[2021] Tweets by Undertowgames on 01 Apr

Many assumed this was just to streamline things, but in reality it was due to the fact that swappable pants are surprisingly tricky to implement in games and caused so much headache that we decided to get rid of them.

I'll jump on the "things in games that are more complex to implement than you'd expect" bandwagon and tell a story about pants. When we moved from #Barotrauma's legacy version to Steam, we decided to combine the inventory slots for pants and shirts into 1 clothing slot. (cont) http://pbs.twimg.com/media/Ex3uKREWYAAP7zR.jpg

Barotrauma uses procedural, physics-based animations, and the clothes the characters are wearing affect these animations: heavy or stiff clothes obviously restrict the characters' movement more than others. http://pbs.twimg.com/media/Ex3vGyqXMAA8c9P.jpg

If you've played the legacy version you probably remember how clunky the animations were: this was due to the complications posed by the pants. http://pbs.twimg.com/ext_tw_video_thumb/1377519446441463812/pu/img/Hmrc0CThY7tPM2pN.jpg

As a side note, Naughty Dog reportedly had similar issues when developing the 1st Crash Bandicoot game; their solution was to actually remove the pants altogether, and paint the blue jeans directly on Crash's legs! http://pbs.twimg.com/media/Ex3ushCXIAIwQ9V.jpg

The swappable pants also caused some pathfinding concerns; the character's movement speed and agility were depended on the type of pants they were wearing. http://pbs.twimg.com/media/Ex3vigzWYAgRze0.jpg

However, we've got good news for those who are still missing the legacy pant slots: we've now come up with an approach that allows us to reintroduce the swappable pants in a much more robust way!

We're writing a more detailed blog post about this later, but in a nutshell, we switched to a blockchain-based solution. Since the character's legs are essentially chains of blocks, simulating them in a #blockchain is much more accurate than doing them on the player's CPU. http://pbs.twimg.com/media/Ex3vq1UWEAoXTzd.png

Many assumed this was just to streamline things, but in reality it was due to the fact that swappable pants are surprisingly tricky to implement in games and caused so much headache that we decided to get rid of them.

I'll jump on the "things in games that are more complex to implement than you'd expect" bandwagon and tell a story about pants. When we moved from #Barotrauma's legacy version to Steam, we decided to combine the inventory slots for pants and shirts into 1 clothing slot. #gamedev http://pbs.twimg.com/media/Ex3zKzTWgAIzZy-.jpg

Barotrauma uses #procedural, physics-based animations, and the clothes the characters are wearing affect these animations: heavy or stiff clothes obviously restrict the characters' movement more than others. #gamedev http://pbs.twimg.com/media/Ex3zT9SWgAAUoqV.jpg

If you've played the legacy version you probably remember how clunky the animations were: this was due to the complications posed by the pants. #gamedev http://pbs.twimg.com/ext_tw_video_thumb/1377524732317339648/pu/img/96Gd9HfaWAIAFn88.jpg

As a side note, @Naughty_Dog reportedly had similar issues when developing the 1st Crash Bandicoot game; their solution was to actually remove the pants altogether, and paint the blue jeans directly on Crash's legs! http://pbs.twimg.com/media/Ex3ze2DWgAI0Pfe.jpg

The swappable pants also caused some pathfinding concerns; the character's movement speed and agility were depended on the type of pants they were wearing. http://pbs.twimg.com/media/Ex3zs9RWYAE26Mt.jpg

However, we've got good news for those who are still missing the legacy pant slots: we've now come up with an approach that allows us to reintroduce the swappable pants in a much more robust way!

In more technical terms, we couldn't use either Manhattan distance or Euclidian distance to evaluate paths, but had to use a much more complex random walk algorithm that takes the Brownian motion in the pants into account. #gamedev http://pbs.twimg.com/media/Ex3z9BWWUAMDHPs.png

We're writing a more detailed blog post about this later, but in a nutshell, we switched to a blockchain-based solution. Since the character's legs are essentially chains of blocks, simulating them in a #blockchain is much more accurate than doing them on the player's CPU. http://pbs.twimg.com/media/Ex30DDHWgAUQmdG.png

@gaming_standard Unfortunately we have no plans for our own cryptocurrency atm, but we might release some unique DLC pants as #NFT's in the future!

@Zepler9 It's cold in Europa, surely they need some kind of physical pants!

This sounds vaguely familiar 🤔 https://twitter.com/pcgamer/status/1641885531058458635