Am game dev, can confirm it's a miracle anything ever gets shipped. "Why is there a strange tomato behind this wall?" "Game crashes on boot without it /shrug"
Like how it is rumored that when EA made NASCAR video games in the early 2000s, there had to be a field goal post hidden under the world because it used the same engine as the Madden football games, and the game would break it if was removed.
@@Confron7a7ion7 Probably because that situation happened almost exactly with Team Fortress 2. There was/is a .jpeg of a coconut in the game files that for some godsforsaken reason is absolutely necessary for the game to even open.
Skyrim also has another funky behind the curtain thing. Every time you hear a disembodied voice, there is an actual npc hidden away that provides the voice that you hear in your head. This includes all the disembodied Daedric princes like Azura, Malacath and Meridia. Usually these npcs are just naked characters locked away in a cube somewhere. The strangest is Mephala, who we believe is behind a strange door in the Dragon's Reach palace. If we take a peak outside the geometry, we find that Mephala is an end table just floating behind those locked doors.
I just learned today that Skyrim's headless horseman is actually just a regular "living" NPC with a ghost filter slapped on - apparently the way to make live NPCs headless is to spawn them in and immediately make their head explode. Really tickles me for some reason
We need art of Mephala as an end table. it would be a funny easter egg if in a game we find the mephala/table and it has some spider appendages or something
There’s an amazing video from Game Maker’s Toolkit called “How Game Designers Solved These 11 Problems” and if you like this video you’ll love that one.
It's not even the first time Bioware has used that exact sprinting trick! Mass Effect 1 did the same thing where sprinting out of combat was just speed lines and a zoomed in camera that didn't actually increase your speed. In fact one of the selling points in the Legacy Collection was that in ME1 sprinting actually made you run faster now! What a novel concept!
I'm pretty sure ME3's out of combat sprinting is still no faster than the standard moving speed, but I'm glad ME1 got the upgrade since there was definitely a lot more fumbling around the environment in that one.
I love this kind of thing. People often tell me this kind of trivia ruins the magic for them, but for me, finding out how this stuff is done _is_ the magic.
Yeah, it's easy to just assume "oh they're the game developers, they can just code it in" but they often don't have the time so a creative solution that requires nothing new is often a better way to do it. Plus it's good to get modders thinking that way as they then start to uncover some really cool tricks. That's part of why modding for a game like Skyrim or Fallout 4 is fun because it *is* limited, so it forces you to problem solve.
We have a Danish mage/comedian who often goes into how he does the trick, except he never does, it's actually an other trick he is doing and you never realize the slight of hand he did.
An absolute classic example is Wing Commander. Closing the game would break the memory in a very specific way, so they just changed the error message to "Thanks for playing Wing Commander!"
Ok, the pretend speed boost in Dragon Age Inquisition got me:D Speaking of Fallout and its weird solutions, New Vegas has another interesting bodge job- when you complete the game, your character is teleported to a room, where the endgame slideshow is displayed on a wall, view is locked to the first person and a player controls are disabled. So, it's not a cutscene, it's your actual character staring at a wall, with an NPC named "Ron the Narrator" standing behind it:)
They did the same thing in Mass Effect!!! Shep doesn't run one iota faster on the Normandy when you sprint. They just put a filter on your body to trick you. That little Shep jog around the bridge is the same as your walk speed. 🙃
I actually measured the "sprinting" horse once because I grew very suspicious. On rough terrain it is faster, but only because while sprinting, the horse tends to "bounce" off objects more, instead of getting stopped in the dead. But the difference is only 5-10%, so after that I never bothered to sprint on smooth terrain.
figured that one out via having a mod that adds animations to consumables then watching my courier take a lil sip of his canteen mid-end credits 💀 RIP to immersion
One trick I like from Oblivion is that after you become the Champion of Cyrodil, a statue of you appears in Bruma after a few days; the "statue" is just a copy of your player character and all their worn equipment at a specific point in the game (when you return after collapsing the big oblivion gate there), so if you happened to do that part of the quest in your underpants wielding a spoon… 😂 They just slap a stone shader on it and disable animation and damage. But with a few console commands you can make it an ordinary NPC again.
Ever the narcissist, my Dark Brotherhood character was forced to save Bruma wearing an Iron Cuirass and a skirt just to lock in that particular silhouette for her statue.
