Comment by dmitriid | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dmitriid | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> For basic sprites and characters, you absolutely can.

Ah yes. We went from "items in the game used outside the game" to "basic sprites and characters".

Define "character", by the way.

> There are companies using it to show ads in decentralized way in the metaverse right now.

And this has anything to do with the original statement?

> I don't understand it

This is the key sentence, and you should have started with it.

> looking at similar patterns in gaccha and

Gaccha: Gaccha, alternatively spelled as Gachchha, is a monastic order, along with lay followers, of the image worshipping Murtipujaka Svetambara sect of Jainism.

Wat?

> game skins

What game skins?

> They are a digit in a database but sold for huge money and have a big secondary market.

Yes, and this has literaly nothing to do with their usefulness outside the game they were built for.

Example: Fortnite skins are built specifically for the Fortnite game engine, using textures available for that engine, applicable to skeletons and meshes designed specifically for that game engine.

How exactly are you going to use it outside of Fortnite's game engine?

> The value of it comes from the association and possibility

Translation: speculation, scams, and tricking people out of their money.

Edit: I mean, there was a huge public outcry because of EA's lootboxes. No cryptobros want these loot boxes everywhere and pretend it's a good thing.

By gaccha they likely mean gacha as in gachapon. The Japanese capsule toy machines. Many loot box video games are sometimes referred to as skinner boxes[0] or gacha games.

I definitely agree with your assessment that most crypto/web3 stuff these days are terrible ideas.

[0]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning_chamber

I see this argument a lot and all it makes me think is general sadness people are so defeatist about something that's hardly brain surgery. If people can't work out a way to share a skin between games when they both want to then I understand why AAA games are so boring nowadays outside of a couple studios.

It's more difficult technically to share game assets than to have everybody use the same JavaScript framework. At least in JS-land the engine is the same for all, and yet people can't find any agreement on how exactly to use it.

(I haven't yet seen web3 proposed as the solution for JavaScript framework proliferation, but I'm sure it's just around the corner...)

For sure! But what I mean is if NFTs catch on then there's no reason to imagine Unity/Unreal/Whatever won't create a standard for them that allows game developers to easily integrate them into textures/skins/etc. It's not some impossible unsolvable problem unless you don't want it to work.

Is it good game design for every game to look like Fortnite where everyone is running around as a character from a different media franchise?

What does it add to Halo Infinite if Deadpool is a playable character in it? Especially if the developers and publishers do not make money selling you a skin that you bought some place else.

No idea! CoD just got an Attack on Titan skin, Halo Infinite has some questionable skins that could definitely become franchised, Gears of War 5 has a few Halo Skins in it but I assume they were built from scratch. Online games seem to be going the way of cross-franchise skins to entice people to pay for cosmetics. All my point is I don't believe it's technically impossible as people seem to suggest.

I do not think it is technically impossible if you specifically design for interoperability which NFTs seem like a reasonable first iteration of that idea but it might not be financially reasonable. Even if it is, then it would just be boring if not immersion breaking to play the same character in every game, at least to me.

> won't create a standard for them that allows game developers to easily integrate them into textures/skins/etc.

What standard? A skin in a game is not a shitty ape jpeg that you can right-click to download. It's a 3D model designed for a specific game. Other games will not have the same models (and nor should they).

> It's not some impossible unsolvable problem unless you don't want it to work

Go and work on it then. So far you've shown exactly zero understanding of the problem. You clearly don't even understand what NFTs are.

It might be worth mentioning I was using ERC-721 tokens in 2018 and worked on one of the top 10 chains for a few years, before that I worked with Unity but for architecture (digital twins) rather than games. So I’m not a total novice here.

> If people can't work out a way to share a skin between games

People can work it out at great expense to developers and at the risk of destroying whatever a game is stylistically.

Again, each game will have its own ways of presenting, combining and displaying objects. A game with highly detailed human-like motion will be radically different from a cartoonish game. A game designed with large textures in mind will not work well with small textures. A game with complex physics will be completely different from a simpler game in how it represents, handles and combines objects. And so on, and so forth, ad infinitum.

Brushing this aside betrays how little you understand of this.

By way if example: websites are completely open systems. You can go in and see all the "assets and objects and items". Websites are also manny, many orders of magnitude less complex than a computer game.

Go ahead, copy a website's CSS and paste it into another. Or copy a chunk of a website's HTML and paste into another. Doesn't work, does it? You can reflect on why that is.

On top of all of that, why would, say, developers of Elden Ring want to allow you to bring in assets from Horizon Zero Dawn or Binding of Isaac? Those are completely different games with completely different stylistic choices.

> I understand why AAA games are so boring nowadays outside of a couple studios.

Ah yes, they are boring because you can't use skins from Fortnite in Shadow of Mordor. That's the reason.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com