Or those gigantic multi million dollar game dev corporations could afford to, you know, pay to license that shit for their own games.
If they can afford to pay the CEOs millions of dollars for their golden parachute as well as their yearly salary, then they can afford that license.
If you think a game that doesn't have that is a failure, then both your expectations as well as that game both deserve to fail.
Why license endless patents if you can save money by just not doing that
Greedy ceos is a bad justification for software patents
You sound like you need a refresher on basic intellectual property protections and why they are essential.
Remember when Amazon, Apple, ARM, Cisco, Facebook, Google, Huawei, Intel, Microsoft, Mozilla, Netflix, Nvidia, Samsung Electronics and Tencent all had to come together and form a super group to develop a royalty free video codec because something as simple as compressing and decompressing video was so god damn patent encumbered by people who just existed to suck money out of everyone.
Literally, every time software is patented, it ends up being used to screw with everyone, then eventually the patent expires ten years after the software was useful, or we have to waste huge amounts of effort to sideline it.
You sound like you need a history refresher on patents in the software industry and the disastrous effect that it has had in hurting innovation and consumers and how it is dominated by trolls and squatters.
I don't know how to convey to you how important it is to incentivize innovation without worrying someone else will simply steal your ideas to make millions from your hard work you did inventing something while they literally did nothing.
If I make something and someone else can simply take it and dominate the market with it and pay me nothing for the work i did, why the fuck should I even bother making anything?
Again, look at the history of software patents. Tell me a single time it incentivied innovation and wasn't just used by patent trolls and wasn't just a huge waste of time and money for the industry to spend time on.
I think you are wholey unfamiliar with software patents in general and are just going on some basic guiding principal and I can tell you right now, history has not played out in your idilic description at all and you are just coming off as ignorant on the topic.
Let's take a look at countries with no patent laws and compare their innovations that contributed to the rest of the world:
East Timor - nothing
Suriname - nothing
Somalia - nothing
Eritrea - nothing
Maldives - nothing
Marshall Islands - nothing
Micronesia - nothing
Myanmar - nothing
Palau - nothing
South Sudan - nothing
North Korea - nothing
This is literally just whataboutism. You must be degenerate if you think that there's a correlation between the research performance of the listed countries and their patent laws. There are dozens of more useful and much more relevant indicators for why these nations are disadvantaged in this regard. But just stick to your belief that North Korea is what it is because it doesn't have patent laws lol.
Also, for you to better understand the harm that software patents caused and are causing, consider reading Free Software, Free Society by Richard Stallman.
My mistake, you're right. We should completely remove the incentive to innovate novel ideas and no longer protect them if they are created to allow theft.
I am a hypocrite thief that uses free software in my daily life.
I don't know how to convey to you how important it is to incentivize innovation without worrying someone else will simply steal your ideas to make millions from your hard work you did inventing something while they literally did nothing.
If I make something and someone else can simply take it and dominate the market with it and pay me nothing for the work i did, why the fuck should I even bother making anything?
TIL that open source doesn't exist.
TIL that morons here don't know the difference between software patents and copyright licenses.
Oh sorry, I was under the impression that you had at least a basic knowledge about software and software development.
I now see that that's not the case.
Open source is an area where software patents don't generally protect the product, and yet it's the most innovative space out there. And in cases where patents are brought in (see the rust trademark incident) they are rejected by the community. And yet open source is still around, and powering most of the internet and present in most devices.
If what you said about patents were the case, that would not be so.
I hate this. Same with WB patenting the Nemesis system then not even bothering to milk it.
Time to get to work writing the alternative cola recurring enemy system I guess...
They've built a library of small building blocks for character movements. These blocks can be combined in various ways to create a wide range of animations. … Instead of designing separate animations for each of these situations, they use these building blocks to put together the character's movements naturally.
This sounds like shape keys, which is a technique already widely used in games and animation today. When you get shot in Battlefield, your character model plays a “getting shot” animation. When your character runs, it plays a “running” animation. When your character gets shot while running, these two animations are combined - it’s not a separate “shot while running” animation.
