Nintendo filed numerous patents for Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom mechanics
automaton-media.com
automaton-media.com
No way this is the first game to ignore the player character in physics calculations. I'm pretty sure in GTA3 you could climb onto the roof of a car and not slide around as the NPC drives and makes sharp turns.
The most likely I can think of is Axiom Verge, which has a mechanism for "glitching" enemies that might allow for a non-frozen enemy to be used as a platform while it continues to follow the player character around. I'm not totally familiar with how each enemy glitches so it's only "likely" in the sense that I don't know it's definitely not possible.
Can Mario fall into a thrown ice block and acquire its velocity while it’s moving midair without pushing the block down? I think he can technically. But it doesn’t show up as something you should expect to interact with. Maybe sliding along a surface but that’s barely a physics object.
My apologies that it's a youtube short. I couldn't find any better video.
Uncharted 2, (or 3?) on the PlayStation, was widely publicized among game developers as having this kind of technology built into enable for instance the Nathan Drake character to stick appropriately to platforms which were being tossed around in a sinking ship. The ship was filling up with water creating buoyancy for the platform that he was standing on. There were numerous talks about this and I believe also a GDC presentation about it.
I'd imagine nintendo probably have other claims linked to this since alone it has clearly been done before.
You weren't moving on a simulated rigid-body physics object, but in practice there's not much difference - other than handling the nasty cases, like what to do when the physics object flips upside down and crushes the player, or resolving collisions with static world objects that the player makes contact with but the 'vehicle' doesn't.
My understanding of the patent is that two objects that are normally subject to physics (the player and a platform), when the player stands on an object the player's physics are disabled and the player's position is just copied from the object.
But, like, there's no way this hasn't been done before.
We aren't even talking about something interesting like inverse kinematics!
This patent boils down to nothing more than math, and should have been invalidated as soon as it was read. The fact that it wasn't speaks volumes on the failure of our patent system.
And anyone named in the patent or sponsoring anyone named in the patent prevented from applying for any new patents for 10 years.
There is nuance to what constitutes “standing” on the object.
1. https://www.videogameschronicle.com/news/switch-hacker-gary-...
BOTW/TOTK have excellent implementation and aesthetics but there is nothing about them that is technically unique or worthy of a patent.
They seem to be very mindful of the effect, which is why they are taking these actions.
The guy stole FOSS code by making a closed source fork to sell for a profit, tweaked it to be malicious (bricking devices that ran homebrew software that he personally did not like, notably the FOSS competitor to his product), and explicitly advertised his stolen product as being used for software piracy (or unsanctioned copying if you're a stickler for that). Boneheaded actions like that hurt the entire homebrew scene by branding people who just want to run their own code on their own devices as criminals. Gary was in the wrong both legally and morally. It's people like him that incite action against hackers as a whole.
It looks like Nintendo threw everything against the wall to see what sticks, which is what a good IP attorney would recommend. It's unlikely these would hold up in a suit. I would be surprised if Nintendo uses any of these aggressively -- do they have a reputation of doing so?
Nothing to see here, if you ask me.
(Sure, let's abolish parents, but you don't accomplish that by not playing the game. Instead you simply lose.)
I think we could find a more useful word than "good". How about "useful"?
They do have a reputation of suing everyone who "infringes their copyrights". I would assume they would do the same over patents. Hell, there's even one case where they tried to sue themselves.
did they win?
2 years ago, Nintendo successfully sued a game developer for $30 million over a patent on touchscreen virtual joysticks. (https://www.dualshockers.com/nintendo-lawsuit-colopl-white-c...)
That sure is a weird way to say 'patent troll'.
The two things I really liked about TOTK was the ascend ability and the rewind / recall ability. Those were pretty cool and seemed novel to me.
Admittedly, I don't play a ton of video games other than Zelda titles and the odd indie game so maybe those features are not novel and have been implemented before in other games.
Also, world state is not deterministic like Braid's levels, so entities can lose its rewindable status or have their state history modified depending on certain factors (a destroyed or lost object can't be brought back with rewind, etc.).
https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1012210/The-Implementation-of-...
Yep. Not 100% the same as Tears of the Kingdom—you turn the entire game clock back in Sands of Time, not individual items like in Tears of the Kingdom. But still.
Rewind/recall, the game Entropy Centre has that mechanic for specific objects too.
That said most of those patents also are so mundane I doubt they can be enforced.
One day we will all be dead (or much older) and all of these features and patents will be freely available, described in significant detail to be reproducible, and the world will be a slightly more amazing place than it is now.
If you look at all the expiring patents, many filed 20 years ago, you will find there are some neat things documented. It is awesome those are all available for use. The quid pro quo of the patent system is the other end of the pipe.
One great use case for LLMs is the translation of patents into short, easily-readable summaries.
Since the system exists for the benefit of humanity, I assume that is baked into the process?
I'm talking more about the practical act of sitting down and reading a patent. They are long, boring, and filled with legalese. A patent may be 50 pages long, but the interesting part may fill no more than a few paragraphs and be described using nouns and verbs you've never heard before. It's completely possible to read a patent, look at the pictures, and still have no idea what the thing actually is.
It's essentially legal abstraction -- inventors and patent attorneys don't want to be pinned down to a particular interpretation, implementation, or embodiment.
Seems like mainly a net loss.
If the examiner and patent office screw up and allow a claim that shouldn’t have been allowed, then the claim can be challenged later and revoked. Yes, that costs money and is inefficient sometimes.
