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[Revolutionary]

I knew about the Fallout 3 train NPC, but I didn't know that the cinematics in New Vegas were simply placing you in a room with a projector while an NPC talks to you lol

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=7&v=JJnWwli3Thg

 

[Gaz_RB]

for a thread of praise i have to drop a line as an indie dev and a >>>compentent<<< video game player i notice all of these and they patronize me really hard and its a good way to buy your game a steam refund because i'm not a moron

e: the fat majority of these are designed to solve problems with shooting games and fps which are boring to the core because they can't actually offer the player a real challenge and have to resort to this AAA level fake gameplay garbage

lol alright man.

 

[PsionBolt]

This is for this simple reason alone i can't stand to play another Fire Emblem game...

I'll accept your silly reasoning if and only if you've completed the best Fire Emblem, Thracia 776. It uses true and honest RNG, and there's not a single player who completed the game without at least a few horror stories about how their healing staff missed with a 99 on the worst possible turn.

When Mike Bithell says pioneered by Insomniac, which game would that be? Cos MGS1 does this to an extent.. Obviously pushing into the wall made you lean, but if you're outside of that threshold Snake will run along the wall's direction, ignoring the exact joystick direction.

Yeah, it's pretty damn old -- you nudge around obstacles even in Dragon Quest games, at least as far back as 1992's DQ5 (probably even earlier, but I can't perfectly recall).

 

[Ferr986]

This is wrong. They lose aggro by increasing the distance with the player, not by being off-camera. This isn't a "hidden under the hood" thing, it's an obvious thing you see right away.

Yeah this is so easy to test, you can look at them and see how they give up. It's solely based on distance (with DS2:SOTFS having increased distance for de-agro).

Really, Souls AI is as basic as it gets.

 

[Shifty]

Yeah, it's pretty damn old -- you nudge around obstacles even in Dragon Quest games, at least as far back as 1992's DQ5 (probably even earlier, but I can't perfectly recall).

Nudging around obstacles is a bit different, that's largely a result of a game's collision system pushing objects out of walls without completely negating their velocity, thus causing them to 'slide'.
As an interesting aside, sticky collision in old games generally happens because the engine simply opts to zero your lateral velocity instead.

The technique Mike Bithell is on about is a bit more 'high-level' in that it filters the player's input before the character receives it, so the collision system acts as more of a last resort after correction.

hell, heres one of my favourite examples, from one of the JJBA anime intros.

 

[iShouldGoPro]

Coyote Time is most notably present in Donkey Kong Country after a roll or cartwheel, and more recently in Crash 1 Remaster if i'm not mistaken

 

[Fafalada]

Are you sure it's not for the camera itself?

It's not - realistic scale is often ignored for getting the right sense of overall composition - not uncommon in FPS and racing games as well.

 

[Sande]

Coyote Time is most notably present in Donkey Kong Country after a roll or cartwheel, and more recently in Crash 1 Remaster if i'm not mistaken

Uncharted: The Lost Legacy was just released.

I might be wrong, but I think it's more common to have at least a bit of coyote time than not at all, at least in games with platforming.

 

[televator]

I knew about the Fallout 3 train NPC...

Speaking of which:

 

[PsionBolt]

Nudging around obstacles is a bit different, that's largely a result of a game's collision system pushing objects out of walls without completely negating their velocity, thus causing them to 'slide'.
As an interesting aside, sticky collision in old games generally happens because the engine simply opts to zero your lateral velocity instead.

The technique Mike Bithell is on about is a bit more 'high-level' in that it filters the player's input before the character receives it, so the collision system acts as more of a last resort after correction.

No, it's not that. In DQ5, if you hold straight up and reach an outside corner, your character literally turns to the side, walks over a bit, and then turns up again and continues walking up.
It's 100% intentional as something to make the game smoother to navigate; it's definitely not a side effect of collision handling.

 

[Toadthemushroom]

This is really obvious in arcade racers with a speedometer; you hit the boost and get the nice motion blur and fisheye effect but only go like 10MPH faster than top speed. Boost tends to be most effective at low speeds, since it increases acceleration and lets you reach top speed much earlier.

