Shuntaro Furukawa: Nintendo to explore shorter dev cycles; Invest in development teams to improve efficiency

The good indies and AA are currently doing this and barely anyone here is paying attention (unless said dev/game gets enough clout to be noticed)

They keep giving people exactly what they keep asking for, but since their game isn't 'well known brand by well known publisher' it either gets ignored, criticized to an extreme degree, or finds itself a small fanbase.

Gaming didn't forget, gamers forgot.

Gamers forgot what it was like to simply browse a blockbuster, or grab a demo disc, and try out a random game they thought looked fun. Now? It's clout. Big Publisher X has to make it or publish it for them to notice.

Nintendo potentially doubling down on smaller experiences doesn't excite me like others here because I was already playing other good smaller experiences. People now just care because it's Nintendo spotlighting it again.

The whole 'not fun' thing has been a prevalent personal issue that people keep brazenly assigning to the industry as a whole.
My counter to that would be, indies would be better served to have Nintendo, Sony, MS, EA, to each make an arcade style game. If they introduced the audience to those types of games again with their large reach, it could help indies immensely!

I agree though, indies need a better way to be discovered.
 
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Nothing in this talk proves me wrong or is incompatible with what I said. In fact, it reinforces that I was right.

The part I mentioned that wasn't in the physics engine and was the state management of objects (frozen, burning, etc) is a pretty simple code as he says, but they mentioned it there as 'chemistry engine' even if as he mentions it's just a state calculator instead of a real or accurate chemistry engine.

But doesn't have anything related to chemistry, it's just to handle the few simple rules to decide when each object changes their state as I said.

Maybe that's the other 'engine' you mentioned.
Did you watch the presentation? Because it's explained pretty clearly there, they even show it in a diagram:

This part begins near the 25:00 minute mark.

Even something as simple as the original Super Mario Bros. has many of these clever lies to adjust the physics behaviour, like when you jump against a block corner and get pushed out of it, Coyote time, having different gravity values for different times of the jump, different accelerations and friction values depending on whether you're turning around or running in the same direction or are near a cliff...BotW has a million more of those, like constraining the angles in which stuff can move in reaction to a player action so that it looks realistic while still allowing for ease of control. That's the secondary physics engine, an engine built on top of the Havok simulation that applies another set of rules to give a "gameplay adjusted" final output. That is what makes BotW so impressive, because it has these million little adjustments running on the background that makes everything work exactly like you expect it to work, while most other games that try something much less complex break all the time. And all of these physics simulations are running in a HUGE open world, on a toaster. BTW, this is just the basics physics layer, I haven't even mentioned any of the stuff you can do with stasis, magnesis or the orders of magnitude crazier stuff in TotK.

In summary:
  • There is a history of games using physics, allowing you to do half of the things BotW allows, in maps quarter the size, yet breaking all the time with the simplest interactions.
  • There is the Zelda team, one of (if not THE) most revered development teams out of there, giving a presentation on their physics engine approach to a room full of other developers, who then proceed to award the game a technical distinction because of this system.
  • There is also the mountain of articles and reactions from other devs gushing to the things that were achieved in TotK.
  • And then there's you saying that they all know sh*t because it is all pretty simple stuff that the Havok engine handles on its own.

I agree BotW was an impressive technical achievement and the award was well deserved, but because for including such a big open world with great visuals running well in the toaster that Switch is. Not for using Havok physics.
BotW didn't get any technical achievement because of it's visuals, all the merit of that goes to it's amazing art direction not technical prowess, and the people giving the award know it. But I agree with you, it didn't get the award for using Havok physics, it did because it implemented an astounding physics engine in a scale and with such polish never seen before.
 
Nintendo is an extremely well-run company with thoughtful, balanced and sensible leadership throughout. Watch this be spun as Nintendo being 'evil' again by YouTubers.
make armazing single playsers games with no gass woke crud youtube mad they cant pirite

evil they said oohoohoohooho
 
Keeping a higher number of developers long term could be one.
The videogame.i dusty is heavenly relying on cycles.
You do lots of hiring when a project goes full swing, but after the project is done you let go a huge part of the team and just hire again when a new project gets to full development.