Baldur's Gate 2 did essentially the same thing. At one point your party can become the Heroes of Trademeet, and statues of all up-to-six of you are placed on pedestals around the fountain in the town square. Each of which is just a copy of one of your party members, sans equipment and petrified.
A *lot* of games do their statues that way. Why make a custom model when you can take the standard human model (which is already probably one of the best in the game anyways), put a single frame animation on it to pose it, and put a stone texture all over? Asheron's Call also did this.
I love the idea of your character from Fallout 3 running around the Wasteland with no idea and everybody around them going "They think they're on a train, don't tell them." I would assume that also means either the player, the train hat or the obscuro-vision wrist appliance simulates a train noise as well.
I recently found out about Dying Light's mechanic, where instead of having thousands of grabable ledges for the player to grab, they just have one ledge that appears in front of the player when they need it through logic
I can taste the cheers of their level designers at the prospect of not having to manually place grab trigger volumes and then test all of them in my soul.
Wait, how the heck does it knows whether it's climbable or not tho? Does it calculate whatever the object model infront of you has something to grab on? Or something else?
@@AhmadWahelsa It probably does a check on if the edge matches certain parameters like minimum length and space around it, if it is vertical or horizontal and what type of object the ledge is on.
The way unpacking is using a sort of forced perspective to hide the 3D ness of the scene while using the 3D space for rapid prototyping is really ingenious.
it's actually not as rare as it seems either. sprite layering has been done in a lot of game, heck there was one game that had a fake moving background... that wasn't really a background, but a layer in the terrain geometry.
I remember the days when actual 2D isometric games were starting to get annoyingly large. Like Baulders Gate taking 7 CDs or somesuch. Switching to an actual 3D engine and locking the camera angle made them much much smaller.
This is why I end up down the rabbit hole of Zullie's FromSoftware vids, lol. The amount of things in FromSoftware games that are NPCs when you'd expect them to be objects or objects when you expect them to be NPCs is amazing. I love the kinds of things devs do to get something to work how they want it to in a game.
@@taylor3950 Zullie the Witch is probably the best for diving deep into FromSoftware cut content and how they coded certain stuff. Also just taking closer looks at characters, enemies, environments, etc. Vaati is there for all the lore for their games at least from Demon's Souls onward. I don't think he's done much on the Armored Core series or their other series.
i mean sure it requires some leaps of creativity to make work-arounds to get a specific effect. However *if you're the company that created the engine* then you should you know *make the engine do the things you want it to do* . I'm all for modders making cool stuff happen with some weird mechanical exploit, but the actual game devs shouldn't need to do that.
Or in Elden ring with the Mount mechanism. She's found multiple creatures that have mount points that were never used. (Eg Dragonflys) or how the Trolls pulling the carts work by having the spike act as NPC mounted on the Trolls.
Fun thing about the Mario 64 infinite staircase. The DS port uses the exact same trick, but since the game has a minimap on the lower screen, you can see your character being teleported, thus ruining the illusion.
Fun fact: the original Xcom was secretly two games. The world map section where you shoot down UFO was one executable while the ground force tactical sections was another, with these two programs quietly swapping data and exiting/launching into the other to save on limited computer resources. Another one was Castle of Illusion Starring Mickey Mouse, which would send the player to a “secret level selection” if the game would ever enter into a crash state. They did this to ensure if the game would ever crash during SEGAs certification process (where the game is tested to ensure it does not have bugs)it would appear that whatever caused the crash was actually a deliberate secret.
Sonic 3D Blast used the same trick to sneak past the certification, and I'm sure there's a vid somewhere of Jon Burton (who worked on the game) whacking a running Mega Drive cartridge to show it.
Covert Action (from Sid Meier) was like that too: multiple .exe files for infiltration, wiretapping, cryptography, driving, surveillance. Neat concept, just most of the effort was put into the infiltration, which is just as well, since it was essential to completing missions.
If anyone's curious, the ascending stair music from Mario 64 is called a Shepard scale. Christopher Nolan uses it a lot in his movies ("The Prestige," "The Dark Knight," and "Dunkirk").
