The American company Electronic Arts Inc (EA) has opened the source code of the games Command & Conquer: Tiberian Dawn and Command & Conquer: Red Alert publicly available. Several dozen errors were detected in the source code using the PVS-Studio analyzer, so, please, welcome the continuation of found defects review.

Command & Conquer is a series of computer games in the real-time strategy genre. The first game in the series was released in 1995. The source code of the games was posted together with the release of the Command & Conquer Remastered collection.

The PVS-Studio analyzer was used to find errors in the code. The tool is designed to detect errors and potential vulnerabilities in the source code of programs, written in C, C++, C#, and Java.

Link to the first error overview: “The Code of the Command & Conquer Game: Bugs from the 90’s. Volume one”

Errors in conditions

V583 The ‘?:’ operator, regardless of its conditional expression, always returns one and the same value: 3072. STARTUP.CPP 1136

void Read_Setup_Options( RawFileClass *config_file )
{
  ....
  ScreenHeight = ini.Get_Bool("Options", "Resolution", false) ? 3072 : 3072;
  ....
}

It turns out that users couldn’t configure some settings. Or, rather, they did something but due to the fact that the ternary operator always returns a single value, nothing has actually changed.

V590 Consider inspecting the ‘i < 8 && i < 4’ expression. The expression is excessive or contains a misprint. DLLInterface.cpp 2238

// Maximum number of multi players possible.
#define MAX_PLAYERS 8 // max ## of players we can have

for (int i = 0; i < MAX_PLAYERS && i < 4; i++) {
  if (GlyphxPlayerIDs[i] == player_id) {
    MultiplayerStartPositions[i] = XY_Cell(x, y);
  }
}

Due to an incorrect loop, the position is not set for all players. On the one hand, we see the constant MAX_PLAYERS 8 and assume that this is the maximum number of players. On the other hand, we see the condition i < 4 and the operator &&. So the loop never makes 8 iterations. Most likely, at the initial stage of development, the programmer hadn’t used constants. When he started, he forgot to delete the old numbers from the code.

V648 Priority of the ‘&&’ operation is higher than that of the ‘||’ operation. INFANTRY.CPP 1003

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