Related note: in Burnout Paradise, cars have an infinite transmission. Even at top speed, cars keep making acceleration and gear upshift noises to give the impression of "always going faster."

Yup. Interestingly, Criterion turned this into a mechanic in Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit (2010) - the game's load screens (I think) let the player know that their boost power was most effective while accelerating.

 

[dragonchild]

A lot of this feels like the crap I had to deal with in industry (not game industry, industry -- the guys that make real shit) -- execs meddling with things, marketers making shit up, and engineers compensating for one bad feature by adding another bad feature -- brilliant!
The problem is that when everyone's selling rotgut wine with sugar added, it becomes a self-reinforcing thing on the supply side, with everyone going "well people are too stupid to know the difference", when in fact they do, but they're shouted down.

I know, for example, that the fuel gauge in your car is basically a lie; it exaggerates when it hits "E", supposedly for those who like to push their luck, so "E" doesn't actually mean "empty". It means you have about 1-2 gallons of fuel left. But DRIVERS know this, including those who like to push their luck, so now everyone feels comfortable when the gauge is near "E", so did that little hack accomplish anything?
The life gauge thing is the same deal, and I'd figured it out on my own in a few games, and guess what? Wound up doing the exact same thing. It didn't "encourage a feeling of *just* surviving"; my brain instantly transitioned to "life gauge is a lie" and adjusted from there, playing more aggressively when it's above critical and then more conservatively when in critical because I didn't know how much I actually had. Knowing the real value would've been more suspenseful.

 

[Teuoxton]

its was probably Guilty Gear Xrd (i dont think there has been a 3D blazblue?), and it is far from the only place that does this. any time the animator can be certain that the scene is only going to be viewed from a specific angle, you can be sure that they will be warping the rig like that to get the best looking poses they can.
its hardly common in games due to free cameras being the thing everywhere, but its a constant in any kind of feature/TV animated production.

hell, heres one of my favourite examples, from one of the JJBA anime intros.

At least this example might have an in-universe explanation, Ceasar might be using some Hamon technique like Zoom Punch to pose!

 

[Amibguous Cad]

In the case of X-Com, it is due to really misguided ideas about save scumming ruining the game- the way they do the rolling is a hell of a lot more deterministic than actual RNG. Then they try to compensate for that by "helping" the player, when they could have just made it fair in the first place by using an actual RNG.

The amount of 90%+ shots I miss in X-Com while getting obliterated by what should be low probability shots makes the game feel completely unfair to me. Maybe I just pick the worst possible moves and the universe is out to screw me, but the simpler explanation is that the dev's micromanagement of the "randomness" of the game simply sucks the user out of the experience because it is so noticeable. It made X-Com less enjoyable for me than it probably would have been without any of the dev intervention, and it made the second game completely unplayable from my perspective.

AFAIK, the RNG in X-Com is made from a single seed plugged into a pRNG algorithim. In other words, they don't have to fix the save scumming problem - basically all the RNG results are calculated before the player ever loads up the map and and the game will just keep running down that table of results every time you reload (though it's still random, or as random as computers can get).

I don't want to be mean to you - and most people make the exact same mistake - but it really floors me how insistent people are that RNG is out to get them. We've got a developer in a twitter thread spelling out that the only way the game cheats is in a player's favor and -still- people can't accept that their intuitive conception of probability is fundamentally flawed.

I mean, everyone's intuitive conception of probability is bad, it's not just the people complaining about RNG. The simplest explanation isn't that the universe hates you, or that the RNG is designed to be frustrating, but that given a certain probability of an event happening almost everyone expects it to happen more often than it actually does.

The last bit of health being worth more than displayed is commonly called the "magic pixel" in fighting games.

In Bayonetta, an attack that would kill you instead reduces you to 1 hp. So unless you have 1 hp, it always takes 2 hits to kill you.



The old Desire Sensor.

Interesting. A lot of pen and paper games use exactly this mechanic - or at least D&D did, usually involving a sort of downed state where the player can't take any more actions but only actually dies when they take a little more damage. To go from alive to straight-up dead in a single attack, it has to be an overwhelming one.