If you want a other fallout one, in new vegas when you “sleep” with benny it literally just puts a black box over your head, he walks towards you and speaks then teleports above his bed and dies
als othe end credits rolle in New Vegas is just you, the player, stnading in a enpty room watching the slideshow with the camera locked while the narator, an actual NPC, stand next to you to give the recap
I took a creative writing class once, and one of the things the instructor said that has stuck with me, is that limitations breed creativity. That seems counterintuitive because limitations seem... well, limiting. His point was that limitations both streamline your efforts (since you can only work within certain parameters, you don't waste time and energy on something outside those parameters), and force you to look at what you DO have available from different perspectives. I feel like this list is a great example of the latter.
When I found out about the DA:I horse workaround I went back to play again and see if I could tell; turns out even knowing it's fake speed I feel 10x happier going "fast"... Brains are ridiculous and speedlines are amazing
Another neat trick in skyrim is the mannequins and statues are all NPC with no AI. Sometimes when loading in an area their AI will be active for a brief moment before being turned off again causing them to walk around.
My favorite Skyrim secret mechanic....Almost all mechanical devices, down to moving doors and boobytraps, are attached to invisible, intangible rabbits to give them movement
@@psychodrummer1567 it were I think we'd have an NPC somewhere called Nutty Ron or something who'd go around telling everyone he distrusts anything mechanical because "when I was young see, a rabbit bit me nose off, it did!" And the player would indeed see Nutty Ron is also noseless Ron but have no idea how that's connected to his leporiphobia, oh silly silly Ron... until they somehow work in a boundary break in the plot and we somehow SEE the rabbits that move the mechanical devices and whenever we'd meet Nutty Ron (whom we'd now just call 'Ron') we'd have a conversation options that goes "Rabbits... *nods*" to which Ron himself just replies with a grim "Told ye, guv". ... Man now I want a Discworld-esque Skyrim-clone.
@@goranisacson2502 I wouldn't want one, because: 1) this shit is way funnier when it's in your imagination and 2) the world of Disc slightly keeps evolving throughout the books: telegraphs, press, trains - at what point in Discworld's history/timeline you'd set the game? The adventure games were set before the first permanent change, but the games were from the early 90's.
In Half-Life 1, the guns are all weirdly shaped to be enormous at the barrel end and smaller at the trigger end, but the camera perspective makes you think that they're just regularly sized
Can't wait to hear about the OXbox workaround for filming these videos. The production crew couldn't find a white backdrop so instead they just use Jane's Endless White Timeout Room. As a bonus, it has surprisingly good acoustics for a featureless void.
What would be funny is if they couldn't find a white background, they us a green screen background and superimpose white onto it for the video during edit.
One of my favorite RPGMaker games, Legacies of Dondoran, pulled off the impressive feat of having Diablo-style skill trees in a game engine that had no functionality for making skill trees built into it. How did they do it? Each character's skill tree was a map, the skill nodes were physical objects, and the "cursor" was your character walking around and interacting with them. 😆It looked janky but the results were great.
I've seen this in other games as well. Anything from turning the player character into a glowing point walking over a map texture to simulate fast travel to becoming a cursor to navigate a fake website. There's quite some creativity to those.
The first raid of World of Warcraft, Molten Core, was not actually planned. When they realized they were not going to be able to get Blackwing Lair done on time, they tasked a small group to throw something together. However, the team doing this work didn't have a whole lot of tools in the game to keep track of things. In order to track your progress in the raid, when you complete an objective like killing a boss it would also kill a critter in a hidden room. Then when the game was checking if, for example, you had completed the requirements for spawning Ragnaros it would check on what critters were dead in that room.
This is exactly how it was done in starcraft 1 maps that require i.e. numeric variable arrays. That game didn't have numeric variables (except kill counts), and its flag system was clunky and inflexible, so often to store a data value you would spawn/remove units out of sight and then count them. This trick was a common knowledge in mapmaking community, so I guess WoW devs may have just remembered the old days...
I now wonder if they for some reason did something similar with Assassin's Creed Origins, because riding along speedily sure looks fast, but doesn't really feel like it
@@flusendieb6833 , shouldn't be difficult to test. The game tells you how far you are away from markers. Set one far away and go towards it at regular speed and note how quickly it counts down, then go towards it at the, supposedly, increased speed and note how quickly it counts down. Compare the results and there you go! If they're the same, you know you never need to waste the effort trying to "sprint" again.
