7 Tricks by Game Developers You Won’t Be Able to Unsee: Commenter Edition

"As a British person, this amount of queuing in one scene pleases me greatly." That line killed me 😂😂😂

That bullshit about parenting is from someone who doesn't know how to program collision boxes.

This is car slander, the car is the best thing about Brütal Legend and the game would be infinitely worse without it

The bed one is particularly noticeable (and funny) in Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days for the DS. The game has a day-by-structure hence the name so there are multiple scenes where Roxas is seen sleeping or waking up, or just laying in a bed as he contemplates something...while wearing a full body coat and sneakers. Even though I knew nothing about game coding back then (still don't), I already knew it was a coding shortcut. Still, it quickly became hilarious.

Sims fans hearing "an additional 3 seamless wholes" god i wish it was just 3

The Deadly Premonition bed is enormous!

Not getting in and out of vehicles is a popular thing as well. They walk towards the helicopter, next shot helicopter takes off, then it lands, they walk away from helicopter.

But at least V now sleeps with her head on the pillow...took a lot of patches to stop the "I'm just going to drop perpendicular to the bed, that's fine" approach.

First time I saw the mirror trick was in 007 tomorrow never dies because you could use cheats to use dev tools to use a free camera and other things

it's weird because i get wanting to make game criticism but i also find it weird how people with annoying voices convince themselves that people should actually listen to their voices

Shadiversity designed a serviceable back-scabbard. It's not perfect, but it does work. Kind of looks like the sword is clipping through too

We saw that hospital and insurance joke you put in just for us Americans!

Thanks now ill never sleep and want to chop off my bony flesh spiders

You know, Andy is right. What HAVE cars ever done for anyone?

nice, starting directly with an EA roast! me gusta

Gotta remember about scabards: they would pull the scabards off then pull the weapon out. You don't need a scabard hanging about when fighting for your life

now i know why Doom always made me motion sick

I don't fully agree with the parenting explanation. Parenting and re-parenting isn't really that difficult. Coordinates can easily be converted from their character local coordinates to world coordinates and then back to another character local position without the object jumping. That said if the object isn't properly in the other characters hand it may float when parented so often its snapped back to a location on the hand which is why you get the jitter.
It's really more of a positioning problem that stems from how typical animation works. The simplest way to animate 3D characters is to have their bones follow a pre recorded sequence of motions. You can make any bones follow any sequence at any speed and mix and match these sequences over different parts of the character body (having the legs follow the run sequence and the arms follow the raise gun sequence for example) and it's all relatively easy to do this.
Notice that you can't really change the actual sequences though just the timings and where they are applied. It's this reason that makes hand offs hard because you essentially need to use a different method of animation to ensure that characters can animate their arms toward a position, if they can't reach it then the character needs to walk or somehow move realistically to position the hand at the target. This is possible, it's called procedural animation but it is much more costly and tedious to employ. If regular scripted/blended animation covers everything else which is often the case you are better off trying to hide hand offs. There are also other ways to hide things like that. Sometimes you'll see whole characters slide into a position before pulling a lever or doing a hand off. That's because they were animated with that prop/character doing that action, the game then just puts both into the starting positions for that animation and lets the hand off/lever pull play out like a mini cut scene. I like that method because you can hide the setup in a play to dialoge transition and focus on the actual hand off as it happens.

And the Sims! They sleep under the cover in the Sims!

#2 I hate it with a passion. I know it's difficult to do, but there's a better solution, the From Software approach. Actually, they do two approaches:

1. No animation at all, you just get a message you got the item.
2. Animated arms and hands, reaching out to each other, without touching, much less carrying any visible items.

Seriously, both solutions are perfect, but games so obssessed with hyper-realism should animate the whole thing, their current approach (shown in the video) is just infuriaring. Realism? My ass!

Anytime you see a corridor with a split in the middle that goes around an island that looks like a chain link: -[]-
It's to give the next area a little more time to load. Both areas have that little donut on the map, and they overlap. When you go through it, it tells the code to load the next area. Some games do this with very long tunnels or caves instead: the cave exists on both maps.

