> The functionality seems at first glance to be a given for any game with a similar environment, but according to an observation by naoya2k, what makes Nintendo’s solution unique is that there are no physics working between Link and the dynamic object. Since both the character and object use physics, the most straightforward solution would be that Link moves together with the moving objects he is on top of as a result of physics (such as frictional force), but Nintendo apparently decided that what works better game-wise is Link being given the same movement that the object is performing, without any physics working between the two.
No way this is the first game to ignore the player character in physics calculations. I'm pretty sure in GTA3 you could climb onto the roof of a car and not slide around as the NPC drives and makes sharp turns.
That's just a trivial parent-child transformation copy, and it's one of the oldest tools in 3D digital representation. You would be hard-pressed to find a game engine or even modeling software without this feature. Hell, I'm sure if you looked through a few geometry or physics books, you could pretty easily find any instance of this that predates computing.
We aren't even talking about something interesting like inverse kinematics!
This patent boils down to nothing more than math, and should have been invalidated as soon as it was read. The fact that it wasn't speaks volumes on the failure of our patent system.
Uncharted 2, (or 3?) on the PlayStation, was widely publicized among game developers as having this kind of technology built into enable for instance the Nathan Drake character to stick appropriately to platforms which were being tossed around in a sinking ship. The ship was filling up with water creating buoyancy for the platform that he was standing on. There were numerous talks about this and I believe also a GDC presentation about it.
Another example could be: in Tribes, when you pilot a vehicle your player character gets attached to a mount point and any physics calculations are ignored.
I'd imagine nintendo probably have other claims linked to this since alone it has clearly been done before.
I think the point is that the approach far predates games with anything like a physics system. That part of the patent seems to describe what happens when a character stands on a moving platform like an elevator. This stuff predates Super Mario Bros.
Typically something like an elevator wouldn't be modeled with physics (mass, velocity, etc.) its movement would just be hardcoded. And of course games without a physics emulator wouldn't do that either.
My understanding of the patent is that two objects that are normally subject to physics (the player and a platform), when the player stands on an object the player's physics are disabled and the player's position is just copied from the object.
But, like, there's no way this hasn't been done before.
Even the original Half-Life monorail intro sequence had the player moving relative to a moving vehicle.
You weren't moving on a simulated rigid-body physics object, but in practice there's not much difference - other than handling the nasty cases, like what to do when the physics object flips upside down and crushes the player, or resolving collisions with static world objects that the player makes contact with but the 'vehicle' doesn't.
In HL1 you fly to the back of the tram when you jump because you only move with it while grounded. In HL:Source you move with the tram correctly and jump in place relative to the tram. Bafflingly in Black Mesa it's back to the incorrect HL1 behavior. Always bothered me.
Not quite. It’s pretty rare to be jumping off and standing on top of moving physics objects in 2D platformers. Like in Mario almost everything you can stand on is static or following a fixed movement pattern.
I'm also wracking my brain for this situation in one of the many metroidvanias I've played. There are many which let the player freeze enemies so they can be used as platforms but the enemies are also not moving by that point.
The most likely I can think of is Axiom Verge, which has a mechanism for "glitching" enemies that might allow for a non-frozen enemy to be used as a platform while it continues to follow the player character around. I'm not totally familiar with how each enemy glitches so it's only "likely" in the sense that I don't know it's definitely not possible.
Physics objects are generally poor fits for 2D platformers. They’re random which betrays slick level design (and endangers sequence breaks in some games). They probably fall too fast to interact with. They potentially accumulate. 2D platformer characters tend to not experience physics aside from gravity to begin with and sliding momentum as they usually cannot rotate and don’t expect to encounter forces from collisions.
Can Mario fall into a thrown ice block and acquire its velocity while it’s moving midair without pushing the block down? I think he can technically. But it doesn’t show up as something you should expect to interact with. Maybe sliding along a surface but that’s barely a physics object.
