trans mom, wife, composer. The now-retired speedrunner who asked the axiom verge dev "why?"


okay so in principle everything is technically discretized if not outright quantized because the set of values a computer can store is finite, but the use of like, floating point values in video games that are not provided by the system, regardless of precision, i feel like should generally be treated very carefully

this isn't to say you need to like, eliminate all subpixels, just that if your player needs to, for example, rotate objects to solve puzzles, it's worth considering if the system is better served by having a set of fixed angles the object can be in, rather than allowing it to be at arbitrary angles and then deal with tolerances on an irregular range

this isn't suitable for every game or application, but for me, i find it valuable to think about as a first option in a lot of cases. also i think it would be interesting to play a 3D game where the player can move forward or backward continuously, but can only rotate in 45° increments


You must log in to comment.

in reply to @SaberaMesia's post:

Was watching a stream of Ocarina of Time multiplayer and when multiple people pulled/pushed a block simultaneously, the game left the block in an intermediate position which prevented some puzzles from being solved since it wasn't perfectly aligned anymore. Required a restart to reload the area. Obviously that would never happen in a solo playthrough, but it still shows a crack in the system.

doesn't Super Mario 3D Land only allow the player to move in 8 directions? i think that 3D World expanded the directions to 16. this simplifies level design as you can be sure that the player will go straight in a direction and follow your path (especially if there are donut blocks that disappear a few seconds after standing on them and parkour).