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Alt text: In the 60s, Marvin Minsky assigned a couple of undergrads to spend the summer programming a computer to use a camera to identify objects in a scene. He figured they'd have the problem solved by the end of the summer. Half a century later, we're still working on it.
Edit: seems I'm the third person to comment this! :')
I love how this is actually an example of progress. These days, ML can be used for this kinda thing and it's not too bad at it even.
There's an XKCD comic for that.
This comic is so old, that both should be rather easy now
She did get her research team after all :)
Oh, yeah, the specific example listed was solved within roughly a month of the comic being posted. But the idea still applies, as seen with the twitter post above.
Well, sure, with an image classifier, the bird identification is doable. I'm sure I could implement that if I went looking for some open source thingamabob that does that. But it's still not something I could actually understand. That part definitely hasn't changed over the years.
Ebird/ Merlin bird id does this wonderfully.
only because people never stopped asking it to be able to id birds.
No problem, just mention it in the requirements - early on. Not when everything is built to work this one specific way.
Well yeah, we have a character model for the giant demon and the giant demon has a huge use case.
A scarf? That's a model extension. Either you're asking me to create a whole new character with a scarf baked into the mesh that will deform weirdly as the character moves, or you're asking me to implement an accessory-anchor system all for the sake of a scarf (albeit other accessories might use this new framework) which will then need a physics/cloth sim to even look half good.
You could import fabric physics and just have it lie there, but that's going to be a bigger hit on performance than you possibly can imagine and it will move weirdly (in large part becomes we're not modeling wind, just fabric in a vacuum) and the model features it will lie on top of won't deform accurately from the simulated weight, etc...
Feature requests never account for the performance hit.
Game director : we’re gonna add interact-able doors with proper door opening animations for the characters
The game designers:
The programmers and artists:
The producers:
Now we need to decide in the case of collisions if:
The frustratingly comedic unintended results of any choice makes for great organic marketing though.
Gamedev is magical.
Aside: Know what did this really well though? Resident Evil games after RE:4.
The ability to "slowly quietly open", and then at any time decide to violently action-hero kick it open to send a zombie on the other side flying, was genius.
FROM Software: Fuck that, we're doing fog-walls.
Way back in the 90s I did a contract job at MS Research on a project called "V-Worlds" - a world simulator similar to the Doom or Quake engine, but it was browser-based and everything was a script, so changing how the world worked didn't mean you had to restart a server, just change the scripts and new stuff would appear right in front of you.
Anyway the concept of adding accessories to the player's avatar and even having a pet follow you around came up, and I remember there was an involved discussion of how difficult/impossible that would be. The player's avatar was a special object class that represented a user, and didn't have the same capabilities as ordinary objects in the world. I remember asking, "Why isn't the avatar just a world object the player happens to control? Then you could do all kinds of cool stuff like let the player transform into something else just by switching objects, or let another player run your character." Dead silence. I was just a contractor, what did I know?
The giant is easy. The ground is easy. The lava though... Do you want the particles to stick together? To visually connect? To collide with each other? To interact with dynamic objects?
Design lead wants parting earth and flowing lava. Budget dictates static assets and baked in animations.
The player will jump on it, what happens then?
Only in 3D. In 2D, you slap some pixels on top and there's your scarf:
I tend to find it's the other way around. Once you've got a scarf modelled and rigged, it'll work* for all animations, but for animated 2D sprites you have a lot more things to do.
* May have visual artifacts like clipping
Player: Can you make it so that a 3 inch drop won't kill me?
DayZ Standalone dev: .........
There’s already a codebase for bursting from the ground in an explosion of lava. Everyone wants that.
You’re the first person asking for a scarf, and our system doesn’t even know what a neck is.
Time for the old NPC-with-a-train-for-a-hat trick.
Always have to remind myself of this when managers ask me if something could be done. If it's easy, I naturally get a little annoyed that they're even asking. But knowing that is my job, not theirs, and it's good that they ask. There's lots of places where they assume and things go badly.
mf said choas
I just want a game that lets my avatar be left handed.
As a gameplay programmer, I got anxiety from reading this (and I think the animators are already in a fetal position on the floor)
Can't you just swap x for -x. Run some unit tests just in case. We'll push to prod next Wednesday. Sound good? Got to dash, strategy meeting started 5 minutes ago. Seeyoubye.
Player? Easy. Scarf? Easy. Wearing a scarf? That depends on a lot of factors such as which part of the body, how the models were made and rigged, etc.
I worked at a company that made IoT stuff (which is an increasingly archaic term). The web team was pitching using a third party tool called ThingSpace to view and manage the things. The web dev said ThingSpace could do all these amazing things automatically. The manager said “can we change the color of the background?” The web dev said “…. no.”
I want dresses, and I don't care if they clip through literally everything!
