Destiny heavy ammo bug to be fixed, probably won't break everything else

Praise the Sunbro, Bungie is finally going to fix the heavy ammo bug in Destiny.

If Destiny has one bug that has gone too long unresolved, it's the heavy ammo issue.

For quite a while now Guardians wearing armour that increased heavy ammo capacity have found their supply emptied whenever they respawn, return to orbit or trigger a cutscene. It's not a big deal when you're fooling around on Patrol, but in raids and difficulty strikes like the Nightfall, it's a killer.

The issue has gone unresolved so long that players have almost stopped complaining about it and started calling for lower prices on heavy ammo refills instead - but Bungie seems to have finally found the root of the problem.

In the latest Bungie Weekly Update, Bungie community manager David "Deej" Dague said the bug has proved more than elusive, but will be fixed in an update the developer hopes to release before the end of February.

Sandbox engineer Jon Cable explained why the bug has been so hard to nail down:

"The basic flaw here is an ordering problem. Our inventory system creates your weapons when your characters spawn. When that happens, it tries to restore the same fraction of ammo that you had when you died. The bug occurred because the weapon is created before capacity modifiers from armour perks are applied, so the persisted fraction yields fewer rounds," he said.

"This bug was mainly risky because it was at the intersection of a lot of different systems – player profiles, investment, sandbox, perks, and weapon management."

As such, Bungie couldn't just whack an update on and hope for the best - it might have brought down a bunch of related systems. There was no way to bandaid the armour perk itself without restructuring the engine, either.

"In the end, I came up with a surgical change that fixes the main issue and minimizes the chances that a new problem would be introduced," Cable said.

"I do not think I can overstate the complexity of these systems – it took me several tries to come up with a fix that did not cause other problems."