Tears of the Kingdom is just Breath of the Wild with Garry's Mod tacked on. Still a good game though
Nintendo filed numerous patents for Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom mechanics
81–90 of 135 posts
Re: Nintendo filed numerous patents for Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom mechanics
#82Nintendo doing Nintendo things again. Honestly the whole article gives me flashbacks of the various legal battles that they've been involved in [1]. They seem to pay no mind to the effect their litigiousness has on competition and innovation in this area...as if it wasn't already hard enough. 1. https://www.videogameschronicle.com/news/switch-hacker-gary-...
I want to love Nintendo. They create such great IP and their games are time and again some of the most memorable and unique experiences you can purchase in the space. But their lawyers are relentless, and it will forever leave a foul stench on the company for me for that reason.
Re: Nintendo filed numerous patents for Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom mechanics
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your original comment that monocasa responded to read only: > 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.
That's because triviality isn't an issue in patents, non-obviousness and inventiveness is what's key, so it doesn't matter that the thing accomplished is trivial.
Because it seems I need to really spell it out, there are a lot of obvious and non-inventive patents being granted.
Re: Nintendo filed numerous patents for Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom mechanics
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the point is that the approach far predates games with anything like a physics system. That part of the patent seems to describe what happens when a character stands on a moving platform like an elevator. This stuff predates Super Mario Bros.
Typically something like an elevator wouldn't be modeled with physics (mass, velocity, etc.) its movement would just be hardcoded. And of course games without a physics emulator wouldn't do that either. 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 j…
I agree fully.
Re: Nintendo filed numerous patents for Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom mechanics
#85If anyone has worked with an IP attorney before then they know that filing patents is a stength-in-numbers approach. You don't file patents because you think you're a genius, you file patents to defend yourself and ensure an end state of mutually assured destruction. 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…
> I would be surprised if Nintendo uses any of these aggressively -- do they have a reputation of doing so? 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.
> Hell, there's even one case where they tried to sue themselves.
did they win?
Re: Nintendo filed numerous patents for Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom mechanics
#86We seem to always focus on the cost of the patent system, never the benefit. 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 document…
I salute your intention to find the silver lining but my experience reading patents is that they are hard to read. I believe this is because their job is not to convey information but rather to fulfill a legal requirement. I also believe that less restriction of these "inventions" would lead to a greater proliferation of truly useful explanations. No doubt there are exceptions but this has been my experience.
they're incentivized to be vague because specificity decreases the utility of the patent.
Re: Nintendo filed numerous patents for Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom mechanics
#87> The functionality seems at first glance to be a given for any game with a similar environment, but according to an observation by naoya2k, what makes Nintendo’s solution unique is that there are no physics working between Link and the dynamic object. Since both the character and object use physics, the most straightforward solution would be that Link moves together with the moving objects he is on top of as a resul…
I’m pretty sure the source engine has this builtin
Even the original Half-Life monorail intro sequence had the player moving relative to a moving vehicle.
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.
Re: Nintendo filed numerous patents for Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom mechanics
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
Rewind was a gameplay mechanic in the pretty great 2d platformer “Braid”. There is a GDC talk about how it was implemented in 2010. https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1012210/The-Implementation-of-...
The first game I remember having a "rewind" feature as a part of the core gameplay mechanics was Blinx on the OG Xbox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blinx:_The_Time_Sweeper
I was gonna say "Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time" was earlier, but seems it was released a year after Blinx. I'm 90% sure The Sands of Time had some gameplay feature about turning back time somehow.
Re: Nintendo filed numerous patents for Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom mechanics
#89> The functionality seems at first glance to be a given for any game with a similar environment, but according to an observation by naoya2k, what makes Nintendo’s solution unique is that there are no physics working between Link and the dynamic object. Since both the character and object use physics, the most straightforward solution would be that Link moves together with the moving objects he is on top of as a resul…
Another example could be: in Tribes, when you pilot a vehicle your player character gets attached to a mount point and any physics calculations are ignored. I'd imagine nintendo probably have other claims linked to this since alone it has clearly been done before.
I have fond memories of playing Tribes on call center PCs when we got snowed in at the office in a mid-day snowstorm.
Re: Nintendo filed numerous patents for Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom mechanics
#90Tears of the Kingdom is just Breath of the Wild with Garry's Mod tacked on. Still a good game though
Almost obscene to me that Nintendo is trying to patent something that Valve has had the opportunity (and denied taking action on based on principle) to patent for over 2 decades. Related [1]