Would love to know if there’s actually some novel aspect to this “invention” but it seems more likely that this is yet another bullshit patent approved by a clueless clerk who did zero searches for prior art.
Edit: Read the patent. Not only does it describe nothing novel, it doesn’t even document what they did. All it says is basically “we created animation blocks and combine them”. The details are just a bunch of bullshit jargon spew:
attributes can include conditions, properties, events, flags, graphs, values, references, and variants
Their novel discovery: They figured out nobody had patented this yet
I think this would make it tough to enforce the patent if it's actually commonly used. If I were somehow granted a patent on tap dancing, its common usage by others before me would probably cause my patent to be invalidated if I then tried to sue a tap dancer.
Not a patent lawyer, but IIRC, US patent law had some protections for things (including non-patented) that are already common practice.
EDIT: Clarity
Software patents get away with stupid shit like this all the time. Patent trolls claim they invented a software pattern and then sue everyone who uses it.
It sounds more like they're using more fundamental movements than what you're describing, not running animation+shot animation but more like:
Both reloading a particular weapon and mantling over a walk require you to lift your arms, so the root movement of lifting your arm to reload an LMG is the same one used to grab a ledge overhead, etc.
Basically they're just categorizing movements based on use case and direction so they can string those individual movements into different and unique patterns for individual actions.
Pressing an elevator button uses the same arm movement as opening a door, which uses the same wrist rotation movement as turning the key in a car, etc. So they just break down individual movements in the same way an LLM breaks down a voice into phonetics to string new words together.
It’s definitely possible they’re doing something novel internally, but the details that would support that interpretation are missing from the filing. One of the requirements for patents is that it “sufficient disclosure of the invention so that it can be reproduced by others”. I would say I qualify as an expert in the domain covered, and I have no idea what they’re actually doing based on the patent alone.
Not shape keys, but something more akin to Unity's animation layers. This kinda stuff has been in games for a decade or so.
This has been done for decades. Anyone that respects this patent is an idiot.
Meanwhile at Bethesda:
Hey look, I figured out how to animate them to look at you! What? Walk naturally? No I don't have time for that.
The modders will figure that part out.
Did they just patent procedural animation?
We need a video game "taco bell" to take on this stupid "taco John patented taco Tuesday slogan"
As long as GTA 6 has male strip clubs I'll be happy.
Who cares? Give me great game mechanics. It will be the dated missions with you being always an inch from failure in an open world. Give me another Zelda pls. Or better yet (since I haven't played it) Horizon Forbidden West.
The Fromsoft locomotion is already perfect for games. People care about good games, not graphics or realism.
I don't know how old you are, but I feel like younger people say this more often than older people.
As someone who saw the transition from 8-bit to 16-bit to 32/64-bit in their childhood, graphics were everything from the 80s until at least the 2000s. Each new generation was leaps and bounds better than the last; I remember the discussions in the playground being centered around nothing but graphics every time a new console was announced. Nobody talked about the games.
Nowadays we have incremental updates at best, so now people care less and less about graphics like they used to. Not me, though. I'm still a graphics slut and an absolute whore for path traced games. I'll play a game I don't enjoy if it has the latest in graphics tech.
I'm old and hold the opposite opinion. Those first few generational leaps were amazing. But I feel like we've long reached the point that almost any experience can be conveyed with impact.
I enjoy the new bells and whistles. But these incremental upgrades come coupled with skyrocketing costs, longer development times, and fewer risks. Indie gaming is still innovating of course, but I miss when AAA studios were churning out risky, unique titles.
Same. The PS3/360 era was the last one where graphics wowed me. The 2 gens since have been incremental graphically.
I'm likely older than you.
Edit: why down vote? Were you born in the 60s?
Yeah but Rockstar won't using that they were using just standard animations so it's fine that they've come up with around animation system cuz they use their own engine.
