This page lists suspected and confirmed bugs in the TimeHunt, as well as some past bugs which
have been fixed, and other things that have changed since the game started.
It attempts to do so without revealing any spoilers, although there are other
pages around which give spoilers about the game. Still, it has to reference
some puzzles which are not available to beginning players, so for such players
there will be mild spoilers about what is to come.
These bugs and suspected bugs still exist as of the last update to this
page.
There are a number of software problems that can plague TimeHunt players.
The biggest is that the communication between Flash and/or Shockwave components
does not work completely correctly for Linux users and most Mac users. This
results in games that load with pieces missing or non-functional (usually
save/load buttons or the navigational buttons which link to the planet map,
time machine, and captain's log), and games that fail to operate properly
when they have to communicate back to the server. This occasionally affects
various Windows platforms as well, and I don't think there is any OS version
that has been totally unaffected. I found that thgis worked a lot better
on Linux after I upgraded to Flash 6 shortly after it became available for
Linux.
Some people have trouble with the sound on the Shockwave games which have
sound - specifically the musical flowers and the black-screen audio puzzle
on Neptune. The advice for dealing with this is to update to the latest sound
driver, then completely uninstall and reinstall Shockwave. This worked for
me on one computer and not on another, so YMMV.
Some Windows 2000 and XP systems have trouble with the Schrödinger's
Rabbit puzzle; it will complain about a script error right from the start
and you won't be able to play the game. Upgrading the the latest service
packs may or may not cure the problem.
Other technical advice can be found on the Technical Advice page linked
from the Order/Law page from the swirly thing on the home page.
Occasionally the machine that runs www.timehunt.com is down. This page
is merely a frame that loads http://linux.timehunt.com
and you can sometimes use that URL to play when the other machine is down.
There are a couple bugs here.
On two of the chemistry diploma puzzles, there is a hint to enter your
answer in the form '6.4 E7'. The hint should read '6.4E7' - you must enter
it without a space for it to be accepted. Also, for some reason after you
have submitted a wrong answer, you have to click Submit twice after each
subsequent answer to get a response.
The answer to this puzzle gives a message similar to the one for approaching
a satellite, but no satellite name is shown. Then a black screen appears
which fails to load a Flash movie. This is a confirmed bug; it is supposed
to unlock a time machine feature.
These texts contain various typos. Chapter 5 and chapter 6 both begin with
an extra C at the start of the word CHAPTER. Also, Chapter 5 has duplicate
associations of some of the letters. Chapter 4 swaps two of the usual directional
associations; not sure if this is a bug or intentional. In Chapter 4, verse
III, one occurrence of the word extremities is misspelled.
Vacuum is misspelled.
If you type a % in chat, it and the following character are deleted from
the displayed text; if you put it at the end of the line, your chat ends
up on the same line as the previous line of chat. Another character clears
the chat screen.
The icon in the Time Machine is typoed Capitain's Log. If you type
a \ in a captain's log entry, it is deleted when saved. If you try to edit
a captain's log entry containing a " then the entry is truncated at the ".
These bugs are no longer present, but may have hindered you in the past.
Go back and try it again!
During the beta, the gateway was looking for the wrong answer, and the
time machine was looking for the right answer but needed a decimal point
which was not allowed in the code entry field in early versions. The time
machine was fixed late in the beta period, and the gateway puzzle was fixed
upon launch.
During the beta, the answer for this puzzle was not accepted until after
the puzzle was removed from the surface of Jupiter. For a while after that,
the password gave the Katya puzzle itself. This was fixed at launch.
During the beta, the correct answer to this puzzle gave a series of Login
OK messages instead of the response it was supposed to give (which is
still rather unusual, compared to other answers, but the current behavior
is correct).
During the beta, after you filled in the fourth cross-stitch message, you
got a script error and the game stopped. This was confirmed to be because
a puzzle was removed. Since the launch, this has been working.
Two of the puzzles on Neptune and the Our Cosmic Habitat essay on Uranus
did not load at times during the beta. All have been fixed since the launch.
During the beta, this game was giving out the wrong clues. This was fixed
for the launch. Just after the launch, level 8 of the Domino game was broken.
When you started the dominoes falling, the first segment fell towards the
bunny and thus towards the edge of the board, making it impossible to complete.
This was fixed within a couple days. There is another minor display bug remaining,
but it is too spoily to post here.
Several typos in the text in the beta (which were not a puzzle)
were fixed for the official launch.
At the very beginning of the beta, this game gave the wrong answers, due
to an early test version of the game being installed instead of the real one.
Throughout the beta, the game got hung up and started repeating itself near
the end of the third message. This has been fixed.
The clues you get from this game originally depended on your solution
path, but they were not supposed to and were fixed.
For several months starting at the launch, the drop-caps at the start of
each section of the book were showing up in a Dingbats-like font instead of
the fancy script they were in before. Fixed.
Originally, when you solved this puzzle, it connected and then said "entry
incorrect". This was a bug. Now there is a checker button, and when you
have the entry correct the grid spins.
These features have changed at some point since the public beta of the
game began.
The machine in the fourth room changed subtly; its top measurement changed from 10 to "above 10" (the column fills to the top).
Several passwords used for testing purposes gave the message Time machine
function unlocked. See User's Guide during the beta. Of course, there
was no User's Guide then, and the one I found (an answer to one of the chemistry
puzzles) did not have any noticeable effect except to make some of the blue
lights on the Time Machine console light up occasionally when they were testing
various things. These were disabled for the official launch.
During the early part of the beta, this puzzle appeared on the surface
of Jupiter. Later it was removed, and it showed up in the release as a satellite.
Three coded messages - Mercury meta puzzle and two satellites with ciphertext
divided into 5-character blocks - changed between the beta and the launch.
This page linked from the login page, which shows a status report of the
game, changed on August 12. The perhaps misleading count of unseen pages
was replaced with a count of planets solved, and also now the name of one
leading player is listed.