ConcernedApe thought so, too ;) He works on Stardew his whole game development career. It is difficult to stop trying to improve the game and let your baby go after so long.
I’ve been playing and replaying it since its original PC-only release in 2016. I remember being so excited about a new game finally improving on thr Harvest Moon formula. I think it’s safe to say that today it has completely surpassed other games in the genre. The freedom and variety of tasks in the game has since enticed me towards further replays as well. It’s so inspiring how passionate Barone has been towards his creation in the long run too.
From what I’ve seen it seems a bit more targeted at teens and adults then kids and that’s kind of what I wanted Harvest Moon to be to begin with so I’m pretty excited to play it.
Also generally the added depth and how fleshed out it seems
It encapsulates some whimsy and magical elements which have always been underdeveloped in other similar games. Filled with mystery, easter eggs and constant progress and discovery. The relationship elements are a lot more mature than Harvest Moon as well. Deals with some of the grit and consequences of living in reality. All packaged together superbly.
On the exact same boat. I switched to Godot as soon as version 4 came out and have been really happy with it. I still use Unity professionally (at least until Godot 4 fixes some big issues), but most of my projects are now on Godot. God bless open source devs.
Yeah my device struggled to run any major engines so Godot kinda saved my ass when I first got into gamedev many years ago. I was going to start learning the major engines now that I have slightly better hardware, but I guess I’m skipping Unity now.
How is that tradition? It happened one time. Successor name suffixes and prefixes used: super, color, advance, mini, 64, i, 3, new, u. It could be anything.
Edit: ah no, there was also super game boy, I guess that’s the only one they repeated. But that was specifically for super NES compatibility.
Do “i”, “mini” and “new” really count as new consoles? i and new were just upgrades to the same console, I believe, and I’m not sure what “Mini” was even for…
I mean, they were direct successors. I imagine the next console won’t be something completely different than the switch, so I imagine I will be some sort of switch 2.
How about the Swiitch? You get the roman numeral 2 in there and the name’s similar enough to the original Switch, so customers will be confused as to whether this is a new console or an iteration of the current one. Just like the Wii U!
Hyping up old features as if they’re groundbreaking is a proud Bethesda tradition. I still remember laughing at their pre-release hype around the Radiant quest randomizer in Skyrim, which is virtually identical to the quest randomizer that Daggerfall had been built around fifteen years prior.
When I buy a Bethesda game, I know what I’m getting into. People bitch, but like you said, it’s the familiarity I’m going for.
And you know the modding scene is going to be good in a year or so.
Ultimately I don’t understand all the bickering. I don’t like Subway or McDonald’s, but I also don’t rant that they are no good because they don’t have lasagna on the menu.
They’ve built a library of small building blocks for character movements. These blocks can be combined in various ways to create a wide range of animations. … Instead of designing separate animations for each of these situations, they use these building blocks to put together the character’s movements naturally.
This sounds like shape keys, which is a technique already widely used in games and animation today. When you get shot in Battlefield, your character model plays a “getting shot” animation. When your character runs, it plays a “running” animation. When your character gets shot while running, these two animations are combined - it’s not a separate “shot while running” animation.
Would love to know if there’s actually some novel aspect to this “invention” but it seems more likely that this is yet another bullshit patent approved by a clueless clerk who did zero searches for prior art.
Edit: Read the patent. Not only does it describe nothing novel, it doesn’t even document what they did. All it says is basically “we created animation blocks and combine them”. The details are just a bunch of bullshit jargon spew:
attributes can include conditions, properties, events, flags, graphs, values, references, and variants
I think this would make it tough to enforce the patent if it’s actually commonly used. If I were somehow granted a patent on tap dancing, its common usage by others before me would probably cause my patent to be invalidated if I then tried to sue a tap dancer.
Not a patent lawyer, but IIRC, US patent law had some protections for things (including non-patented) that are already common practice.
Software patents get away with stupid shit like this all the time. Patent trolls claim they invented a software pattern and then sue everyone who uses it.
They would only be able to get away with this if it had already been determined that they did indeed invent that thing. Many choose not to fight cease and desists when it would be in their best interest to counter claim.
You can’t grant a patent for something that is already in the public domain at the time of filing, regardless of whether or not that thing is currently patent protected.
Edit: this is such a funny comment to want to downvote. “Fuck you with your legitimate factual information!”
Novelty is assessed against all publicly disclosed prior art, not just the stuff that has been patented.
