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Back when I worked in the video game industry I built a tool to find places in the collision mesh where objects could fall out of the map. It worked by just doi

Back when I worked in the video game industry I built a tool to find places in the collision mesh where objects could fall out of the map. It worked by just doing millions of ball simulations. Distributed the job with one sector per core to every developer machine at night. Worked great!

patates 4y ago
Neither have I ever worked in game industry nor developed games in any capacity, but as a very casual player, I'm always amazed in how many games even in these days, falling off the map is still not very hard. Is it easy to fix but nobody cares (like the most SQL injection vuln.s in web apps) or is it really genuinely hard to prevent?
- nauful 4y ago
  Depending on the technology used it may be trivial to extremely difficult. For most additive geometry constructed maps, cracks can form to create collision holes which otherwise look solid, or the map may not be entirely closed and have a gaping hole into the void. This is very difficult to get right. For maps which carve out empty space from solid space and then add geometry back (subtractive, such as Unreal), there may be cracks caused by numerical imprecision but collision errors here are relatively rare.
- Dalewyn 4y ago
  It's the latter. The first problem is that it's not immediately obvious. Hitboxes aren't tied to what is visible, so just looking over a map won't tell you anything. Playtesting the map also isn't foolproof, because sometimes the lack of a hitbox where there should be only manifests under very specific conditions which may or may not be in the realm of developer expectations. The second problem is that it's just very complex, and complex things are hard to build right the first time, find any problems, and fix them. Are these two overlapping polygons a bug or intended? Should this polygon have a hitbox? What about this particular face on the polygon, should it have a hitbox or not? How accurately should we be calculating collisions? The third problem is that game developers, and especially programmers, are paid bad and work in bad conditions. Any programmer worth their salt wants to jump ship over to the enterprise side of things ASAP, where both the pay and the conditions are much better. So you're left with not necessarily skilled/motivated programmers left to deal with complex programs (games) rife with the potential for bugs.
  - muststopmyths 4y ago
    > Any programmer worth their salt wants to jump ship over to the enterprise side of things ASAP, where both the pay and the conditions are much better I read ignorant shit about the game industry all the time on HN, but this is so beautifully ignorant, arrogant and demonstrative of what is wrong with software developers that if wish HN had gold to give. I suppose John carmack, George Romero and jonathon blow would be sad to learn they’re not worth their salt. Lest someone argue that I’m picking outliers, you’ll just have to take my word that in my years at Microsoft and then in games I have seen brilliant programmers (and bad ones) in both environments. And many of the best in games tried to stick it out at “enterprise software” (google, msft, SV unicorns) but always left within a year despite bags of money being hurled at them. Sorry if this sounds harsh but I am so tired of people who’ve never walked a mile in the shoes, telling a walker how they must suck at walking. It’s endemic on HN, for all kinds of things, not just games.
    - UncleMeat 4y ago
      Carmack did leave gaming and is now working on AI and VR. George Romero is a filmmaker so I think you are thinking of John Romero, who was never a stunningly good programmer but instead was focused on game design and level design. Jonathon Blow made two games, neither of which are known for particularly impressive engines, and is now spending most of his time developing a language and compiler. Odd examples to choose.
      - muststopmyths 4y ago
        Yeah, I meant John Romero, sorry. And Carmack didn't leave gaming for enterprise "ASAP". He had a long and storied career in games. I would say Romero was "worth his salt" as a programmer, whatever that vague metric means. Jonathan Blow made two games with engines developed from scratch. I don't know how you think that's "not particularly impressive" for a solo person, unless you have never tried to actually ship a game. With or without a custom engine. I was just trying to pick programmer examples that people would know. Probably didn't make my point very well, which was that there are plenty of programmers "worth their salt" in the gaming industry, and who chose to stay in it. To state otherwise is just fucking idiotic.

patates 4y ago

Neither have I ever worked in game industry nor developed games in any capacity, but as a very casual player, I'm always amazed in how many games even in these days, falling off the map is still not very hard. Is it easy to fix but nobody cares (like the most SQL injection vuln.s in web apps) or is it really genuinely hard to prevent?

nauful 4y ago
Depending on the technology used it may be trivial to extremely difficult. For most additive geometry constructed maps, cracks can form to create collision holes which otherwise look solid, or the map may not be entirely closed and have a gaping hole into the void. This is very difficult to get right. For maps which carve out empty space from solid space and then add geometry back (subtractive, such as Unreal), there may be cracks caused by numerical imprecision but collision errors here are relatively rare.
Dalewyn 4y ago
It's the latter. The first problem is that it's not immediately obvious. Hitboxes aren't tied to what is visible, so just looking over a map won't tell you anything. Playtesting the map also isn't foolproof, because sometimes the lack of a hitbox where there should be only manifests under very specific conditions which may or may not be in the realm of developer expectations. The second problem is that it's just very complex, and complex things are hard to build right the first time, find any problems, and fix them. Are these two overlapping polygons a bug or intended? Should this polygon have a hitbox? What about this particular face on the polygon, should it have a hitbox or not? How accurately should we be calculating collisions? The third problem is that game developers, and especially programmers, are paid bad and work in bad conditions. Any programmer worth their salt wants to jump ship over to the enterprise side of things ASAP, where both the pay and the conditions are much better. So you're left with not necessarily skilled/motivated programmers left to deal with complex programs (games) rife with the potential for bugs.
- muststopmyths 4y ago
  > Any programmer worth their salt wants to jump ship over to the enterprise side of things ASAP, where both the pay and the conditions are much better I read ignorant shit about the game industry all the time on HN, but this is so beautifully ignorant, arrogant and demonstrative of what is wrong with software developers that if wish HN had gold to give. I suppose John carmack, George Romero and jonathon blow would be sad to learn they’re not worth their salt. Lest someone argue that I’m picking outliers, you’ll just have to take my word that in my years at Microsoft and then in games I have seen brilliant programmers (and bad ones) in both environments. And many of the best in games tried to stick it out at “enterprise software” (google, msft, SV unicorns) but always left within a year despite bags of money being hurled at them. Sorry if this sounds harsh but I am so tired of people who’ve never walked a mile in the shoes, telling a walker how they must suck at walking. It’s endemic on HN, for all kinds of things, not just games.
  - UncleMeat 4y ago
    Carmack did leave gaming and is now working on AI and VR. George Romero is a filmmaker so I think you are thinking of John Romero, who was never a stunningly good programmer but instead was focused on game design and level design. Jonathon Blow made two games, neither of which are known for particularly impressive engines, and is now spending most of his time developing a language and compiler. Odd examples to choose.
    - muststopmyths 4y ago
      Yeah, I meant John Romero, sorry. And Carmack didn't leave gaming for enterprise "ASAP". He had a long and storied career in games. I would say Romero was "worth his salt" as a programmer, whatever that vague metric means. Jonathan Blow made two games with engines developed from scratch. I don't know how you think that's "not particularly impressive" for a solo person, unless you have never tried to actually ship a game. With or without a custom engine. I was just trying to pick programmer examples that people would know. Probably didn't make my point very well, which was that there are plenty of programmers "worth their salt" in the gaming industry, and who chose to stay in it. To state otherwise is just fucking idiotic.