276°
Posted 20 hours ago

6 Pcs Cute Chip Clip Clamps,Plastic Foldback Clips, Potato Clips Clamp,Sealing Food Clips for Food and Kitchen Storage,Snack Bag Clips and Bread Clamps

£9.9£99Clearance
ZTS2023's avatar
Shared by
ZTS2023
Joined in 2023
82
63

About this deal

Luzhanskyi’s explanation to me was even more complex than that, and I tried to simplify it for this piece, but if you need an even simpler one, here you go: More potatoes = more math per second = more engine and computer power needed. And it does need both. Luzhanskyi notes that while much does come down to the computational power of an individual’s PC or a console, modern game engines are doing a lot of work on their own end to drive realistic physics simulations. And he adds that it takes a lot of developer work to fine-tune those engines to get the desired result, especially in a situation like this where very few players are likely to encounter the exact situation. What Could Possibly Go Wrong? We spoke to a number of game developers to get their insight on what’s really going on in the potato clip, why more games don’t let players do this kind of thing, and whether or not 20,000 tumbling potatoes really is as impressive as it seems. 20,000 Potatoes Under the Engine Basically, Fox says, it seems like Havok is really, really good at making lots of objects interact like this. She adds that most CPU sims she’s used to working with would “melt down” if there were that many potatoes in one spot, meaning this is either a newer or better version of Havok than she’s used to, or…maybe there actually aren’t 20,000 potatoes there at all! It's impressive because whilst a lot of those potatoes look stationary, they will all actually be simulating physics at all times,” says Liam Tart, lead artist at Unknown Worlds. “Traditionally, lots of physics objects being very close together like that should cause a lot of 'bouncing' as each potato collides with the potato next to it, so I'd expect all of the potatoes to be jumping around and wobbling slightly. However, they seem to be very still, and only move when the door opens. It's also pretty impressive to have 20k+ potatoes all being simulated at once, and not have the framerate drop substantially.”

What piqued my interest about this a bit – and it's not that impressive really – is that that is exactly how all those amazing water simulations that you see online work but on a much more microscopic scale – so every single particle of water is simulated like that – that's why it looks like such a fluid thing pouring out of the door. So in terms of impressive-ness – the water simulations you see, lots of them use the same sort of tech and they are a lot more impressive because there are MILLIONS of things in them whereas that's a few hundred. Nikita Luzhanskyi, an Unreal Engine developer at Pingle Studio, gave me a detailed rundown of what happens when two objects collide with one another in a game. Here’s the super duper basic version of it: In real life, where physics are simply happening at all times. But in virtual spaces, computers take time to calculate all the physics happening to all objects at any given second. So the more potatoes (or whatever else) you throw into the mix, the more calculations need to be done, and the more complex things get. This is why 20,000 piled-up potatoes in a Bethesda game could easily go wrong: all 20,000 potatoes need to use CPU physics, because Bethesda “actually cares about potatoes,” Fox says. And if we want to blow our own trumpet for a moment, we used some of that smoothed particle hydro-dynamic stuff in the PC version of Dangerous Golf to make the paint spills that sloshed onto the ground, walls and screen!"Megan Fox, founder of Glass Bottom Games, was especially blown away by the giant potato pile and helped me understand all the different things that could have gone wrong here. Speaking to IGN, Fox starts by walking me through the difference between CPU physics and GPU; in short, CPU physics run on your computer and are generally better for more interactive simulations where the player is involved. GPU physics, on the other hand, run on the graphics card and tend to be better for self-contained things that just need to look cool, like fancy particle physics, or raindrops. It’s easier to have lots and lots of GPU physics going on at once, because they (mostly) don’t need to interact with other things. But CPU physics are harder to pull off on a large scale. So, we’ve got 20,000 individual potatoes in a big pile all crashing into one another, the floor, and a moving door. Meaning that if any of the calculations Luzhanskyi describes are too slow, or off in some way, then suddenly the 20,000 potatoes are doing weird, funny physics glitches. But that’s where the brilliance of the Starfield clip lies. The potatoes could be exploding, or flying off into space, or rapidly vibrating, or doing some other non-potato-like behavior. But instead they’re tumbling gently around like, well, potatoes.

But we weren’t just impressed at the audacity of someone going through all the trouble of gathering that many potatoes. Digital Foundry’s John Linneman called the clip “mind-blowing” because all of the potatoes “have physics.” But what does it mean for something to “have physics”? Why is everyone fussing so much about a pile of 20,000 tumbling potatoes in a game about being a cool space explorer?

Asda Great Deal

Free UK shipping. 15 day free returns.
Community Updates
*So you can easily identify outgoing links on our site, we've marked them with an "*" symbol. Links on our site are monetised, but this never affects which deals get posted. Find more info in our FAQs and About Us page.
New Comment