If I publish content on a webpage that could be used as prior art later on assessing novelty.
If I invent a special lawnmower and only show my friends and family and never sell it or patent it, that could still count as public disclosure and be used against anyone wishing to patent a similar lawnmower.
I work in patents. If it wasn’t novel it wouldn’t be granted, believe me.
My experience with clients has led me to never trust lay people’s judgements on what is or is not novel.
Feel free to actually read the examiner’s comments in this patent application for an actually full understanding of the process
Or better still if you think you are able to assess novelty though a 5 minute cursory read of a patent without any reference to prior art, feel free to do my job for me. You’re clearly much more efficient and unbiased and definitely aren’t cutting any corners in your evaluation. Both in understanding the law and understanding how to assess novelty in a proper way.
I work in patents. If it wasn’t novel it wouldn’t be granted, believe me.
I work in computer graphics software. My former employer preferred that engineers liberally apply for “defensive” patents because of how often people would get a patent for something we already did and then try to sue us for it. Plus we got a small cash bonus when our patents were approved. Through this process, I was granted six patents for my work there. It would be unwise to put something to text that could be used as evidence to invalidate the patents, so I’ll just say that my opinion on how low the bar is to getting software patents approved is definitely well-informed.
understanding the law and understanding how to assess novelty in a proper way
I’ll admit I have little understanding of the legal definition of “novel”, but insofar as the intent of the patent system, the current bar is way too low for software patents. Although remedied recently, the plethora of software patents that still exist for “(Something people have done for decades) but do it on a computer” is ridiculous.
If it was something you already did prior to filing and you could prove it then their case would be extremely flimsy, but I do understand where you come from.
It really depends on jurisdiction, in the UK it’s not possible to even patent software. In Europe it is, but regulations are strict. The US patent law is a little bit wonky in this regard.
You’ve not even referenced the claims of the patent, which is actually what is protected. It’s already extremely likely the examiner has flagged these up as prior art and more and still passed it as allowable after a thorough novelty search and several rounds of amendments. Lots of things are sort of like other inventions but what they actually do lies outside of the claim scope.
The invention is not what is patented, the claims are. There are undoubtedly novel features in the claims or again the examiner wouldn’t allow it.
Barring a performance of a full novelty search where you break down the claims and compare them to the prior art individually, you aren’t convincing me that the claims aren’t novel.
Assessing novelty is one of the most difficult parts of being a patent attorney and can’t be done with a cursory search.
A locomotion system for controlling animation of a character in a three-dimensional (3D) virtual environment comprising: a rendering engine; a core system logic communicatively coupled to the rendering engine for executing core game logic of the virtual environment …
This is basically a description of a game engine that supports movement and animation. Descent (1994) would be the earliest production use of such an engine.
The locomotion system of claim 1, wherein a key identifies one or more variables of the blackboard, the key comprising a human readable name associated with the variables to provide the selection criteria.
Congratulations, you just described “variables”, a concept at least as old as ENIAC (1945).
The locomotion system of claim 1, wherein the core game logic defines one or more desired physical movements to sequence the motion type objects blocks.
Yes, that’s one way to describe “animation”
The locomotion system of claim 1, wherein a selected archetype block defines a fallback archetype block, the fallback archetype block defining at least one new motion animation block or motion type block not present in the selected archetype block and inheriting any remaining motion type blocks and motion animation blocks from the selected archetype block.
Variables having a default value is the default behavior of most programming languages and software systems.
The locomotion system of claim 1, wherein a selected archetype block defines the character’s default animation.
Yea, we’re talking about animation here. Default value of animation description = default animation.
The locomotion system of claim 1, wherein a selected archetype block of the character is unique from a second archetype block of a second character and at least one motion type block is common across the character and the second character.
Inheritance, a property of most software designs since the 1980s.
The locomotion system of claim 1, wherein at least one of the motion animation blocks, the motion type blocks, and the archetype blocks is defined by a series of extensible markup language (XML)-based meta files.
Storing configuration in a data file. You’d be hard pressed to find an alternative. Maybe some genius will come along and find some way to represent it in JSON…
The locomotion system of claim 1, wherein a selected attribute of a selected motion animation block includes at least one of a clip set that is used by a selected motion of the character, an overloadable animation blend tree to be used for the selected motion, named additional clips within specific clip sets, parametric blends from sets that can be named, a Boolean that specifies whether play speed of the selected motion can be modified, a minimum speed, and a maximum speed.
