There is a bridge to cross the lava pit The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the KingdomIt’s the Marakuguc Shrine, but it’s broken. More than half of the bridge is piled up on one side of the pit and a truncated segment on the other. The bridge is the obvious choice for crossing the lava, but how to fix it?
A clip showing a possible solution went viral on Twitter shortly thereafter Tears of the KingdomRelease: The player uses Link’s Ultrahand ability to unfold the stacked bridge by attaching it to a wheeled platform in the lava. When the mobile platform – now attached to the edge of the bridge – is activated and moved forward, it pulls the bridge taut, splattering lava until the suspension bridge is actually hanging and ready to be crossed. But it wasn’t the solution itself that resonated with players; Instead, the clip left game developers in awe at the way Nintendo’s team coped with the game’s physics system The.
For gamers it’s just a bridge, but for game developers it’s a miracle.
“The most complicated part of game development is when different systems and features touch each other,” he said Shayna Moona technical producer who has worked on games like the 2018 God of War reboot and its continuation, God of War: Ragnarok, to igamesnews. “It’s really impressive. Especially with this puzzle there are so many different solutions due to the amount of dynamic objects. There are so many ways this could break.”
Moon pointed to the individual segments of the bridge, which function independently of each other. Then there’s the lava, the cart, and the fact that you can use Link’s Ultrahand ability to tie all of those things together – even tie the bridge back onto itself.
According to reports, it took Nintendo a whole year Tears of the Kingdom
Another big game that caused this kind of physics-based shock and awe among game developers on social media was in 2020 when The Last of Us Part 2 A rope is included, which is required to solve a puzzle. How Tears of the KingdomThe bridge, the rope, and its natural-looking movements were just things that players expected would work, but game developers could see the amount of work that went into development.
The bridge has a lot of different points interacting within the physical system, said Luna Nielsen, a software engineer who stops by Luna the fox girl online and live streams about the complexities of game engines. “It’s about some pretty mathematical stuff. It can get really weird when something pulls too hard and suddenly the bridge is stuck in itself. So it has to be pushed out. And then one went too far backwards. It’s starting to get really bad because [the pieces of the bridge] differ fundamentally in their movements.”
Software engineer Cole Wardell put it differently: “Imagine the lava bridge at the top, if you grab the end of it, pull part of it to the side,” he said. “Well, that pulls the other attached piece with it a little, and the movement of that piece causes the next piece to move, and so on and so on. And if an element of the track collides with something, it has to be pushed or pushed back to a place where it doesn’t collide, which moves the pieces next to it, which in turn moves the pieces next to it.”
“The last time I saw something so impressive in terms of physics and gameplay was boarding The Last of Us Part 2. And the rope just appeared [a] “There are very few very controlled scenarios,” said Rocksteady Games’ lead gameplay and combat programmer Aadit Doshi on twitter. “To be able to confidently present the player with a stack of blocks connected with chains that move with precision without clipping, without objects shaking like crazy while trying to figure out what to do is impressive.”
Tears of the Kingdom also has its own rope-like physics flex: Another viral clip showed a door opening using four wheels and a chain. “It’s a complex interaction that doesn’t require shortcuts,” Wardell told Polygon. “Physics engines tend to use a lot of shortcuts and make a lot of assumptions, both for optimization purposes and to keep developers from pulling their own hair out,” Wardell said. “Almost all of these shortcuts, be they collision-free ropes [or] Rotating objects that exert forces only in certain ways would cause this type of mechanism not to work at all, or the chain would begin to vibrate until it disappeared from view in a single frame, or it would become infamous in another physical error is coming.”
He said rope bugs that “get out of control” are so common because of these issues. “If you don’t do everything Only Right, one movement will cause the other parts of the rope to move, and their movement will cause more collisions – God forbid you want the rope to collide with itself. These collisions cause more bumps, so more movement, causing your robe to vibrate off the map.”
Doshi explained complex physics is common in games, but said so Tears of the Kingdom pushes the limits of its engine to create exceptional gameplay and puzzles. “Realistic physics simulations take hours to perform calculations to ensure they are highly precise and accurate,” he said. “The game physics must deliver similar results every 16-32 milliseconds (60-30 frames per second).”
Some games are able to avoid this complexity by redesigning it, Doshi said. This means restricting player actions, which is the opposite of Tears of the Kingdom‘s design. There are restrictions, but somehow in this game it still feels like nothing is forbidden.
“In game development, that’s not the case If But physics will collapse If“, lead engineer and former Call of Duty developer of Gravity Well Josh Caratelli
Caratelli emphasized this, however Tears of the KingdomNintendo’s physics aren’t magic – it’s clear that Nintendo understands the physical interactions in the game very well. “What’s extremely impressive technically is how stable it is and how everything fits together in such a way that there is no pre-programmed solution and players are completely free to solve puzzles,” added Caratelli.
Moon pointed out that it’s not necessarily because other studios can’t match this level of technical innovation, but because they don’t prioritize the resources needed to do so. Often it’s about supporting the people who make the games we play. Tears of the Kingdom was apparently built on it breath of the wildA large part of the same team is reportedly working on it.
“There’s a problem in the gaming industry where we don’t value institutional knowledge,” Moon said. “Companies will prefer to bring in someone from outside rather than keep and upskill their junior or mid-level developers. We shoot ourselves in the foot when we don’t value this institutional knowledge. You can really see it Tears of the Kingdom. It’s an evolution of what was made breath of the wild special.”
According to Moon, it’s becoming increasingly common for game developers to figuratively tape one or another function together after the person who originally worked on the development is fired or has left the company; A lot of time is wasted reconfiguring and evaluating how something was done. It’s not that Nintendo doesn’t have problems of its own, because it certainly does – Nintendo of America QA testers For example, talked about a “Frat House” experience at Nintendo of America’s Washington headquarters last year. However, the company seems to value the expertise of its development staff.
“In addition to the overall hard work of the team, the institutional knowledge is clearly a factor in why this ended up going so smoothly,” Moon said. “The more stable and happier people are, the more likely they are to be able to make games of this quality. If you want good games, you don’t give a damn about the people who make them.”