Nintendo doing Nintendo things again. Honestly the whole article gives me flashbacks of the various legal battles that they've been involved in [1]. They seem to pay no mind to the effect their litigiousness has on competition and innovation in this area...as if it wasn't already hard enough.
I'm certainly not defending Nintendo, but Gary Bowser is not as innocent as he was made out to be by viral media.
The guy stole FOSS code by making a closed source fork to sell for a profit, tweaked it to be malicious (bricking devices that ran homebrew software that he personally did not like, notably the FOSS competitor to his product), and explicitly advertised his stolen product as being used for software piracy (or unsanctioned copying if you're a stickler for that). Boneheaded actions like that hurt the entire homebrew scene by branding people who just want to run their own code on their own devices as criminals. Gary was in the wrong both legally and morally. It's people like him that incite action against hackers as a whole.
I want to love Nintendo. They create such great IP and their games are time and again some of the most memorable and unique experiences you can purchase in the space. But their lawyers are relentless, and it will forever leave a foul stench on the company for me for that reason.
I’m a fan of breath of the wild / totk and didn’t really enjoy genshin impact. They really are very different games with a superficially similar cel shaded art style and open world. (But even then Nintendo’s art direction is totally different)
There is nothing about Genshin Impact that is related to Zelda in terms of technology. The style is similar but style similarities isn't addressable through patents.
BOTW/TOTK have excellent implementation and aesthetics but there is nothing about them that is technically unique or worthy of a patent.
I blame Nintendo because I think that they should compete in the market by making good games, as opposed to trying to stop other people from doing so themselves by abusing the legal system against competitors.
If anyone has worked with an IP attorney before then they know that filing patents is a stength-in-numbers approach. You don't file patents because you think you're a genius, you file patents to defend yourself and ensure an end state of mutually assured destruction.
It looks like Nintendo threw everything against the wall to see what sticks, which is what a good IP attorney would recommend. It's unlikely these would hold up in a suit. I would be surprised if Nintendo uses any of these aggressively -- do they have a reputation of doing so?
Nothing to see here, if you ask me.
(Sure, let's abolish parents, but you don't accomplish that by not playing the game. Instead you simply lose.)
> I would be surprised if Nintendo uses any of these aggressively -- do they have a reputation of doing so?
They do have a reputation of suing everyone who "infringes their copyrights". I would assume they would do the same over patents. Hell, there's even one case where they tried to sue themselves.
Huh, didn't think there were that many new and innovative things even though the game was fantastic experience.
The two things I really liked about TOTK was the ascend ability and the rewind / recall ability. Those were pretty cool and seemed novel to me.
Admittedly, I don't play a ton of video games other than Zelda titles and the odd indie game so maybe those features are not novel and have been implemented before in other games.
I was gonna say "Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time" was earlier, but seems it was released a year after Blinx. I'm 90% sure The Sands of Time had some gameplay feature about turning back time somehow.
> I'm 90% sure The Sands of Time had some gameplay feature about turning back time somehow.
Yep. Not 100% the same as Tears of the Kingdom—you turn the entire game clock back in Sands of Time, not individual items like in Tears of the Kingdom. But still.
Similar, in a much a bigger scale, but with the big difference that Zelda applies rewind to objects instead of the whole level.
Also, world state is not deterministic like Braid's levels, so entities can lose its rewindable status or have their state history modified depending on certain factors (a destroyed or lost object can't be brought back with rewind, etc.).
We seem to always focus on the cost of the patent system, never the benefit.
One day we will all be dead (or much older) and all of these features and patents will be freely available, described in significant detail to be reproducible, and the world will be a slightly more amazing place than it is now.
If you look at all the expiring patents, many filed 20 years ago, you will find there are some neat things documented. It is awesome those are all available for use. The quid pro quo of the patent system is the other end of the pipe.
Practically, this is not how it actually seems to work. Instead, companies create an pipeline of patents, whereupon inventions are locked up indefinitely.