Games have done this sort of thing, too, Guild Wars 2 also has a downed state where if you manage to kill an enemy using a compromised moveset you get revived.

I wish more games would make this an explicit mechanic rather than lying!

 

[Tater]

I worked on some well known MMOs, and these sorts of tricks are par for the course. That being said, there are some really great tricks revealed in this thread that I never even noticed as a player.

Sometimes you do this stuff because you spend a couple weeks working on a feature, and then it turns out to be boring or not enjoyable. Sometimes it's because you don't have the time to do it properly, and you can get like 90% of the way there in 10% of the time.

If any of you guys played against the Reaper Bots that first came out back in the Quake 1 days, they had perfect accuracy and could kill you in seconds with the default hitscan weapon. The only way you could use that in a game is to make them miss believably.

Game development is about making something that is enjoyable and challenging to the player, which often means misleading the player as to what is really happening.

 

[Japanmanx3]

Very intriguing read so far.

 

[timetokill]

Coyote Time is most notably present in Donkey Kong Country after a roll or cartwheel, and more recently in Crash 1 Remaster if i'm not mistaken

It's not really "coyote time" in DKC because it's a mechanic that you're expected to use. You can't get some things without using it. It's not a "hidden trick."

Coyote Time is more "invisible," to make a jump when you felt like you pressed the button in time.

 

[Falk]

If any of you guys played against the Reaper Bots that first came out back in the Quake 1 days, they had perfect accuracy and could kill you in seconds with the default hitscan weapon. The only way you could use that in a game is to make them miss believably.

Oh please, when bots had the Q2 railgun... :V

 

[Belker]

At least this example might have an in-universe explanation, Ceasar might be using some Hamon technique like Zoom Punch to pose!

Reminds me of this Crysis video, where you see how the character model deforms to pop and out of cover.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FbOxieWCmDY

 

[ResidentDante]

I knew about the Fallout 3 train NPC, but I didn't know that the cinematics in New Vegas were simply placing you in a room with a projector while an NPC talks to you lol

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=7&v=JJnWwli3Thg

Speaking of which:

Anybody care to explain these? What is the Fallout 3 train NPC and what is going on in the gif.

 

[FyreWulff]

I knew about the Fallout 3 train NPC, but I didn't know that the cinematics in New Vegas were simply placing you in a room with a projector while an NPC talks to you lol

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=7&v=JJnWwli3Thg

As for why they'd do it this way rather than programming a 'real' movie player: a lot of times tricks like this and the train-NPC are used are because you only have a certain amount of time the engineers have to program new features vs fixing bugs, so designers will often build features out of existing engine functionality and piggyback on existing code that already works.

So instead of making a custom end game cutscene player, which carries with it adding new test suite, test cases, etc etc you go 'wait, we can just lock the player here and use our existing ability to have an NPC talk loud enough to be in both speakers and just switch an object in front of a player".


Another example of this is the Halo engine has code for vehicles and how they're networked in multiplayer. So anything that moves on the map in multiplayer is a vehicle as far as the engine is concerned. The security cameras in 3/Reach? Vehicle.

The soccer ball?

Vehicle.


The giant monitor on Cold Storage?

Vehicle.


Golf ball?

Engine considers that the same thing as a Warthog or a Tank.


Bonus content

The Warthog's horn in Halo 2 onwards are just programmed as the Warthog's "gun", so that's why the horn button is the same as the 'fire gun' button for every other vehicle. They even prevent you from spamming the horn indefinitely by having the horn-gun "overheat". As above: "hey, our engine already knows how to make a vehicle fire a weapon in MP, and also network the sound it generates. Let's just make it a gun that shoots nothing and it's muzzle sound is a horn instead of implementing a completely new and separate horn-honk subengine"

 

[nOoblet16]

This was always something I appreciated about Witcher 3 - everything in that game felt really proportional, to the extent that sometimes objects seemed quite small, but they felt completely proportionate to Geralt. The player/camera is just set far away and the game recognized that.

It's solution though is a reflex lens when you're indoors, stretching and distorting things at the image margins, which I don't appreciate.

