Just how the f*CK did Nintendo developed tears of the kingdom?
There are so many things being tracked all the time in the game for puzzles and the power arm. Yet despites literally tracking sunshadows for some puzzle completion for example it runs almost smoothly with (in my 170h) no crashes. On a 6 yo portable console??
Botw was already impressive but I could grasp it with the shaders and also there weren't that much physics puzzle. Objects were more static, there wasn't the two other maps, enemy diversity was limited, same for weapons. There was less of everything overall but I thought it was the limit of the console and the possible engineering around it.
Is there any resources on how they managed to pull this off? White papers, behind the scenes, charts, ...?
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Yes but I meant that they don't just draw it using the GPU, they actually track the shadows casted from bodies to verify puzzle conditions.
While this alone can be easy to reproduce in your engine of choice, it's the cumulation of all these small things that amazes me.
I'm not very familiar with TotK and I'm not sure how familiar you are with game development, but just in case you're not very:
When making something like a shadow puzzle it is very unlikely they're actually checking shadow conditions, and if they are it's probably very sparse/only a couple of pixels.
For instance, if you know the position of the light source, the position of the shadow catcher and the position of the shadow receiver you could approximate the shadow casting with much simpler geometry. If Link is just treated as a box then you only need to check where each corner would cast a shadow and see if that overlaps the area you care about.
When done correctly the player would think it's link's shadow that's being tested but in reality it's nothing to do with the shadow, it's just a much simpler estimation of a shadow that works well enough to trick players.
Game development is all smoke and mirrors. Tell the players one thing such as "This NPC is always at this location" then unload them when the player isn't looking. It's all sweet lies and I love it.