Sure, the original invention may be available, but in the meantime, new patents were filed for improvements and refinements. Without those, the original patent cannot be made efficiently or cost effective. Plus, the new patents can be weaponized in the courts to drain the resources of anyone experimenting in the area.
In other words, patents as implemented effectively enable indefinite monopolies. This may not be true for all patents, but this seems to be a standard playbook these days.
Isn't this the system working as designed? If you want your thing to be protected, you've got to keep improving and refining it. When your 20-year old product is competitive with today's product, you lose your patent protection.
As a competitor, you can also try taking the 20-year old product and refining it differently, too. Or if you're aggressive, you can build and refine current competitive products and patent the refinements, but you can't sell the product without a license, so might not be great (otoh, you might trade licensing the refinement for licensing the base product)
You only need to generate a single patentable refinement once every twenty years. In a lot of places, this is a horrible pace relative to the organic rate of progress. Compare the progress made since the main patents for FDM 3D printing expired compared to the progress made while it was still under patent.
You might not like the 20-year term; but in the case of FDM; I'm sure there are plenty of patentable refinements, and I'd be surprised if Stratasys only got the initial patent and never any refinements. But when the initial patent expired, there was an explosion of other options as the initial patent was sufficient to enable the ecosystem, even if there was a need to avoid some refinement patents.
> Isn't this the system working as designed? If you want your thing to be protected, you've got to keep improving and refining it. When your 20-year old product is competitive with today's product, you lose your patent protection.
Not really—the point of patents is to publish information so that others can use it after a period of exclusivity. But if you can keep filing patents, preventing others from using that information indefinitely, then it defeats the purpose of the patent system.
If you can keep filing new patents, and the new patents are so important that the old patents are worthless, then you're improving the product space tremendously.
If you look at video compression, by the time a patented algorithm expires, there's tended to be a new codec that's better, but you can use mpeg-2 as you like now. So we get the incentive to make better codecs, and we get the old codecs.
If it makes your old patent worthless, because your new stuff is so much better, that’s fine. If it makes your old patent worthless, because it’s hard to use your old patent without running afoul of your new patent, because they’re overlap too much—that’s not working as intended.
I salute your intention to find the silver lining but my experience reading patents is that they are hard to read. I believe this is because their job is not to convey information but rather to fulfill a legal requirement. I also believe that less restriction of these "inventions" would lead to a greater proliferation of truly useful explanations. No doubt there are exceptions but this has been my experience.
Sounds like a great opportunity for someone to make an AI that is designed to "decrypt" patents into their actual useful parts (minus the legal stuff basically)
With trade secrets, you can still independently discover them later. With patents, you have to check your own inventions on whenther they infringe patents, which is kind of ridiculous.
> companies would be obligated to wrap anything up in trade secret and never disclose anything
What in these patents would be locked away in a trade secret? They seem to be things you can figure out just by playing the game, or thinking about how it might be implemented. There's no secrets here.
I mean, these seem pretty obvious, or even visible from the game itself in a way that publishing it as a patent results in no additional publication since it was apparent in the game already. For instance the loading screen bit simply seems to talk about how they show where you're going on the map during fast travel.
If the claims are non-novel or obvious, then the examiners, who are familiar with the state of the art in the field, will reject them. Maybe the applicant will amend the claims to claim something narrower, or maybe not.
If the examiner and patent office screw up and allow a claim that shouldn’t have been allowed, then the claim can be challenged later and revoked. Yes, that costs money and is inefficient sometimes.
Your original comment that monocasa responded to read only:
> If the claims are non-novel or obvious, then the examiners, who are familiar with the state of the art in the field, will reject them.
Which displays a stunning level of naivety and lack of familiarity with our patent system. Patents are regularly granted for extremely trivial (edit: and obvious) mechanisms.
That's because triviality isn't an issue in patents, non-obviousness and inventiveness is what's key, so it doesn't matter that the thing accomplished is trivial.