I understand their reasoning... My point is why patent a locomotion style when no one gives a shit if the game is shit. I don't think a great looking walking animation is going to move the needle as to a game's sales.
And in no other games! Patents aee truely wonderful aren't they.
We will get like two games out of this before the patent expires cuz Rockstar takes 3 console gens to make 2 games.
They made GTA V then GTA V again then GTA V again then GTA V for VR, that's loads of games.
Rockstar have just innovated by releasing exactly the same game every single generation.
Bethesda will sue them for copyright infringement any day now
Releasing the same thing is our thing, man!
Or those gigantic multi million dollar game dev corporations could afford to, you know, pay to license that shit for their own games.
If they can afford to pay the CEOs millions of dollars for their golden parachute as well as their yearly salary, then they can afford that license.
If you think a game that doesn't have that is a failure, then both your expectations as well as that game both deserve to fail.
Why license endless patents if you can save money by just not doing that
Greedy ceos is a bad justification for software patents
You sound like you need a refresher on basic intellectual property protections and why they are essential.
Remember when Amazon, Apple, ARM, Cisco, Facebook, Google, Huawei, Intel, Microsoft, Mozilla, Netflix, Nvidia, Samsung Electronics and Tencent all had to come together and form a super group to develop a royalty free video codec because something as simple as compressing and decompressing video was so god damn patent encumbered by people who just existed to suck money out of everyone.
Literally, every time software is patented, it ends up being used to screw with everyone, then eventually the patent expires ten years after the software was useful, or we have to waste huge amounts of effort to sideline it.
You sound like you need a history refresher on patents in the software industry and the disastrous effect that it has had in hurting innovation and consumers and how it is dominated by trolls and squatters.
I don't know how to convey to you how important it is to incentivize innovation without worrying someone else will simply steal your ideas to make millions from your hard work you did inventing something while they literally did nothing.
If I make something and someone else can simply take it and dominate the market with it and pay me nothing for the work i did, why the fuck should I even bother making anything?
Again, look at the history of software patents. Tell me a single time it incentivied innovation and wasn't just used by patent trolls and wasn't just a huge waste of time and money for the industry to spend time on.
I think you are wholey unfamiliar with software patents in general and are just going on some basic guiding principal and I can tell you right now, history has not played out in your idilic description at all and you are just coming off as ignorant on the topic.
Let's take a look at countries with no patent laws and compare their innovations that contributed to the rest of the world:
This is literally just whataboutism. You must be degenerate if you think that there's a correlation between the research performance of the listed countries and their patent laws. There are dozens of more useful and much more relevant indicators for why these nations are disadvantaged in this regard. But just stick to your belief that North Korea is what it is because it doesn't have patent laws lol.
Also, for you to better understand the harm that software patents caused and are causing, consider reading Free Software, Free Society by Richard Stallman.
My mistake, you're right. We should completely remove the incentive to innovate novel ideas and no longer protect them if they are created to allow theft.
I am a hypocrite thief that uses free software in my daily life.
TIL that open source doesn't exist.
TIL that morons here don't know the difference between software patents and copyright licenses.
Oh sorry, I was under the impression that you had at least a basic knowledge about software and software development.
I now see that that's not the case.
Open source is an area where software patents don't generally protect the product, and yet it's the most innovative space out there. And in cases where patents are brought in (see the rust trademark incident) they are rejected by the community. And yet open source is still around, and powering most of the internet and present in most devices.
If what you said about patents were the case, that would not be so.
I hate this. Same with WB patenting the Nemesis system then not even bothering to milk it.
Time to get to work writing the alternative cola recurring enemy system I guess...
This sounds like shape keys, which is a technique already widely used in games and animation today. When you get shot in Battlefield, your character model plays a “getting shot” animation. When your character runs, it plays a “running” animation. When your character gets shot while running, these two animations are combined - it’s not a separate “shot while running” animation.
