Comment on Nintendo's Creature Capture Patent Dealt Blow Amid Palworld Lawsuit
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day agolol, I still remember being utterly baffled by how many Nintendo uberfans were just blown away by the kind of construction / physics elements of BotW.
Like… I’d been playing Garry’s mod for years before it even became a game, sold for money.
I was doing that kind of construction silliness … what, before Twilight Princess came out? Something like that?
Funniest part is that learning how to fuck around in lua there, was what spurred me on to learning programming… whereas Nintendo fans kind of tend to be the Apple fans of the video game world… on average, they don’t really know anything about hardware or software, compared to an Xbox or Playstation, if you compare people of similar ages in each of those fandoms.
So, I remeber ending up inadvertently triggering a fair number of BotW fans when I just started to describe havok/source physics calls, as well as contraptions I’d built an actual decade prior.
ACF is fucking bonkers, don’t know if its still maintained, but yeah I basically just made my model minfigs of tanks and ifvs and such in digital, functional form, hahah!
drosophila@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 day ago
Did you mean TotK instead of BotW?
I’ve played gmod since probably around 2007, but IMO this is a bit disingenuous.
The physics in Tears of the Kingdom is way more stable than Havok. In gmod even putting a bunch of cans inside a crate can make them start vibrating or cause them fly out at a million miles per hour after you try picking them up. Walking around on a moving physics object is extremely jank, and can cause you to phase through it or just be killed instantly by mysterious physical forces that appear out of nowhere. In particular, the puzzles that use chains (which have collision with themselves and other objects, unlike source engine ropes that phase through everything), are way beyond anything you could do reliably with Havok.
In addition to that, TotK takes gmod’s mechanics and uses them as the basis for combat encounters and puzzles, inside an actual campaign with a narrative, environmental design, music, etc. That sort of thing adds a lot; just look at Portal vs Narbacular drop.
And yeah, I know that there are community made gamemodes for gmod that use its physics mechanics for all kinds of stuff. None of those are a 70 hour long professionally designed campaign. That’s not to say that I think TotK’s campaign is strictly ‘superior’ to that community made content, or should be viewed as a substitute for it, but I also don’t think the opposite is true either. These are simply two different types of experiences, and neither replaces the other.
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
No, I mean BotW.
I very distinctly remember these real world social interactions I had with BotW players around the game’s release… I very distinctly remember accidentally pissing them off by not being blown away by the construction mechanics, when I said something like ‘oh that’s neat, they did some Garry’s mod style stuff!’
That was apparently not enthusiastic enough for them, and they literally exiled me from their friend group after that.
And uh, the specific problems you mention with GMod?
The standing/moving while on a phys object being jank? Yeah you can fairly easily fix a good deal of that in GMod by toggling some server side settings, you can more comprehensively fix that by writing some gamemode logic in lua that moderates/alters/hooks into the source/havok phyics.
The ropes don’t act like chains? Yeah, cuz… they aren’t chains, they’re meant to be visually cheap effects. You can make actual physical chains with actual physicaly colliding links via a series of joint connected props, pretty sure there are just tools you can find now that let you automate and customize the generation of such things.
In both of these cases, basically what you do is just clamp translational and rotational acceleration values below a certain threshold… thats one main ‘trick’ that source/havok/gmod doesn’t do by default, that BotW does, anither one is just hard limit the number of potentially active physics capable objects in any given scene down to a lower number.
Also, Gmod has a bunch of early gamemodes that involved having to construct something, given some limitation set, to achieve some specific goal, or gamemodes that were more like some kind of other common at the time game, but made use of on the fly, but tightly regulated, snap build type construction mechanics, sort of like fortnite, but from a first person POV.
I guess you just never played these?
I guess people don’t realize that GMod was basically a precursor to Roblox.
Its more of a platform for making wildly different kinds of games than it is just… ‘a game’.
Gmod just didn’t have a built in currency system, Gmod gamemode developers had to (and did) figure out how to tie that into some kind of out of game webserver/db to keep track of player accounts and purchases, and then tie that back to the player’s in game inventory/abilities.
… I know everything I am saying here, because I either knew people who did all of this stuff, wrote scratch, or I did myself.
Anyway, yeah obviously BotW has a huge open world and an actual narrative storyline and all that good stuff.
It has that, plus some simplified version of Gmod buildy stuff, neat!
But ‘neat!’ wasn’t ‘unprecedented and my mind has been blown’.
In summary, no, no my account is not disingenuous, you just aren’t very familiar with or have much experience with Gmod as I do.
And that’s probably a good thing: while Gmod offers a lot of possibilities, it also has one of the worst and most toxic communities of any game I’ve ever played.
I could go on about how… the comparison to Roblox also extends to massive problems with grooming and sexual predation / exploitation of children, but that would probably be fairly far from the original topic.