The world of PC gaming is not for the faint of heart: outdated drivers, cheats, file tweaks, and unexplained errors often turn players into makeshift IT specialists. But few tales are as strange as what happened in Dogfight 1942 – and the absurd, yet effective, fix that solved it.

In the realm of PC gaming, bugs have a way of appearing out of nowhere. Outdated drivers, exploit attempts, and file manipulation can all be culprits when a game that worked flawlessly yesterday suddenly refuses to run today. These situations often force players to put on their troubleshooting hats and dig deep for solutions.

During a conversation on X, one of the weirdest bugs ever was brought up. Years after the release of Dogfight 1942 – a World War II aerial combat game – players began encountering a recurring issue. On certain missions, their planes would crash into thin air, as if hitting an invisible barrier.

The reason? The game had trees, but players simply couldn’t see them. Some took to Steam just to ask where the trees had gone, while others deduced they must be the invisible walls causing the crashes. The solution was as ridiculous as it was effective: set your computer’s date to any day in 2012.

Magically, the trees returned. But it wasn’t magic – it was a licensing problem. In 2015, one of the game’s developers revealed on the Steam forums that the issue stemmed from an external plugin called SpeedTree, which had been used to populate the game’s environments with trees. Someone on the team had mistakenly set the plugin to expire at the end of 2012. If the game checked your computer’s date and found it was later than that, the trees simply wouldn’t load.

“It would have taken us five minutes to fix,” the developer lamented. The problem was that by then, none of the original team members still worked at CI Games. Formerly known as City Interactive, the Polish company spent much of its history producing low-budget titles before becoming more widely known in recent years for publishing the Lords of the Fallen series.

Source: 3djuegos