I actually strongly disagree.
I find the scale to be one of the worst aspect of The Witcher 3, things are either too big or too small. Buildings that look large on the outside but cramped inside or vice versa. Travelling 2KM feels like travelling 500M. Imo it lacks a feeling of 1:1 scale that a game like FFXV or AC:Unity has.

 

[nOoblet16]

I really like this thread, so much fun information here.

Anybody care to explain these? What is the Fallout 3 train NPC and what is going on in the gif.

The trains in fallout 3 were just NPCs moving with hats (the train was the hat)

 

[orava]

Super interesting but ruined many games Now I can't stop thinking about what's happening behind the scenes while playing!

This is called the curse of a game developer.

 

[Interficium]

Super interesting but ruined many games Now I can't stop thinking about what's happening behind the scenes while playing!

oh no

your immersion

 

[sandpiper]

its was probably Guilty Gear Xrd (i dont think there has been a 3D blazblue?), and it is far from the only place that does this. any time the animator can be certain that the scene is only going to be viewed from a specific angle, you can be sure that they will be warping the rig like that to get the best looking poses they can.
its hardly common in games due to free cameras being the thing everywhere, but its a constant in any kind of feature/TV animated production.

hell, heres one of my favourite examples, from one of the JJBA anime intros.

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=215298309&postcount=41

This? Yeah.

 

[Rymuth]

Except it kinda wasn't.

A lot of the criticisms thrown at Isolation had to do with the AI obviously knowing where you are at times. You can definitely feel the gears turning in the background. The double AI thing doesn't feel very hidden.

This.

Wasnt hidden very well, imo. I liked the game but it was fucking obvious the AI was a cheating bastard. Broke the immersion at times.

 

[N30RYU]

I would really want to know if whem playing a racing game in first person (no cockpit) the chasis of the vehicle is nonexistent making it easie not having lateral impacts while taking a turn.

I'm sure if you take a turn in first person you won't collide but when making that exact same turn in third person view your car impact to the wall.

 

[GrinningColossus]

Time to load up Surgeon Simulator

If you don't think this was in Surgeon Simulator, try playing the alpha demo and tell me the full release doesn't feel easier.

Spoiler

only the thumb button matters, as long as you press any other finger button

 

[Lo_Fi]

As for why they'd do it this way rather than programming a 'real' movie player: a lot of times tricks like this and the train-NPC are used are because you only have a certain amount of time the engineers have to program new features vs fixing bugs, so designers will often build features out of existing engine functionality and piggyback on existing code that already works.

So instead of making a custom end game cutscene player, which carries with it adding new test suite, test cases, etc etc you go 'wait, we can just lock the player here and use our existing ability to have an NPC talk loud enough to be in both speakers and just switch an object in front of a player".


Another example of this is the Halo engine has code for vehicles and how they're networked in multiplayer. So anything that moves on the map in multiplayer is a vehicle as far as the engine is concerned. The security cameras in 3/Reach? Vehicle.

The soccer ball?

Vehicle.


The giant monitor on Cold Storage?

Vehicle.


Golf ball?

Engine considers that the same thing as a Warthog or a Tank.


Bonus content

The Warthog's horn in Halo 2 onwards are just programmed as the Warthog's "gun", so that's why the horn button is the same as the 'fire gun' button for every other vehicle. They even prevent you from spamming the horn indefinitely by having the horn-gun "overheat". As above: "hey, our engine already knows how to make a vehicle fire a weapon in MP, and also network the sound it generates. Let's just make it a gun that shoots nothing and it's muzzle sound is a horn instead of implementing a completely new and separate horn-honk subengine"

On a similar note - any car that moved in CoD4 (for example, the car ride intro) is technically attached to a gun, because guns were dynamic. If you clip through the bottom of the car you can see it.

 

[Yohane]

what's "coyote time"?

 

[_Rob_]

what's "coyote time"?

The few frames of grace in which you can still jump after running off the edge of a platform. Named efter:

 

[ResidentDante]

I really like this thread, so much fun information here.


The trains in fallout 3 were just NPCs moving with hats (the train was the hat)

Hahaha! I see it now!