That's something that is certainly frequently asserted here but I've never seen any proof besides someone linking to one or two patents they don't like.
No thank you. That's not a unique benefit of the patent system, that's a minor ancillary benefit that has already been replicated elsewhere. The patent office doesn't have a patent on historical records of so-called inventions.
And the patent process is not optimized to produce documents that actually help other inventors or future historians. In fact, to the contrary, as it exists within a particular narrow legal IP regime that optimizes around legal risk. This is especially the case with software patents, where the patent office incentivizes patents that use convoluted language to make an obvious process seem like a novel invention.
In other words, let's assume a future where there are no more copies of Zelda to play. If you had to choose between getting to preserve the patent on the Zelda loading screen and an actual recording of it, I'll take the recording every time. Or in a future where much of the knowledge of computer science and programming was lost, I'd rather have an archive of a set of textbooks, Stack Overflow, and Github than the entirety of the patent office's software patent documents.
I think your post reflects several misunderstands or false assumptions about the patent system.
First, you misstate the purpose of disclosure. It isn't to become a record of historical inventions, it's to encourage inventors to disclose their innovations, as inventors otherwise would not disclose their inventions. Inventors and their businesses would instead be incentivized to wrap their inventions up in trade secret and never disclose anything at all.
Second, patents don't use convoluted language to hide an obvious process. That's (a) merely facial and a waste of time, (b) contrary to the actual legal goal of patents which is to encompass as much in your patent as possible, while still maintaining its ability to grant. Patentees must actually disclose their invention, in a way that's cognizable to someone skilled in the art, or they simply do not have any benefit from the patent at all.
Inventors and their businesses would instead be incentivized to wrap their inventions up in trade secret and never disclose anything at all.
In the past there was perhaps more benefit from this exchange: manufacturers disclosed special knowledge of their products in patents and the world at large gained knowledge that would otherwise remain secret. But this theoretical exchange breaks down if the secret is easily reverse engineered or otherwise unlikely to remain secret. Reverse engineering all manner of products is much easier now than it was 100 years ago but the duration of patents has remained fixed at 20 years. I doubt that it would take more than a year to reverse engineer these patented Zelda features (or how to make a new small molecule drug, for that matter) in the absence of disclosure through patents.
There's still an argument for patents to incentivize investment in R&D. We still want people to invest the time and effort in developing and proving new small molecule drugs even though modern instrumentation and synthesis planning makes it easy to copy a drug. But the "disclosure is better than secrets" argument in favor of patents has been weakening every year as secret-keeping becomes harder.
What benefit? Most "inventions" hit the world @ large as soon as products incorporating them are released. Same world @ large gets the details after someone pokes around in those products & figures out how they work.
That is practically always before patents expire.
Truly smart innovations will survive over time. Obvious "inventions" are often trivial enough to be "invented" independently again & again.
Patents mostly add a load of red tape, and a big stick that large companies (& patent trolls!) can hit smaller companies or individuals with.
Overall benefit to society, even if patents work as intended? Debateable (and forever being debated, eg. between economists).
In a small society, an inventor taking solution-to-big-problem into their grave, is a problem. In a world with 8 billion+ souls, not so much. Someone else will repeat what 1st inventor didn't release into the world.
Companies innovate because they want to grab market share by getting there first. Losing 'protection' doesn't stop this process. It just removes that big stick that would-be competitors are beaten down with.
Can you share any literature on economists debating whether the patent system is worth it? I'm not familiar with materials like that, and it's been my experience that the patent system isn't really a debate outside of the hackernews and software development communities.
The book opens up with a case of James Watt (after whom the Watt SI units are named), and that even though he came up with the steam engine, only after the patent for steam engine expired, was the world able to benefit from his invention. Most of the time while patent was active, he was busy fighting off others, trying to extract financial gain (AFAIK). Not only that, his initial design was subpar, and the improvement that was important was actually patented by somebody else.
constantly putting a pause button on progress for 20 years because someone owns a key patent (e.g. e-ink, 3d printing) does much more harm for progress than documenting these things in patents does good
Could you identify what patent that is? I hope I will get a genuine response from someone who genuinely knows that industry because the last time I asked I just got a patents.google.com/search?q=eink response. It is fun to blame patents. But that's like saying we're not making progress in operating systems because Microsoft owns a key patent in operating systems.