Would love to know if there’s actually some novel aspect to this “invention” but it seems more likely that this is yet another bullshit patent approved by a clueless clerk who did zero searches for prior art.
Edit: Read the patent. Not only does it describe nothing novel, it doesn’t even document what they did. All it says is basically “we created animation blocks and combine them”. The details are just a bunch of bullshit jargon spew:
Their novel discovery: They figured out nobody had patented this yet
I think this would make it tough to enforce the patent if it's actually commonly used. If I were somehow granted a patent on tap dancing, its common usage by others before me would probably cause my patent to be invalidated if I then tried to sue a tap dancer.
Not a patent lawyer, but IIRC, US patent law had some protections for things (including non-patented) that are already common practice.
EDIT: Clarity
Software patents get away with stupid shit like this all the time. Patent trolls claim they invented a software pattern and then sue everyone who uses it.
Software patents need to die.
It sounds more like they're using more fundamental movements than what you're describing, not running animation+shot animation but more like:
Both reloading a particular weapon and mantling over a walk require you to lift your arms, so the root movement of lifting your arm to reload an LMG is the same one used to grab a ledge overhead, etc.
Basically they're just categorizing movements based on use case and direction so they can string those individual movements into different and unique patterns for individual actions.
Pressing an elevator button uses the same arm movement as opening a door, which uses the same wrist rotation movement as turning the key in a car, etc. So they just break down individual movements in the same way an LLM breaks down a voice into phonetics to string new words together.
It’s definitely possible they’re doing something novel internally, but the details that would support that interpretation are missing from the filing. One of the requirements for patents is that it “sufficient disclosure of the invention so that it can be reproduced by others”. I would say I qualify as an expert in the domain covered, and I have no idea what they’re actually doing based on the patent alone.
Not shape keys, but something more akin to Unity's animation layers. This kinda stuff has been in games for a decade or so.
This has been done for decades. Anyone that respects this patent is an idiot.
Meanwhile at Bethesda:
Hey look, I figured out how to animate them to look at you! What? Walk naturally? No I don't have time for that.
The modders will figure that part out.
Did they just patent procedural animation?
We need a video game "taco bell" to take on this stupid "taco John patented taco Tuesday slogan"
As long as GTA 6 has male strip clubs I'll be happy.
Who cares? Give me great game mechanics. It will be the dated missions with you being always an inch from failure in an open world. Give me another Zelda pls. Or better yet (since I haven't played it) Horizon Forbidden West.
The Fromsoft locomotion is already perfect for games. People care about good games, not graphics or realism.
I don't know how old you are, but I feel like younger people say this more often than older people.
As someone who saw the transition from 8-bit to 16-bit to 32/64-bit in their childhood, graphics were everything from the 80s until at least the 2000s. Each new generation was leaps and bounds better than the last; I remember the discussions in the playground being centered around nothing but graphics every time a new console was announced. Nobody talked about the games.
Nowadays we have incremental updates at best, so now people care less and less about graphics like they used to. Not me, though. I'm still a graphics slut and an absolute whore for path traced games. I'll play a game I don't enjoy if it has the latest in graphics tech.
I'm old and hold the opposite opinion. Those first few generational leaps were amazing. But I feel like we've long reached the point that almost any experience can be conveyed with impact.
I enjoy the new bells and whistles. But these incremental upgrades come coupled with skyrocketing costs, longer development times, and fewer risks. Indie gaming is still innovating of course, but I miss when AAA studios were churning out risky, unique titles.
Same. The PS3/360 era was the last one where graphics wowed me. The 2 gens since have been incremental graphically.
I'm likely older than you.
Edit: why down vote? Were you born in the 60s?
Yeah but Rockstar won't using that they were using just standard animations so it's fine that they've come up with around animation system cuz they use their own engine.
I understand their reasoning... My point is why patent a locomotion style when no one gives a shit if the game is shit. I don't think a great looking walking animation is going to move the needle as to a game's sales.