This seems to be the main claim of the patent, but seems to have a huge amount of prior art (see links). “Parametric blends” and other terms are just jargon.
The locomotion system of claim 1, wherein the attributes of the motion animation block are custom float values.
Oh my god. Really? Shall we also include “doubles”, “halfs”, or maybe “rationals”?
The locomotion system of claim 1, further comprising one or more transition tables to control a relationship between motion animation blocks.
“Translation table” seems to just be referring to the graph topology of the system. Yes, graphs are the most common way to represent arbitrary N:M relationships.
The locomotion system of claim 1, further comprising an in-game graphical user interface for real-time modification of at least one of the motion animation blocks, the motion type blocks, and the archetype blocks.
Node-based editing; standard practice in all 3D modeling.
A computer-implemented method for controlling animation of a character in a three-dimensional (3D) virtual environment comprising: executing core game logic to render the virtual environment using a core system logic communicatively coupled to a rendering engine …
Yes, you already described what a game engine is and an animation system is. Game engines certainly do have animation systems…
The computer-implemented method of claim 12, wherein said animating the character further comprises identifying a second archetype block, the common set of motion type blocks and the motion animation blocks of the second archetype block altering the animation of the character as a game story defined by the core game logic develops.
Picking animation keys based on game logic. What else would you base it on exactly?
The computer-implemented method of claim 12, wherein said animating the character further comprises identifying a fallback archetype block of the archetype block, the fallback archetype block defining at least one new motion animation block or motion type block not present in the selected archetype block and inheriting any remaining motion type blocks and motion animation blocks from the selected archetype block.
Yes, default values do be defaultin’.
A computer program product for controlling animation of a character in a three-dimensional (3D) virtual environment, the computer program product including a non-transitory computer readable storage medium having program instructions embodied therewith, the program instructions executable by a device to cause the device to perform a method comprising: executing core game logic to render the virtual environment using a core system logic communicatively coupled to a rendering engine …
Yep, software sure does run on computers. Computers are neat. And they have storage.
The computer program product of claim 15, wherein said animating the character further comprises identifying a second archetype block, the common set of motion type objects blocks and the motion animation blocks of the second archetype block altering the animation of the character as a game story defined by the core game logic develops.
Are we really going to enumerate all the permutations of engine + animation + defaults claims?
The computer program product of claim 15, wherein said animating the character further comprises identifying a fallback archetype block of the archetype block, the fallback archetype block defining at least one new motion animation block or motion type block not present in the selected archetype block and inheriting any remaining motion type objects blocks and motion animation blocks from the selected archetype block.
All the claims except 8 are “obvious” IMO. Claim 8 fails novelty because of the huge amount of prior art on the matter.
Note that I’m using “novelty” and “obvious” according to their english definitions, and the intent of patent protection. If they’re different in practice, that’s a failing of current patent law.
If you think you can do better than a patent office examiner get on it because they’re extremely well paid.
Or maybe you could stop and draw a line under what you think is correct. Have you ever considered the possibility that actually you haven’t got the first clue how to properly analyse a patent because it’s a profession that requires extensive training and eye to detail?
I know on the internet it’s fun to pretend you actually know everything because everything is a Google search away but to even properly contextualise and separate good patents and bad patents isn’t a skill you can just pick up in 5 minutes to win an argument.
It sounds more like they’re using more fundamental movements than what you’re describing, not running animation+shot animation but more like:
Both reloading a particular weapon and mantling over a walk require you to lift your arms, so the root movement of lifting your arm to reload an LMG is the same one used to grab a ledge overhead, etc.
Basically they’re just categorizing movements based on use case and direction so they can string those individual movements into different and unique patterns for individual actions.
Pressing an elevator button uses the same arm movement as opening a door, which uses the same wrist rotation movement as turning the key in a car, etc. So they just break down individual movements in the same way an LLM breaks down a voice into phonetics to string new words together.
It’s definitely possible they’re doing something novel internally, but the details that would support that interpretation are missing from the filing. One of the requirements for patents is that it “sufficient disclosure of the invention so that it can be reproduced by others”. I would say I qualify as an expert in the domain covered, and I have no idea what they’re actually doing based on the patent alone.
Valve releasing a competitive game doesn’t prevent you from doing this. I for one am excited by the potential of this game. Then again, I’ve been playing Dota for 10 years so maybe I’m just a masochist.