 

[Creaking]

I think "coyote time" should definitely be an official thing and I love games with coyote time

That was neat to read about. I used to make LittleBigPlanet levels that had precision platforming, which wasn't always a great fit for the physics based gameplay (slopes screw up jumps a lot, and Sackboy sometimes has just a bit of slide after landing). So I ended up adding little invisible extension blocks at the edges of what appeared to be extremely narrow precipice peaks. You still had the feeling of making a cool jump, and could make the precipice look rocky and sloped, but it reduced random slipping and bs like that, making it play better. Sounds like a very similar concept to coyote time, though not built into the actual jump mechanics.

 

[ResidentDante]

That was neat to read about. I used to make LittleBigPlanet levels that had precision platforming, which wasn't always a great fit for the physics based gameplay (slopes screw up jumps a lot, and Sackboy sometimes has just a bit of slide after landing). So I ended up adding little invisible extension blocks at the edges of what appeared to be extremely narrow precipice peaks. You still had the feeling of making a cool jump, and could make the precipice look rocky and sloped, but it reduced random slipping and bs like that, making it play better. Sounds like a very similar concept to coyote time, though not built into the actual jump mechanics.

Am I wrong, but doesn't Uncharted do this? You can almost walk a step off a cliff and then jump.

 

[aaaaaa]

I've noticed "coyote time" in some 2D platformers and I don't like it. It looks and feels like a bug. I prefer the Mario system of letting you stand on a platform with a single pixel.

First person games, sure, go nuts with it.

 

[Diablohead]

I've noticed "coyote time" in some 2D platformers and I don't like it. It looks and feels like a bug. I prefer the Mario system of letting you stand on a platform with a single pixel.

First person games, sure, go nuts with it.

It would not shock me if mario had a frame or two of coyote time, when a game does not have a buffer of any kind you will instantly know because it makes things extremely annoying in platformers.

 

[ResidentDante]

It would not shock me if mario had a frame or two of coyote time, when a game does not have a buffer of any kind you will instantly know because it makes things extremely annoying in platformers.

Remember that old CRT's almost had zero input lag, so coyote time might be a newer design choice to cater for TV latency.

 

[Skulldead]

the problem is that people are really bad at dealing with statistics so giving them the real % of success will frustrate them, and fudging the numbers to seem more plausible for human standards will make the knowing players feel cheated

honestly in most of these games they would be served better by doing away with % of hitting, and just multiplying the % by the damage and thus have them do fixed damage. of course you'd have to give characters healths in the 1000s for this to be manageable, but still

Just make the maximum 90% or 95% like Fallout, not 99%. I can compare whit D&D dice, it would make much more sense to miss more often when throwing a 1 on 20 face dice then a 1 on 100 face dice.

 

[Doc_Drop]

Really interesting stuff.

I like how regardless of the abundance of developers chiming in on this, dark souls fans still find a way to believe the games don't do this sort of stuff.

Surely the fact that the games play so well reinforce the idea that these techniques are most likely present as they're essentially qol and fun increasing techniques?

 

[Count of Monte Sawed-Off]

I knew about the Fallout 3 train NPC, but I didn't know that the cinematics in New Vegas were simply placing you in a room with a projector while an NPC talks to you lol

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=7&v=JJnWwli3Thg

Ha, that's awesome.

 

[Fury451]

I knew that Xenomorph was a cheating bastard.

 

[Sande]

Am I wrong, but doesn't Uncharted do this? You can almost walk a step off a cliff and then jump.

Yes. Quite a lot too.

 

[Doc_Drop]

I'd have liked one of the FIFA devs to chime in, it has to be one of the most scripted games of all time

At least one game per session is just me swearing at the AI haha

 

[Belker]

I really like this thread, so much fun information here.


The trains in fallout 3 were just NPCs moving with hats (the train was the hat)

Apparently the trains were actually classed as wrist guards or something.

http://www.pcgamer.com/heres-whats-happening-inside-fallout-3s-metro-train/

 

[soul creator]

A lot of "moving levels" in 3D games actually keep your immediate playspace still the entire time, and just move the environment around you instead. It's usually much easier than redesigning your entire movement system to account for moving geo.