I was amused to see how the final part of the "Trip To The Stars" side-quest in Fallout 4's Nuka-World DLC works. You're standing in a moving flying-saucer ride, but it's not the ride that's moving, it's the player. Console-command your way out of first-person mode and you can see the Sole Survivor spinning on the spot like a top at about 300kph.
One of my favorites is also from Fallout. The intro and epilogue movies arent actually working the way you think. Your character is teleported into a room and all the controls are locked. In the room theres a large square screen that plays the video portion, perfectly placed to look as if youre not even in a room at all. But thats not all! Behind the screen is an npc (or multiple, idk if it has multiple when there are multiple voices in the video, or they all come from the 1 npc) who is the REAL source of of the narration. So its basically Ron Perlman sitting there talking to you from behind a giant flatscreen tv.
In Mass Effect 2 you get a video call from Admiral Hackett. Rather than just have a preset video, BioWare instead has the Admiral loaded in just offscreen and then overlays a camera feed of him talking in real time onto the computer and then adds some extra effects on top to make it look like a screen.
Thats actually a super common trick. The reason is that video takes up lots of memory space. So if you can recreate a video with assets that are already in the game anyway you can save a bunch of space. This was even more important in the past where Ram was super limited.
Same in Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines with the Newscaster. In levels that have a TV that can play the news, theres always a hidden box outside of the normal level with the Newscaster sitting behind his desk.
@@BouncingTribbles My little sister found a kitten at a gas station and her husband (our DM) decided that the kitten should be called Mimic and that there would now be mimics that turn into cute woodland creatures and lure people to their doom. Little does he know that since we're playing *my* campaign next and they are in the midst of traveling literally to the other end of the country on foot, this will happen to them now.
Yeah, I got suspicious, when the same route took the same time with and without sprinting. After that I tested the horse, and I determined that the speed is basically the same, but sprinting is still faster on rough terrain because while sprinting the horse maintains max speed and doesn't get stuck on many things, that stop you otherwise. Turning the horse on the other hand is harder when sprinting, and requires more room. After that I only used the sprint on rough, and fairly wide terrain. Even so the time difference was just 5-10% so it wasn't a huge save.
Just earlier today I learned about how the Headless Horseman in Skyrim is headless because his head explodes right after he spawns in. Now that is a workaround that will blow your mind!
When in game development, you asked if you're creative, they're not referring to artwork, model work, mechanics, etc, they're referring to "Are you creative enough to make workarounds to problems you might encounter, but can't go back to to fix that specific things, because it might fuck up other things?"
It's hardly a "workaround" like the ones in this video, but the day I learnt the iconic door opening/stair climbing animations in PS1 era resident evil were just loading screens, my mind was blown.
In Morrowind, all items belong to specific characters (it's how the guards know what's stolen in your inventory). Most lootable items actually belong to an NPC that is located in a cell completely disconnected from the rest of the game world; since he can't spawn into the world, his items can be taken without counting as stolen. Also, a better-known one from the same game, but Almalexia's ban on levitation in Mournhold is less about . . . whatever reason is given in-game, and is actually there to keep players from running into the "ceiling" of the indoor cell that the city occupies.
My favorite one of these is in PT where they hide the super scary lady character behind you, she's always there she's just always behind you just out of your vision.
I think I heard about WoW using invisible rabbits for a lot of the spells. Instead of the character or enemies casting a spell at a given area, there's an invisible rabbit that gets spawned and the spell is cast as an area of effect around that rabbit.
There's a neat line about it in-game: 'Before one can truly understand the artistry of weaving a spell, one must first ask themselves how many bunnies can you see? When you understand the meaning of this question, the foundation of the universe will become more clear.'
Another work around: in half life 2, every time you see an npc on a screen, that npc is actually in a hidden room below the map. If only the NPCs face would be visible, this npc model usually will be a cut down version without legs.
It's a trick seen in other games that need a model so it can make the effect. I believe Arkham City uses it for Riddler projections, so if you go out of bounds there's a plain white room with the Riddler stood in it.
I came to the comments to say the same thing. For instance, the Breencasts are Breen sitting in a tiny room with just his desk and the background you can see on the camera.
