Gonna play that new videogame everyone keeps talking about

you can pet the dog

thinkin about all the people that bought PS3s for this and Kingdom Hearts 3 and Final Fantasy Versus XIII

oh cool these grates aren't geometry; they're stacks of 8 planes with an alpha-cutout texture

uhhhhhh this game missed the PS3 because they spent nine years animating these ivy leaves

I am losing my mind at how good this is

so like

twitter compression won't help much and it's hard to get the camera any closer, but as near as I can tell those leaves AREN'T individual quads

if you look at the upper part you can see them flattening out in perspective

it's basically a bunch of big planes + fins

which means almost all of that movement is happening in TEXTURE SPACE

so like prob baking pivot points for leaf texels into a map, and then using that to warp UVs to move leaves around, WHILE ALSO transforming all the normals, and it def looks like they're rotating out of plane so it's doing perspective-ish distortion rather than just 2D rotation

AND once you've got the math right for spinning leaves around in pseudo-3D in a fragment shader (which is impressive but like, generally comprehensible math), *look how much complexity is in the actual movement*

individual leaves flap at a high frequency, but there's ALSO a larger-scale, lower-frequency movement, as clumps of leaves are generally connected to the same branches and thus TEND to move together

so like the leaves flip around their pivots (i.e. their stems), but then the PIVOTS are ALSO moving (i.e. the branches, to which the stems connect, are swaying)

and then there're multiple overlapping layers of leaf/branch clumps with different phase offsets...

AND THEN just to take it even further the wind ITSELF is animated, modulating the speed and intensity of all these effects as it billows and gusts through the scene (global wind values are clearly shared across foliage/cloth/feathers etc)

just... aaaaaaaaaa

really appreciate that this game borrows the climbing thing from Shadow of the Colossus where the creature starts shaking and flailing around and you have to hang on and wait for it to stop, except instead of trying to stab it you are instead waiting until you can safely pet it

hmmmmmmmm jumping on cages hanging from chains hmm

I'm really enjoying this and this isn't a criticism but it's definitely very odd that Ueda was just like "okay so for our third game how about we take all of the best ideas from our previous two medium-defining works and just... did them both At The Same Time"

doing the two-person midair-catch jump from Ico but with the player's role reversed is an interesting idea

okay well we can't let the player walk ALL the way over there so I guess uhhhhhhh pigeon spikes

HOLY INVERSE KINEMATICS YALL

honestly kinda respect this game for just being like "12 FPS is enough for anyone, LoDs are for WEAKLINGS"

so I finished this last night

it's really good and also really flawed in really interesting ways

just the sheer *physicality* of trico's movements never stops being incredible

like they decided to make a game about a 30-foot-tall gryphon that moves like a cat in corridors it can barely fit through and IT NEVER CLIPS THROUGH GEOMETRY OR VIBRATES OR TELEPORTS EVER

its tail has muscles and animates naturally but is ALSO a physics object that drags on the ground and flops around and collides with itself and everything else and you can grab it and drag it and it NEVER VIBRATES OR MOVES LIKE IT'S WEIGHTLESS

like rope/chain physics are notoriously nightmarish to tune and they nailed all of that AND attached it to animated bones

they did so much work to make even the limitations of the system feel like personality quirks rather than tech tradeoffs too

certain actions like jumps and biting stuff use (comparatively) static animations and thus have to start from a specific location relative to the target

most games deal with this by just teleporting or lerping to the correct position when close enough, but trico ONLY ever moves its body by actually placing its feet

so lining up animations requires a lot of time making small back-and-forth steps to reach the right positions

the thing is the animators still gave CHARACTER to these motions, and they added a similar period of anticipation before even actions that don't require careful alignment

the result is a really genuine sense that, like, Trico just moves very, very carefully

he's incredibly agile but also HUGE and extremely heavy and smashes things every time he *needs* to move quickly

so he moves like a cat and does this whole careful anticipation thing where he fixates on his target and scoots around and carefully plants his feet before committing

with AAA being all about scope and detailing every corner of giant open worlds and four billion hours of voice acting, it's honestly super inspiring to see that level of expertise poured into just nailing every aspect of an incredibly narrow scope

nine years pouring world-class tech artists and animators into exactly one giant dogbirdcat friend, with so much character you can reasonably talk about its personality just from the way it moves

the economics extremely don't work out but I'm sure glad it somehow got made anyway