Man I’ve got really conflicted feelings about this game. I do think it’s great, and will probably be picking up Phantom Liberty next sale, but I never know whether to appreciate the devs for sticking with it and making sure their work lived up to expectations, or to be frustrated that I basically had to wait a year for a full product after buying for $80 CAD on day one (my own mistake, I foolishly thought CD Project was immune to such blunders). I guess it’s a bit of both. I do really appreciate all the hard work, I just wish that wasn’t on top of a bunch of frustration and disappointment.
Totally get where you’re coming from. But you can enjoy the game and dislike the way they marketed and released it. 90% of life isn’t a zero-sum game. Despite what the internet would have you believe.
This is true. However, even as a young person I remember the times where a game being released meant it was done, and if it was butchered, that was that. There was no second chance for the studio because the community absolutely wouldn’t trust them.
Now, that’s standard. Every AAA game is just assumed to basically be barely functional until 6+ months post launch. People have to say “why would you buy a game day one?” as if it’s a ridiculous notion to want to purchase a product that has been released onto a market. That sucks. It sucks that something that used to be a fun hobby is now a seedy grey market full of vitriole.
they should learn from the fiasco, don’t promise what the devs can’t deliver, marketing department should ask the devs what they can promote. and you shouldn’t buy game on day one 😂
The straight-up lies are what really get to me. Bullshots and fake-ass trailers for almost a decade. Hype for shit that was never going in. And now people just say “it’s great, what’s your problem?” like they want it to happen again.
The title made me think they were responding to users that needed customer support, but no. This:
Meanwhile, when another user lamented the amount of loading screens, the support team replied imploring the reviewer to “consider the amount of data for the expansive gameplay that is procedurally generated to load flawlessly in under three seconds”.
is just pathetic. This is nothing more than low-effort damage control. Which, funnily enough, is rather fitting for Starfield in general. It’s not a terrible game but it absolutely fell flat on its face on its biggest selling points. Procedural exploration will always have drawbacks but No Man’s Sky absolutely smashes Starfield in this department and it came out nearly 8 years ago and made by a team a fraction of the size. And I don’t expect Bethesda to put in the same effort as Hello did and make Starfield live up to its promises
but No Man’s Sky absolutely smashes Starfield in this department
I had high hopes for No Man’s Sky based on how people talked about it but was left underwhelmed. I found it boring and repetitive.
Starfield took a lot longer before it started feeling that repetitive (to me.) I put many more hours into Starfield (than NMS) without even thinking about it.
I just rolled credits on Starfield last night and went back to keep playing because I have a ton of unfinished quests and some goals for building my spaceship. With No Man’s Sky I felt like there was nothing else to find.
(All that said, I do find a lot of the writing pretty lackluster, the planets now feel boring to look at and now predictable as to what will be there, and I do not particularly enjoy running around trying to find the last things to scan for very little payoff.)
I agree about NMS, I can’t bring myself to try it again. The original feeling that everything is the same is still with me, even after reading reviews of updates.
The best summary for NMS I have read is “huge but shallow”. There is so much stuff to do, but everything is so shallow that it becomes boring very fast
Yeah, I ended up feeling the same about Starfield as I did about NMS. A huge universe that’s wildly unrewarding in every way possible. And getting to the end of Starfield, the NG+ feels exactly like getting to the center of the galaxy in NMS. Completely pointless.
The main quest of Starfield had literally no impact on the world at large. And don’t get me wrong, that’s totally fine. As long as it has an impact on something. But it doesn’t. It all boils down to “no one can know about this” and where you stand on the issue, which in itself its meaningless because no matter where you stand, the outcome is exactly the same. You just run in circles and your choices have no effect on anything.
The side quests and faction quests are pretty good. But that’s about it. The ship building system is painful, the outpost building system is so fucking bad I don’t even know where to start, and it takes hours upon hours to go through levelling up, doing skill challenges, as well as research, to even get to a point where any of it is rewarding, and even then it isn’t actually rewarding. At least the settlement crafting in NMS felt like building a cool house and a rad looking planet. Whereas Starfield, settlements are just massive pain in the ass mines and manufacturers.
An issue is that Bethesda might be getting deluded into thinking that Fallout 4 on its own was fantastic.
It is, on its own, very boring. The story is bland, characters left unexplored. But the mods make it amazing.
