recover on rare occasisons, it's because it finally got unstuck and loaded successfully, which resumes all other types of loading.
Therefore, if you load an entity that's been modified to not have a property file, that instantly triggers it, because it's looking for a file that doesn't exist, which is the same as it not being able to find it. I'm using a debug build of the game (which unfortunately lacks anything past the Mech Land Assault DLC) to spawn a vehicle that's had this modification made to it, giving it the label "Trigger Big Glitch".
The Big Glitch can happen in other games, but not through this method. It's been triggered exactly two times in Just Cause 4 - once by LukeJC accidentally, and once by someone on reddit. It can also happen in Just Cause 2, but even more rarely, and the PC release is likely too fast for it to happen. A variant can be triggered manually by loading a location data archive (.nl) that's been written with the wrong byte order, so a Big Endian file on PC or a Little Endian file on PS3. Each game has their differences between how it acts, but it's pretty much the same everywhere - the games cannot load anything new. However, no one has ever gotten it to happen in Just Cause 1... perhaps the Just Cause 2 method could work once its modding tools advance a bit more?
Fun fact: while experimenting with this and getting these recordings, the Big Glitch happened naturally.
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