This is money savvy but also makes you lose a lot of acquired experience and the efficiency that comes from it or even just from team members already knowing each other.

Shortening the dev cycle while also overlapping them better (so that people can jump from project to project without dead time in the middle) could make projects more efficient.

A lot comes down to good management at all levels
Potentially yes, but Nintendo already does these things so I'm not sure they will impact their dev times.
 
Did you watch the presentation? Because it's explained pretty clearly there, they even show it in a diagram:

This part begins near the 25:00 minute mark.

Even something as simple as the original Super Mario Bros. has many of these clever lies to adjust the physics behaviour, like when you jump against a block corner and get pushed out of it, Coyote time, having different gravity values for different times of the jump, different accelerations and friction values depending on whether you're turning around or running in the same direction or are near a cliff...BotW has a million more of those, like constraining the angles in which stuff can move in reaction to a player action so that it looks realistic while still allowing for ease of control. That's the secondary physics engine, an engine built on top of the Havok simulation that applies another set of rules to give a "gameplay adjusted" final output. That is what makes BotW so impressive, because it has these million little adjustments running on the background that makes everything work exactly like you expect it to work, while most other games that try something much less complex break all the time. And all of these physics simulations are running in a HUGE open world, on a toaster. BTW, this is just the basics physics layer, I haven't even mentioned any of the stuff you can do with stasis, magnesis or the orders of magnitude crazier stuff in TotK.

In summary:
  • There is a history of games using physics, allowing you to do half of the things BotW allows, in maps quarter the size, yet breaking all the time with the simplest interactions.
  • There is the Zelda team, one of (if not THE) most revered development teams out of there, giving a presentation on their physics engine approach to a room full of other developers, who then proceed to award the game a technical distinction because of this system.
  • There is also the mountain of articles and reactions from other devs gushing to the things that were achieved in TotK.
  • And then there's you saying that they all know sh*t because it is all pretty simple stuff that the Havok engine handles on its own.

Yes, I watched the video and in that point of the screenshot he says the same I said, that they did use Havok for movements and collisions (physics) of the game.

He never said anything about a secondary physics engine.

The rigid body objects in Havok are required to have attributes like friction, acceleration etc. to work and interact with each other, if not it wouldn't work because that's what a physics engine needs to work. Same as back in the PS2/PSP times, nothing new.

 
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Yes, I watched the video and in that point of the screenshots he says the same I said, that they did use Havok for movements and collisions (physics) of the game.

He never said anything about a secondary physics engine.

The rigid body objects in Havok are required to have attributes like friction, acceleration etc. to work and interact with each other, if not would work. Same as back in the PS2/PSP times, nothing new.
Most of us were impressed with TOTK physics. Quit derailing the thread with this shit. If you want to make a point about BOTW/TOTK being underwhelming, there are better threads to do so or better yet, create your own thread.
 
Yes, I watched the video and in that point of the screenshot he says the same I said, that they did use Havok for movements and collisions (physics) of the game.

He never said anything about a secondary physics engine.
How do you call a game system that handles the game physics? That's exactly what the "Telling clever lies!" rectangle reffers to: It's the other half of the system that comprises the game physics (the other being the raw/basic/unadjusted movement+collision systems which are later replaced by Havok, this is also explained in a previous slide).


The rigid body objects in Havok are required to have attributes like friction, acceleration etc. to work and interact with each other, if not it wouldn't work because that's what a physics engine needs to work. Same as back in the PS2/PSP times, nothing new.
"Acceleration" is not an attribute of Rigidbodies in any existing physics engine, it's not a property you set that defines how the object behaves, it's a magnitude resulting of the appliance of forces that is constantly changing if those forces don't remain constant. Acceleration and friction were already being used back in Asteroids (released in 1979, a bit before PS2/PSP), maybe even before that.

You still haven't explained how, if all this is something that Havok handles on its' own, the standard for games is to have broken physics, while the polished behaviour of BotW and TotK is the exception.
 
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