Though apparently, the Uncharted 2 train sequence did not use this trick, and actually did go through the trouble of making it "real": http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-among-friends-how-naughty-dog-built-uncharted-2

 

[Khalifa Jayy]

Enemies in games don't detect things the way humans do. There's no real analog to deriving visual information from a 2D projection of a game world and then contextualizing it, the way people see things on a computer monitor and then react to it.

In other words, AI generally directly pulls player state information (position, etc) then decides what to do with it. Or, in other words, enemies in games are generally all omniscient to begin with, and then crippled in various ways by their algorithms. (e.g. is a player entity in LOS, etc)

Granted, something like a singular, more significant enemy like in Alien Isolation probably has more complex routines than cannon fodder, but yeah.

Yeah, I don't understand how their "double AI" changes anything. Most enemies in games work like that... ?

 

[Dahbomb]

Most 3D action games make enemies hella passive when you don't have the camera on them. This is to avoid getting hit off screen which was something that was common in early games. Of course you can still get hit off screen but the enemies hit far less.

At higher levels of play this is something that you could abuse.

 

[Ferulci]

For those interested by that type of tricks, I recommend to check the Game Design Deep Dive series by Gamasutra :
https://www.gamasutra.com/deepdives
A creator (dev, artists, game designer) explains in depth one mechanic.

 

[Khalifa Jayy]

Also feels like it's a good thread to share the NBA Jam oral history write-up with background info, insights into development challenges, etc. Really neat stuff.

https://www.si.com/longform/2017/nba-jam-oral-history/index.html

STEPHEN HOWARD
NBA Jam model; NBA forward
When I was negotiating with Mark I said, “I have the potential of playing in the NBA, so I need to get more money.” He ended up paying me double what he paid the other guys.

JOHN CARLTON
Midway developer
At that point they were just doing very simple, realistic dunks. I put that footage on a floppy disk and gave it to Mark to digitize.

MARK TURMELL
Midway developer
I would show these dunks—at pretty normal heights—to Eugene Jarvis, who made Defender and Stargate and Robotron, and he was like, “Maybe make that a little faster, a little higher.”

JOHN CARLTON
Midway developer
The next day Mark gave me a call: “Come on over; I just got one of the dunks in the game.” He had exaggerated it to the point where the player was taking off at the top of the key, jumping 20 feet in the air—a classic NBA Jam-style dunk. I was just dumbfounded, like, “Come on, we need to make this realistic!”

SAL DIVITA
Midway developer
More and more, people reacted positively to [the exaggerated dunks], like, “You have to do this!”

STEPHEN HOWARD
NBA Jam model; NBA forward
You know how when you’re on fire and you tumble over and spin when you dunk? To film that they set me on a picnic bench; there was a mat on the floor and I would just tumble over, like stunt work. We did that for about five days. It was pretty monotonous work.

JOHN CARLTON
Midway developer
I was down on the monster dunks, I have to admit. I loved the NBA for what it was; I didn’t want to turn this into a clown show.&#8200;.&#8200;.&#8200;. But within 24 hours I was converted. “O.K., let’s go crazy here!”

JONATHAN HEY
Midway developer
Mark Turmell wanted a phrase for blocking the ball: “Get that s--- out of here!” Of course, that wasn’t gonna fly with the NBA. I recorded it, though, and all that stuff went into a subfolder of rejected lines—“he’s got him by the balls” and stuff like that.

TIM KITZROW
NBA Jam announcer
There was only one line that made the game that I thought was kinda stupid: razzle dazzle. I wasn’t buying anyone saying that. It’s a little hokey, a little cheesy. . . but it’s just a great line, and now I love it.

SAL DIVITA
Midway developer
We talked about putting cameras on the game so a customer could get his actual face onto a character, but the effort was more than we wanted to deal with. Plus, for any game with a camera there’s the TTP factor. Time to Penis. How long is it gonna take before somebody puts their penis on video? Any time there’s a camera on anything, that always happens.

MARK PRICE
Cleveland Cavaliers guard
I’d go into arcades to see if they had NBA Jam. I played as myself a few times. I made a lot of threes.

... much more at the link.

_________________________________


Man, I wish they'd do this for every game!