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Starfield’s Giant Pile of 20,000 Potatoes, Explained by Game Developers - IGN (www.ign.com)

submitted 1 year ago by geosoco@kbin.social to c/PCGaming@kbin.social

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But we weren’t just impressed at the audacity of someone going through all the trouble of gathering that many potatoes. Digital Foundry’s John Linneman called the clip “mind-blowing” because all of the potatoes “have physics.” But what does it mean for something to “have physics”? Why is everyone fussing so much about a pile of 20,000 tumbling potatoes in a game about being a cool space explorer?

We spoke to a number of game developers to get their insight on what’s really going on in the potato clip, why more games don’t let players do this kind of thing, and whether or not 20,000 tumbling potatoes really is as impressive as it seems.

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[–] tal@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago

“Is the engine consolidating potatoes below the surface?” he asks. “Did the player bulk up the pile with sacks or something so they didn't need quite so many potatoes? We need an investigation.”

I don't think so. I could believe that they're consolidating things from a physics standpoint if they have some way of computing that they aren't gonna be individually moving -- that'd be clever -- but I don't see any reason to make that extend to rendering polygons to represent that.