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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.
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.
PM: You know real world?
Make it like that
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?
This feels like the kinda project that should have a 1hr YouTube indie doc about it
I wouldn't mind seeing that! After V-Worlds was declared "completed" MSR tried to find a product group to fold it into, but nobody wanted to own it. I don't remember if XBox existed then, but the code just sat there for a few years, then I heard they opensourced it. When my kids were playing ToonTown I found a bug that let you slide behind the background and move around, like you could see that a clerk behind a counter was just a legless floating torso. The method of getting there seemed to be exactly like a V-Worlds bug, so I wondered if Disney might have been using the code. But it could have just been a common graphics bug, I dunno.
I remember finding another bug while creating a demo with a snaky sea creature swimming around. To animate a multi-segmented object you had to animate each segment separately. After the animation ran for a minute or two, enough unrelated interrupts would happen in the computer that would throw the body parts out of sync, making body parts either merge into each other or move apart, and the whole thing would look like crap. Same thing if you had somebody ride in a car or on a train - the car and character were animated separately and you'd end up with the character floating along behind the car.
I asked the dev about making the animation itself an abstract object whose position would be moved around, and attaching in-world objects to it, with position offsets. Each animation step would be computed just once instead of for each body part (or for the person and the car), and all the parts would be rendered with offsets from that one position, guaranteeing them to stay in sync visually. He said yeah that's a good idea, but we're not working on that code anymore. Oh well.
Another bug involved moving from room to room. The engine only loaded graphics for the current room, so when you went through a doorway it would load the new room and dump the previous one, causing a very unnatural visual delay that looked like a glitch in the matrix. The way we coped with this was by putting an entire world in a single room, so all the world's graphics were loaded all at once. But this not only limited the world size, it meant we had to create our own version of the room system in script. To keep track of where players and objects were, we put invisible barriers in doorways and used event handlers when things passed through them. Then we used this to enforce which players could talk to each other or hear sounds made in a given "room".
I suggested loading a cluster of rooms at once - the current one and those that were one connection away. Then when an avatar passed into a doorway the new room's graphics would already be there, no glitch, and the graphics for nearby rooms could be loaded and unloaded in the background. Again, nice idea but we're done working on that code. Sigh. I really wish I had joined that project about 6 months sooner. Not like I'm a genius or anything but these seemed like really fundamental things that should have been addressed up front.
Okay, rant over. I haven't thought about this stuff in quite a while - I'm kind of amazed so many details are still in my head. I must have agonized over it a lot at the time lol.
Hey if it’s still out there as open source could finally fix those bugs lol!
But yeah seems interesting especially if it had a second life once it was opened sourced. It kinda boggles my mind how much companies are willing to scrap things after putting so much work into it, but I guess that’s the whole sunk cost thing but still.
Plenty of nostalgia for toon town so if it was used could broaden audience of video def.
Thanks for your ‘rant’ was interesting seeing some of the same problems that pop up for me in my current game dev (how to handle when to load certain things).
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.
It’s always nice of them to ask
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.
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
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.
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.
As a programmer, I've learned to cringe at any suggestion from someone that starts with "can't you just". Cause I guarantee you, I can't "just" do that. It's way more complicated than just.
The location that the player is visually interacting with would be different, but the world wouldn't know that. Eg. in a cutscene, the player reaches out and touches a button on a control panel. If the player's X is flipped, their left hand will be further left than their right hand, and will miss the button visually as they go to press it. Asymmetrical animations might also be fucked, ie. sidestep/jump right normally extends the left leg for leverage, but now their right leg would push off visually and they would still move right.
I don't want you to come to me with problems. I want you to come with solutions. I'm going to schedule some action orientated soft skills training for you next month. There is a push to increase our education KPIs so budget is available.
No problem, just mention it in the requirements - early on. Not when everything is built to work this one specific way.
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 want dresses, and I don't care if they clip through literally everything!
mf said choas
Shadows in the real world a lack of energy Shadows in games imma need it all boss
"I noticed the elves in level 3 look too similar to the dwarves in level 5."
"It's too late to change it now!"