In portal 2, because they had no way to animate a camera travelling through a portal in a cutscene, the moon at the end of the game is actually under the final boss room, upside down. The portal you travel through is a hole in a very thin floor with a fake portal effect around it. Additionally, it doesn’t matter which portal you shoot at the moon as it will automatically swap it to be blue, to ensure the pace is maintained.
Hey, I've used NPCs as vehicle control a number of times when game modding. Just that instead of an actual NPC I use their stats and behaviors on a small ball and tell it to walk/roll through a trench so it is as if the vehicle is jittering around on tracks.
In the lead up to the 20th anniversary of Metroid Prime one of the original devs revealed a bunch of stuff about the development process. My favourite being the static effect caused by certain enemies, as the Gamecube had insufficient memory to convincingly render the static texture, the game code itself was rendered to achieve the same effect!
Mind officially blown. The only one of these I'd run across was the Fallout train, just goes to show that there's so many weird things that devs have done as workarounds that you're unlikely to ever run across them all.
The Fallout train thing is the equivalent of watching Lord of the Rings and you get to the Virgo scene where he breaks his toe. Everyone already knows, but you just have to say it
The who broke what? Two things I haven't herd about before today. And I actually remember the excuse Fawkes gives for not entering the chamber if you haven't loaded the Broken Steel DLC because I finished the game before that DLC was released! "I can not rob you of your destiny." my ass! Get in there Fawkes!
@@Chris_Sizemore In the second Lord of the Rings movie Aragorn kicks a helmet and then falls to his knees crying in grief. What actually happened on set was that they took several takes over and over and because it was an actual metal helmet Viggo broke his toe, and the pain of doing so made the yell so visceral that was the version they used in the final cut. In a similar vein there’s a scene in the first movie where an orc throws a knife at Aragorn who uses his sword to deflect it out of the air. The original choreography was for the knife to go harmlessly past Viggo, but the stuntman missed so Viggo had to actually parry an actual knife that was going straight for his head, and once again that was the version they used in the final cut.
Another famous "ah heck, it's better if we leave it in" moment is during the Simpsons, where Homer is dancing around yelling "I am so smart! S-M-R-T!" That was actually Homer's voice actor flubbing the line and misspelling SMART, but the producers thought it was so funny they left it in.
I would like to think in fallout that when the NPC goes running by with the train hat on that there is another NPC just sitting there in front of his check who glances at his wrist and goes, "Well, looks like Bills running a little behind today" then goes back to eating his CRAM and talking to his cats....his many, many cats
The SM64 staircase is why the Backwards Long Jump skip works. By using a glitch to go really fast you can be in the looping section on one frame, and past the bit that teleports you backwards on the next, skipping over it.
Hilariously, they also used the same technique in the DS version. Only problem is they added a mini map to the second screen which would jump around like crazy when you ran up ,much like the camera in this video except just in the game without hacks.
Want another for the future? In FFXIV the battle vs Leviathan is on a boat that can get knocked back and forth in a rocking motion, the developers said the engine couldn't support the platform rocking so they made it look like it did by rotating the background back and forth.
Oh yeah, Star Trek Online uses a game engine that doesn't support moving platforms(well, in the traditional sense)... so when they made a mission where you stand in an elevator, that had the elevator shaft as moving geometry. Notably, unlike most real elevators, this one you enter the front of the cab and exit the BACK of the cab. It spawns/despawns terrain to make you think you're in a different level of the building.
@@zafranorbian757 Ah, were you also one of those lucky people who spent days(or months... or years?) tinkering with the Foundry? So much fun..... but hol----- was it fickle to work with. :D Maybe look up Foundry Roundtable if you want to see examples? We had a BLAST with that.
@@marhawkman303 Oh I played plenty of foundry missions or even campaigns back then. Only tinkered a little bit with it myselve though. Such a shame that they removed it. So many stories people put their heart into.
Dead Cells is another that is 3D but rendered to look 2D - but - as was revealed at a GDC talk - there are also hidden helpers in the game that if you are just short of making a jump or other action, the game will move you a touch closer to make it giving you a "phew, I just made that!" feel to the gameplay.
Don't want to blow your mind but almost all modern games have mechanics to give you phew moments, from cod who have the red screen effect appear sooner than what your health actually would reflect to any platformer giving the player a jump when they are already off the platform
Is not like the game tries to hide it, your protagonist and almost every monster in the prison cells is rendered in 3D, what actually baffles me is the amount of entities that are just sentient paintings, sometimes the program does an oopsie and let's you see the entire cardboard turn around.