"where characters place objects into an unseen pocket" ... "you better hope it's an unseen pocket" lmao

Oh nooooo, Jane is too pure to know TaurinFox is more than just a random username... iykyk

Jane always has my favorite jokes! 🤣

3D engines imagine a 3 Dimensional space, but then render them into an image displayed on a 2D screen.
So isn’t all 3D in games just 2D, when you think about it?

Unit slotting is also known as Mook chivalry.

Control knows no courtesy and keeps dropping enemy after enemy right on top of my head.

The 2d nature of DOOM is what makes My House.wad so interesting. RagnarRox has a great video if you dont know about it.

Back swords - in real life you lift it up from the bottom so that it angles across your shoulder, then withdraw it with the other hand.

Somebody should really tell the pokemon devs to not overdo it with the "not showing an item exchange hands" tricks

I love it when Brits make jokes about the healthcare system being paid in dollars. Please keep it up.

I always thought the unseen handover is rarely seen because it would look awkward when someone pulls out a large object from out of nowhere, hands it over, and the receiver stashes into their pocket.

In gothic 1,2 one handed swords hanging on a hip, not on the back. However two handed swords on the back.. However it's old game and there is no scabbards. I think there is scabbards in Oblivion... I'm not sure, and one haded swords also dangling on a belt on side of hip.

I hate cars too, btw. So I can relate to him.

Raycasting is a way to represent 3D scene, so it still 3D (at least in my opinion, apparently it called pseudo 3d or 2.5d, but it still draws 3d scene on a screen, even if with limitations). Also I've told once, that Doom is not even raycasting. Wolfenstein 3D and such was raycasting, but Doom have some, at least, illusion of elevation of geometry, so it's not just pure Raycasting.

In cutscene you can just bake animation of blanket. But ingame you still can bake it, but it's may not match current character model, (like if character decides to sleep in heavy armor or something)

Coyote time actually goes hand-in-hand with input buffering. In some games, if you hit an input too early, it is buffered for a short duration of time (typically under 250ms), so it can be executed when the time is right. A good example is a falling character - if you hit the jump button some milliseconds before they hit the ground, they will jump the moment they are on the ground. Those two are staples for platformers nowadays and any character controller without them feels stiff and unresponsive.

The scabbard clipping isn't entirely dishonest, as real-world scabbards can have openings to allow a draw that would otherwise be impossible. A notable example is the Gurkha kukhri, which has a gap in one edge of the scabbard to allow the deep cruve of the blade to clear the bend, and which also presents a fine opportunity for an inexperienced user to lose, or at least deeply lacerate, a finger.

I've definitely seen back scabbards which are complete at the bottom and the collar, but have an open top in the upper half so the blade can be half drawn, then tilted to a shallower angle to clear the collar. Full disclosure, I don't know if these have any historical precedent or are just clever work arounds, effectively the cosplay equivalent of the insubstantial scabbard.

Idk why she looks and sounds like Russell Brand lol

Oh. It's an unseen pocket alright. When I wear pants, I have an unseen pocket.

Why not tie two of the same object to the separate characters and switch visibility on the frame(s) where they overlap?

Wile E. Coyote SUPER GENIUS

Its nice knowledge but turn the game sound lower, its super jarring when you speak softly and then present a clip of racing game with engine revving to 9000RPM

Dude as a programmer, is kinda easy to smoth down the transition between a item in one hands to another hands... This is the issue with AAA studios, they are fucking lazy... You not parent the item to it, instead put a target position to the hendler, on the transition, slow the smothness of the new target position that will be on the other location and them the math computers does will increase overtime in a point it looks stick, or well held by the new location... I was though that studios not want a small asset used a single time that is fucking useless, this truth is really lazy and stupid...

All "3D" game engines are just 2D if you're reductive about it enough.

Some of us knock our beer down when we sleep too close to it...

Lost a laptop to that one.

Re: prioritizing enemies you can see also helps reduce motion sickness. In older games innthe 90s I would rotate the camera like crazy to avoid sneaky enemies and get motion sick very quickly. Then I noticed that I don't need to do that anymore in modern games.