> If the claims are non-novel or obvious, then the examiners, who are familiar with the state of the art in the field, will reject them.
Which displays a stunning level of naivety and lack of familiarity with our patent system. Patents are regularly granted for extremely trivial (edit: and obvious) mechanisms.
What in these patents would be locked away in a trade secret? They seem to be things you can figure out just by playing the game, or thinking about how it might be implemented. There's no secrets here.
Sure, the original invention may be available, but in the meantime, new patents were filed for improvements and refinements. Without those, the original patent cannot be made efficiently or cost effective. Plus, the new patents can be weaponized in the courts to drain the resources of anyone experimenting in the area.
In other words, patents as implemented effectively enable indefinite monopolies. This may not be true for all patents, but this seems to be a standard playbook these days.
As a competitor, you can also try taking the 20-year old product and refining it differently, too. Or if you're aggressive, you can build and refine current competitive products and patent the refinements, but you can't sell the product without a license, so might not be great (otoh, you might trade licensing the refinement for licensing the base product)
Not really—the point of patents is to publish information so that others can use it after a period of exclusivity. But if you can keep filing patents, preventing others from using that information indefinitely, then it defeats the purpose of the patent system.
If you look at video compression, by the time a patented algorithm expires, there's tended to be a new codec that's better, but you can use mpeg-2 as you like now. So we get the incentive to make better codecs, and we get the old codecs.
And the patent process is not optimized to produce documents that actually help other inventors or future historians. In fact, to the contrary, as it exists within a particular narrow legal IP regime that optimizes around legal risk. This is especially the case with software patents, where the patent office incentivizes patents that use convoluted language to make an obvious process seem like a novel invention.
In other words, let's assume a future where there are no more copies of Zelda to play. If you had to choose between getting to preserve the patent on the Zelda loading screen and an actual recording of it, I'll take the recording every time. Or in a future where much of the knowledge of computer science and programming was lost, I'd rather have an archive of a set of textbooks, Stack Overflow, and Github than the entirety of the patent office's software patent documents.
First, you misstate the purpose of disclosure. It isn't to become a record of historical inventions, it's to encourage inventors to disclose their innovations, as inventors otherwise would not disclose their inventions. Inventors and their businesses would instead be incentivized to wrap their inventions up in trade secret and never disclose anything at all.
Second, patents don't use convoluted language to hide an obvious process. That's (a) merely facial and a waste of time, (b) contrary to the actual legal goal of patents which is to encompass as much in your patent as possible, while still maintaining its ability to grant. Patentees must actually disclose their invention, in a way that's cognizable to someone skilled in the art, or they simply do not have any benefit from the patent at all.
In the past there was perhaps more benefit from this exchange: manufacturers disclosed special knowledge of their products in patents and the world at large gained knowledge that would otherwise remain secret. But this theoretical exchange breaks down if the secret is easily reverse engineered or otherwise unlikely to remain secret. Reverse engineering all manner of products is much easier now than it was 100 years ago but the duration of patents has remained fixed at 20 years. I doubt that it would take more than a year to reverse engineer these patented Zelda features (or how to make a new small molecule drug, for that matter) in the absence of disclosure through patents.
There's still an argument for patents to incentivize investment in R&D. We still want people to invest the time and effort in developing and proving new small molecule drugs even though modern instrumentation and synthesis planning makes it easy to copy a drug. But the "disclosure is better than secrets" argument in favor of patents has been weakening every year as secret-keeping becomes harder.
Could you identify what patent that is? I hope I will get a genuine response from someone who genuinely knows that industry because the last time I asked I just got a patents.google.com/search?q=eink response. It is fun to blame patents. But that's like saying we're not making progress in operating systems because Microsoft owns a key patent in operating systems.
That is practically always before patents expire.
Truly smart innovations will survive over time. Obvious "inventions" are often trivial enough to be "invented" independently again & again.
Patents mostly add a load of red tape, and a big stick that large companies (& patent trolls!) can hit smaller companies or individuals with.
Overall benefit to society, even if patents work as intended? Debateable (and forever being debated, eg. between economists).
In a small society, an inventor taking solution-to-big-problem into their grave, is a problem. In a world with 8 billion+ souls, not so much. Someone else will repeat what 1st inventor didn't release into the world.
Companies innovate because they want to grab market share by getting there first. Losing 'protection' doesn't stop this process. It just removes that big stick that would-be competitors are beaten down with.
The book opens up with a case of James Watt (after whom the Watt SI units are named), and that even though he came up with the steam engine, only after the patent for steam engine expired, was the world able to benefit from his invention. Most of the time while patent was active, he was busy fighting off others, trying to extract financial gain (AFAIK). Not only that, his initial design was subpar, and the improvement that was important was actually patented by somebody else.
I would like to finish the book someday though...
Maybe they plan to reuse it in the future.
Although I think this time I'm done with Zelda for real.
It's just not worth a patent though.
https://old.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/tbxyrf/genshin_impa...
Making a shader using normals for the color values has been around a long time.
It's like chatGPT took the prompt "make a game just like zelda but with microtransactions".
it’s working for them but i don’t understand it.
tl;dr: They ruined some guy's life and well-being to make an example out of him, even though he was not the primary actor.
I've been toying with getting some of their hardware and finally seeing what the hype is about for years. This piece of news just saved me the money I would spend for a Switch or whatever follows it.
Spoiler: The fashion/mayor side quest is a good example of such a reward. Korok seeds are not.