That "jumped anyway even though I already stepped off the platform" in 2D games dates all the way back to Super Mario Brothers (possibly even further back) and if I remember correctly is called "hamburger time." (Which might actually be where it really originated from.)
Skyrim mannikins are also NPCs that just have a script that makes them not move (though I think you've brought this up in a previous video). That's why they sometimes wander away; the script took too long to fire in the loading screen.
I remember in _Tomb Raider_ (on the PS1) there's one puzzle where you move a block out of a pillar, causing it to collapse and alter a nearby room to proceed. What it technically does is swap out the adjacent room entirely, while playing some audiovisual effects to imply what happened. The same puzzle was executed similarly in its PS2 remake (Tomb Raider Anniversary), which also included developer commentary about it.
Aw, you're telling me that the one fallout 3 dlc I didn't play had my character sprinting full speed wearing a train hat and I missed out on that... Dang it
In Hitman 2's Miami Level, Sierra and Moses Lee hang out behind a specific piece of signage on the track near the medical bay, and aren't called in until the race finishes and Sierra and Moses exit their cars.
the reason its underrated is because it was originally a Vita game, and on top of that it was a Vita game that a lot of the time didnt work, there were sections where you'd bribe guards to get past just for them to let you through then immediately agro on you or sections where you had to hold the Vita camera to a light to progress and the Vita camera just would not identify any light, it was a god damned train wreck
OMG I KNEW IT! i knew that bloody mount wasnt sprinting at all in DAI, the animations seemed just so wrong from the get go. Ohhh i've always hated the mounts in that game, thanks for for the conformation.
Love the list! One of my favorites was that Morrowind would stealth-reboot your Xbox during certain loading screens when it was running low on memory (as revealed by Todd Howard in later interviews). And to get really old-school...some of the earliest home computer floppy drives (think 5.25" for the Commodore 64) had no way of knowing where the read head was positioned on the disk. So if they needed to make sure they were reading from the start of the disk, the only option was to seek backwards as many times as the disk had sectors. Given that they were usually nowhere near the end, this tended to result in a machine-gun sound effect as the head slammed up against the start point a few dozen times. Still better than games on cassette tape....
@@jbrou123 There is in fact a warp drive concept that would work by moving the space around you in a way that would "push" you. It's not exactly like Futurama, but it's definitely close.
It's less of a workaround and more "oh, so that's why THAT happened", but my favourite is the story of the dancing baguette boy in Bioshock Infinite's Buried at Sea DLC.
One of my favourite workarounds is the radio conversations in Resident Evil 4 and how they are created. It's quite creepy when you see the camera is pulled back.
Hi, I'm a Dragon Age superfan who is still playing Inqusition after 8 years, and after romancing Solas I didn't think there was much more it could do to hurt me.
Not a named character but during my run of Skyim I had a pretty funny bug partaining bodies. Usually those just disappear after a couple of days but when I was attacked by the Dragonborn cultists inside Skyhold they were killed by me and the town guard and then proceeded to remain laying there in the middle of the road in front of the blacksmith´s shop where people stumble over them and kids tend to run around for the rest of playthrough.
In Skyrim Hearthfire the planters (flower pots) for your vegetables and flowers are actually an invisible NPC hidden underground, who's just a Nord man in his underpants. He "holds" your plants for you. So please know the home you built for your Skyrim family is full of invisible naked men and sleep well!! (Obligatory: It just works.)
It’s always nice to learn something new about your favorite game even after so long. Even if i didn’t really use thd mounds in inquisition. I was to busy collecting everything in my path. Mainly Elfroot to be honest.
Another take on that - Gotham Knights' bike feels a lot slower than the Batmobile from Arkham Knight despite being roughly the same speed (according to Digital Foundry)
In the second Doom game a creature called the Archvile was introduced his gimmick is he resurrects dead enemies. As the Archvile is walking he checks periodically to see if there is anything nearby flagged as a corpse if there is he plays the death animation of the deceased enemy in reverse. The only monsters the Archvile can't revive is the Cyberdemon, Spider Mastermind, Pain Elemental, Lost Soul and other Archviles.