I just wish patents were a little more accessible. I read and write these for a living and I have my doubts about how useful these are, in general, to members of the public.
One great use case for LLMs is the translation of patents into short, easily-readable summaries.
Is that a component of the patent system? It would be nice if there was (maybe there is) a "reasonable reproduction test" that required a patent's acceptance to be conditioned on someone being able to achieve the claim reasonably by reading it.
Since the system exists for the benefit of humanity, I assume that is baked into the process?
There is a test like that. It's called the "enablement" test and you must enable someone to build the thing in order to get a patent.
I'm talking more about the practical act of sitting down and reading a patent. They are long, boring, and filled with legalese. A patent may be 50 pages long, but the interesting part may fill no more than a few paragraphs and be described using nouns and verbs you've never heard before. It's completely possible to read a patent, look at the pictures, and still have no idea what the thing actually is.
It's essentially legal abstraction -- inventors and patent attorneys don't want to be pinned down to a particular interpretation, implementation, or embodiment.
Almost obscene to me that Nintendo is trying to patent something that Valve has had the opportunity (and denied taking action on based on principle) to patent for over 2 decades. Related [1]
I don’t think so. Unleashing a cannon-topped Roomba into an enemy camp while you send stragglers over trees with a bouncy stick (mushroom fused to a stick) is quite enjoyable.
Ironically, Nintendo invented actually pretty groundbreaking stuff in the past, but apparently without patents, such as making the player character steerable while in the air (Super Mario Bros) or making 3D third person controls relative to the camera instead of relative to the player character (Super Mario 64). Basically every 2D platformer and 3D third person game uses these techniques ever since. Of course they also copied a lot of mechanics from other games themselves.
I'm pretty sure there's nothing revolutionary here, sandbox games have existed for a very long time and that loading transition isn't anything special.
Oh yeah sure, it doesn't mean the game is bad or anything, you can use the most obvious gaming mechanic and succeed, the execution matters a lot and the way it's done matters a lot.
It's extremely similar to the last couple of Zelda games both stylistically and in terms of game mechanics. The "climbing up a rock wall" mechanic is basically identical, for example.
It's like chatGPT took the prompt "make a game just like zelda but with microtransactions".
So... would you SNES nostalgics quit cloning Nintendo titles and giving them mind share?
I've been toying with getting some of their hardware and finally seeing what the hype is about for years. This piece of news just saved me the money I would spend for a Switch or whatever follows it.
You'll need someone to let you borrow their switch and dump their bios/firmware keys. I am not aware of any emulation that works without this ritual having been performed on real switch first
It would be totally unethical to search for "128bitbay" and I highly recommend that you never decode odd strings you may find as a result using base64 and definitely never go to the urls that may appear in the decoded string.
This is amazing! This is how you share ideas with the outside world when corporate says “no open source”. It’s unlikely they’ll take anyone to court over this unless you copy their ideas verbatim
Yeah, why would Nintendo, a famously litigious company, take anyone to court if someone copied things Nintendo explicitly went and made into patents? Give me a break.
Meh, I'd rather have lots of side quests with mundane rewards for the quest-enjoyers than a bunch of "not actually side quest" side quests with near-mandatory rewards. Side quests should feel optional.
The side quests are quite boring and uninventive though. 95% of them are not even worth the reward, and then of course they sprinkle in 5% that really are, so you feel you don't really have a choice of missing out.
No way this is the first game to ignore the player character in physics calculations. I'm pretty sure in GTA3 you could climb onto the roof of a car and not slide around as the NPC drives and makes sharp turns.