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.

TBF it had been a long standing problem for roughly a half century before this. Specifically birds were the thing researchers tried to identify first, which is probably the reference here.

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.

It took almost exactly 5 years from publication for that to be commonplace.

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.

only because people never stopped asking it to be able to id birds.

Can’t wait for the Disney live action movie remake of XKDC comics!

PM: You know real world?

Make it like that

Have you ever played ATV Offroad Fury on the PS2? When you reached the edge of the map, it would just fling you back towards the center.

I propose that is how we deal with NPCs blocking doors. With negated fall damage, of course

Almost all game-slowing doors are just hidden loading screen baked into the gameplay.

[Early Resident Evil Titles have entered the chat]

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Feature requests never account for the performance hit.

A character model is made up of “slots”. The head slot, the chest slot, the legs slot and so on. When you equip a piece of gear, it replaced the body mesh in that slot. So a helmet model replaces the head, a cuirass replaces the chest, I think you follow. If you want a piece of gear to only partially cover the character, you need to create a new slot. But gear is easy to implement, since it conforms to the character’s “body” and uses the same animations.

Now add a scarf. First, you need to create a new slot, so that equipping the scarf doesn’t replace the head or chest. And then comes the question of animations. Are you going to have the scarf just lay flat against the character? That’s the easiest approach, but it’ll be completely static, look like ass and probably clip through at least some of your armors. You could use a cloth sim. If your scarf mesh has enough polygons, it’ll look the best. But it’s also computationally expensive, especially if you go with mesh-based collisions for maximum eye candy. And what types of objects can the scarf collide with? Just the character, or world objects as well? Every object the scarf collides with will create a whole new slew of physics calculations, all the time, dropping your performance in the gutter like a mob snitch. Or you could create a bespoke rig for the scarf. It’ll look better than a static object and won’t have a notable performance hit, but won’t look as good as the cloth sim, especially since it won’t collide properly with whatever else your character is wearing. And you’d need to create matching animations for literally every animation the character can possibly do. Every. Single. One. Your animators would want to murder you. And they will, when you come back to them a little later and say “Okay, real impressed with the scarf, now let’s make 5 different ones. And I want capes.”

TL;DR: It’s not just another piece of gear.

You’re assuming the game in question already had character customization in place.