Programmer Humor

The giant is easy. The ground is easy. The lava though... Do you want the particles to stick together? To visually connect? To collide with each other? To interact with dynamic objects?

https://xkcd.com/1425

Alt text: In the 60s, Marvin Minsky assigned a couple of undergrads to spend the summer programming a computer to use a camera to identify objects in a scene. He figured they'd have the problem solved by the end of the summer. Half a century later, we're still working on it.

Edit: seems I'm the third person to comment this! :')

Only in 3D. In 2D, you slap some pixels on top and there's your scarf:

Sure. Player character? No.

There’s already a codebase for bursting from the ground in an explosion of lava. Everyone wants that.

You’re the first person asking for a scarf, and our system doesn’t even know what a neck is.

Player? Easy. Scarf? Easy. Wearing a scarf? That depends on a lot of factors such as which part of the body, how the models were made and rigged, etc.

Way back in the 90s I did a contract job at MS Research on a project called "V-Worlds" - a world simulator similar to the Doom or Quake engine, but it was browser-based and everything was a script, so changing how the world worked didn't mean you had to restart a server, just change the scripts and new stuff would appear right in front of you.

Anyway the concept of adding accessories to the player's avatar and even having a pet follow you around came up, and I remember there was an involved discussion of how difficult/impossible that would be. The player's avatar was a special object class that represented a user, and didn't have the same capabilities as ordinary objects in the world. I remember asking, "Why isn't the avatar just a world object the player happens to control? Then you could do all kinds of cool stuff like let the player transform into something else just by switching objects, or let another player run your character." Dead silence. I was just a contractor, what did I know?

There's an XKCD comic for that.

Game director : we’re gonna add interact-able doors with proper door opening animations for the characters

The game designers:

The programmers and artists:

The producers:

Well yeah, we have a character model for the giant demon and the giant demon has a huge use case.

A scarf? That's a model extension. Either you're asking me to create a whole new character with a scarf baked into the mesh that will deform weirdly as the character moves, or you're asking me to implement an accessory-anchor system all for the sake of a scarf (albeit other accessories might use this new framework) which will then need a physics/cloth sim to even look half good.

Always have to remind myself of this when managers ask me if something could be done. If it's easy, I naturally get a little annoyed that they're even asking. But knowing that is my job, not theirs, and it's good that they ask. There's lots of places where they assume and things go badly.