Sim settlements alone revitalizes the game, changing settlement building into an optional and story driven thing, particularly in its version 2.
The vertibirds mods which not only fix the abysmal default abilities, but even let you call one in as air support.
Various mods that add travellers on the roads and paths, so you encounter other people.
The mods that let you turn the feral ghouls into zombie hordes.
The list goes on.
Yeah, at the beginning Fallout 4 was just Fallout Shelter with a quest tacked onto it. And especially since the game really pushes you into the Minutemen faction, for a new player, the annoyance of constant settlement building and rescuing settlers and setting up new settlements completely overwhelms you and makes the game extremely frustrating. After my first playthrough I put it down and didn’t come back to it for over a year because it pissed me off so much. Realizing you could just ignore the Minutemen made the game so much better. And then when mods came to the consoles, it completely changed the game. Made it so much more enjoyable.
Like, yeah, there’s loads of YT channels now devoted to FO4 content, but only because mods allowed people to transcend how lackluster the game was at the beginning. The love of it now is despite Bethesda. And they definitely spend way too much time smelling their own farts thinking they hit the ball out of the park because of all that.
We will truly live in a world where 95% of games are based on Unreal Engine, 4% on Godot or GameMaker Studio, and 1% custom engines.
Which is such a shame… When Unreal does something bad, like absolutely messing up shader compilation, pretty much all games start suffering with this for years. And there are some amazing engines out there… Resident Evil’s scales surprisingly well and looks way better than it has any right to.
I have a love hate relationship with this man. He has spearheaded some of my favorite games even if they came nowhere close to what was promised. It’s so weird to come back to Fable and enjoy it more than I did when it came out.
Yeah, gamers Nexus was saying that the stream deck guys were telling them that they were waiting for the tech to get good enough to be able to call the device steam deck 2, but that’s probably a couple of years out.
Activision Blizzard has become such a huge pile of disgusting shit that people are quite tempted to see what would happen if the devil Microsoft buys it.
Yeah, never thought I’d live the day to see it but here we are. Blizzard use to be the darling of all gamers, only one who did things right and released games when they were actually done. Then money hungry shitheads took over.
I’m just happy to potentially see Bobby Kotick, Ion Hazzikostas, Mike Ybarra, etc ousted.
Don’t get me wrong. Fifteen years ago I would have flipped if Microsoft put in a bid to buy Vivendi and get their paws on Blizzard, after seeing how badly they ruined Rare. Activision tanked the brand so bad that I’m actually rooting for Microsoft.
I don’t think Kotick is at all certain to be kicked out. As easily as I can see MS letting him go with an enormous golden parachute, I can just as easily imagine them keeping him onboard because all they care about is Activision’s ability to make money.
In all likelihood Blizzard isn’t going to be managed any differently. Microsoft’s modus operandi with gaming acquisitions is to leave the leadership in place and let the dev/publisher run itself. Why is everyone expecting different here? The most likely outcome is MS does nothing to Blizzard and Blizzard continues on more or less the same trajectory as before.
Tell that fucknut Tsujimoto to take a fuckin pay cut if he’s concerned about increasing wages. I’m not paying $80-$90 for a fucking game. Hell, I’m still not completely cool with paying $70
The last triple A game I bought at launch was ‘Watchdogs Legion’, to comemorate my new PC. I figured I just build a new computer, so why not celebrate by buying an expensive game. It was a stupid impulse buy.
I’m still not cool with them raising PC games from $50 to $60 almost 20 years ago just because they could and used the console parity excuse due to their licensing fees. I don’t think I’ve bought a AAA game since EA’s stunts around 2012/2013.
Pixel Tap, another popular tap game, outright prevents you from progressing past level three unless you invite at least one friend - and by the time the airdrop rolled around, level three wasn’t enough to be eligible for any tokens. But for every friend you did invite, you got 5% of the in-game currency they earned, and 1% of anything players they invited made, essentially creating something indicative of a virtual pyramid scheme, or MLM (multi-level marketing), that eventually paid out crypto tokens to those at the top. The Pixel Tap crypto reached a high of $0.0977 shortly after it launched, but at time of writing is now worth $0.006405, less than a tenth of that peak.
Virtual pyramid schemes for monopoly money, lovely.
The problem is the monopoly money is being used in a confidence game that’s being permitted by governments because all they see are more potentially taxable transactions and don’t give a shit about what this means for the longterm health of our societies.
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