The physics of bridge tears in the Kingdom is impressive

There is a bridge to cross the lava pit The Legend of Zelda: Kingdom’s TearsMarakuguc Shrine, but it is out of order. More than half of the bridge is stacked on top of itself on one side of the pit, with a section cut off on the other side. A bridge is the obvious choice for crossing lava, but how do we fix it?

A section showing a possible solution It spread on Twitter After a brief period Kingdom TearsVersion: The player uses Link’s Ultrahand ability to dismount a stacked bridge by attaching it to a wheeled platform in lava. When the wheeled platform—now attached to the edge of the bridge—is activated and moves forward, it pulls the bridge taut, splattering lava as it goes, until the suspended bridge is already suspended and can be crossed. But it wasn’t the solution itself that resonated with the players. Instead, the clip had game developers’ jaws on the ground, in awe of how Nintendo’s team argued with the game’s physics system to do that.

For gamers, it’s just a bridge, but for game developers, it’s a miracle.

“The most complex part of game development is when the different systems and features start to come into contact with each other,” he said. China Moona tech producer who has worked on games like 2018 God of War reboot and its sequel, God of War: Ragnarok, to the polygon. “It’s really impressive. The amount of dynamic stuff is why there are so many different types of solutions to this puzzle in particular. There are so many ways this could break.”

Moon pointed out the individual parts of the bridge that operate independently. Then there’s the lava and the buggy and the fact that you can use Link’s Ultrahand ability to string any of those things together – even the bridge back on itself.

Nintendo reportedly used it for a full year of Kingdom TearsIts development of polish, it shows. “The amount of different options available is a testament to the amount of work that everyone at every level of the team has done, especially QA testing,” Moon said. “Open-world games with a lot of real-time physics elements like this are hard to test for quality assurance.”

Another big game that inspired this kind of physics-based shock and awe from game developers on social media was in 2020, when The Last of Us Part 2 Included is a rope necessary to solve the puzzle. Likes Kingdom TearsThe bridge, rope, and its seemingly natural movements were just something players would expect, but game developers can tell how much work went into developing it.

Luna Nielsen, a software engineer, said the bridge has a lot of different points pulling on each other within the physics system. Luna foxgirl online and a live broadcast about the intricacies of game engines. “It gets into some pretty math-related stuff. It can get really funky when it pulls on something too much, and all of a sudden the bridge is inside itself. So you have to push it out. Then you move one thing too far. It starts out really bad, because [the pieces of the bridge] Fundamentally different from each other’s movements.”

“Imagine the lava bridge above, when you grab the end of it, you pull part of it to one side,” said software engineer Cole Wardle. Well, now this one pulls the other piece attached to it a little bit, and this piece moving makes the next piece move, and so on. moves the pieces adjacent to it.”

“The last time I saw something really impressive in physics/gameplay was rope in it The Last of Us Part 2. The rope only appeared in [a] “Some very tightly controlled scenarios,” said a senior gameplay and combat programmer at Rocksteady Games. I did doshi on Twitter. “Being able to confidently present the player with a set of blocks linked by chains that move in precise ways, without clipping, without jerking things around like crazy while trying to figure out what they need to do is amazing.”

Kingdom Tears It also has its own rope-like physics: Another viral clip Show a door that opens using four wheels and a chain. He told Wardle that this is a complex interaction that requires no short cuts. “As a general rule, physics engines take a lot of shortcuts and make a lot of assumptions, whether for optimization purposes or to keep developers from pulling their hair out,” said Wardle. Almost all of these shortcuts, whether they’re no-bump chords [or] Rotating objects apply forces in only specific ways, that would make this kind of flat mechanism not work, or the chain would start to vibrate until it disappeared from view in one frame, or some other nefarious physical defect.”

He said that rope bugs “vibrating out of control” are very common because of these problems. If you don’t do everything Just Well, one movement will set the other parts of the rope in motion, and their movement will cause more collisions – God forbid, you want the rope to collide with itself. Those collisions will lead to more push, which is more movement, which ends up with your cape shaking off the map.”

Doshi explained Complex physics are common in games, but he said so Kingdom Tears It pushes the limits of its engine to create exceptional games and puzzles. “Realistic physics simulations take hours to do the math to make sure they are very precise and accurate,” he said. “Game physics needs to achieve similar results every 16-32ms (60-30fps).”

Doshi said that some games are able to avoid these complexities by designing around them. This means restricting the player’s action, which is an antithesis Kingdom Tearsdesign. There are limitations, but somehow, in this game, it still feels like nothing is off limits.

In game development, that’s not the case if Physics will break down however when,” Chief Engineer at Gravity Well and former Call of Duty developer Josh Caratelli Polygon said. That’s why there A whole Reddit page about physical idiots – Player characters hanging in limbo or enemies bouncing off walls. It’s not that games with physics bugs or glitches are poorly made; It’s really easy for things to go wrong.

But Caratelli insisted Kingdom TearsGame physics aren’t magic – it’s clear that Nintendo understands greatly the physics interactions in a game. “What’s impressive from a technical point of view is how stable they are and how they all fit together in such a way that there is no pre-programmed solution and players can solve puzzles with complete freedom,” Karatelli added.

Moon pointed out that it’s not exactly that other studios can’t reach that level of technical innovation, but they’re not prioritizing the resources to do so. This is often due to the support of the humans who make the games we play. Kingdom Tears It was apparently built over Breath of the Wildwith much of the same team working on it.

“There’s a problem with the gaming industry where we don’t value institutional knowledge,” Moon said. “Companies will prioritize bringing in someone from the outside rather than keeping and training their junior or middle developers. We’re shooting ourselves by not appreciating that institutional knowledge. You can really see it in Kingdom Tears. It is progress for what was made Breath of the Wild private.”

According to Moon, it’s increasingly common for game developers to feel like they own one feature or another with duct tape, figuratively speaking, after the person who originally led its design has been laid off or let go; There is a lot of time wasted reconfiguring and evaluating how to get something done. It’s not that Nintendo doesn’t have its own problems, it certainly does. Nintendo of America QA Testers He talked about the “fraternity house” experience inside Nintendo of America’s Washington headquarters last year, for example. But the company seems to value the expertise of its development staff.

“In addition to the overall hard work of the team, institutional knowledge is clearly a factor in why this has been done so smoothly,” Moon said. “The more settled and happier people are, the more they can make games that good. If you want good games, you have to care about the people who make them.”

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