A lot of isometric or sprite games use that secret third dimension. I remember being shocked at finding out how much of the sprite Pokemon games or certain fighting games were actually 3-D modeled.
A friend who was a game dev told me that, while working on a helicopter simulator for the army (it might have been more general purpose, but anyway), he was requested to add animals into the sim for a dash of realism. To cut corners, he decided to basically take the standard "enemy combatant" base, remove all weapons from it, give it a Kangaroo skin + animations and leave the rest of the previous A.I. there. For the most part, this was satisfactory: you could dive towards a group of kangaroos, and they would all scatter like a bunch of spooked animals. Nice! Problems arose however, during further testing when in a map that supposably only had animals but no enemies, the helicopters were being suddenly blown out of the air. What gives? After some testing it was found that kangaroos weren't necessarily just randomly scattering: some of them were fleeing to the nearest bunkers, grabbing rocket launchers and shooting the helicopter down. After all, while the kangaroos started with no weapons, the A.I. directions of "retreat and re-arm" were entirely intact!
I think warframe's railjack system was by far the most sophisticated workaround in recent gaming. My basic understanding of it was that it was not possible to have the spaceship moving through space while also being able to walk about freely within the spaceship? So what they did was hide the stationary spaceship in a corner of the map and make it seem like you were piloting the ship across space through camera trickery (changing the view outside the windows to make it look like this is the place you're supposed to be)
In Dark Souls and Bloodborne, when you visit a bonfire or lantern, you're not interacting with the object itself but an invisible NPC standing on top of the object. Also, the Winter Lanterns have a tiny NPC firing a gun at you placed in their heads to inflict frenzy
I love this sort of stuff, it's always so satisfying to see how games work, and somehow even more satisfying learning games are actually held together with PVA glue and newspaper
I always thought the Devlogs of Hyperbolica were very interesting. Considering Geometry doesn't work in this game as it usually does, the developer had to trick the engine so any piece of the map connects to more/less pieces than one would expect.
Interesting thing about the infinite stairs; if you go too fast, the stairs cannot teleport Mario back and he can go to the top with less than 70 Stars. Normally the player can't reach such speeds, but there is a certain trick called Backwards Long Jumping (or BLJ) that Mario 64 speed runners use to surpass the speed requirements.
There's also the camera and prop trickery with Gwendolyn's cutscene, where the lengthening hallway is just a wall moving backwards through the already super long hallway beneath where you trigger the fight, and you get teleported down there during the cutscene.
Fallout 3's "train hat" may be well know but it's not true. The train is not a hat. It's actually a glove! You can see in the picture that the model is missing a right hand. But my favorite is the ending slides. You're not watching a video or a cutscene. Your character is placed in front of a projector screen playing the slides, and the narrator is an actual guy just behind the slides, talking. They lock your controls so you can't see this.
In BotW, all the faraway objects are 2D so it wouldn’t tax the system memory to load them in. It isn’t like you would normally see such a detail from faraway anyways. They use that trick for various arena backgrounds in Smash (and bonus: they also use the endless stair trick for arenas like Big Blue and Spirit Tracks, albeit it’s the ground moving and teleporting, not the characters)
"Honestly there's not a jury in the land that would convict you." mainly because you would fire hand or fus-roh-dah them into next Thursday if they dared try.
Fun fact about the Mario 64 infinite stairs. In the speed run of that game you use a technique called backwards long jump that propels you backwards at high speeds. If you do this on the infinite stairs before getting the needed 70 stars you fly backwards so fast you pass through the teleport barrier and skip the stairs entirely.
Loved this episode everyone! Your usual "7 things" videos are very entertaining, but this one cranked up the education (aka useless trivia to geek out over and impress my geeky friends with) level!
Here arw another two that I know: In Destiny 2 Season of the Seraph, you could rescue a robot dog that you could pet. The dog however, was a normal human NPC that had been made invisible so that we could interact with them. In one of thw Fallouts (I don't remember which) the final game credits are just the player character frozen in place, pressed up against a screen that had the credits rolling, with tge camera frozen, and a "narrator" NPC just behind the screen. With console commands, you could regain control of the player character and walk around during the credits, which were still rolling in that small screen.
The scenes in Metal Gear where the characters are communicating were made by having the character models standing in a room side by side with a screen in front of them.
