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Nintendo filed numerous patents for Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom mechanics

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Re: Nintendo filed numerous patents for Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom mechanics

#121

Post by toast0 »

somesortofthing wrote: post #115
toast0 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't this the system working as designed? If you want your thing to be protected, you've got to keep improving and refining it. When your 20-year old product is competitive with today's product, you lose your patent protection. 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 th…

You only need to generate a single patentable refinement once every twenty years. In a lot of places, this is a horrible pace relative to the organic rate of progress. Compare the progress made since the main patents for FDM 3D printing expired compared to the progress made while it was still under patent.

You might not like the 20-year term; but in the case of FDM; I'm sure there are plenty of patentable refinements, and I'd be surprised if Stratasys only got the initial patent and never any refinements. But when the initial patent expired, there was an explosion of other options as the initial patent was sufficient to enable the ecosystem, even if there was a need to avoid some refinement patents.

Re: Nintendo filed numerous patents for Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom mechanics

#122

Post by toast0 »

mcphage wrote: post #113
toast0 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't this the system working as designed? If you want your thing to be protected, you've got to keep improving and refining it. When your 20-year old product is competitive with today's product, you lose your patent protection. 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 th…

> Isn't this the system working as designed? If you want your thing to be protected, you've got to keep improving and refining it. When your 20-year old product is competitive with today's product, you lose your patent protection. 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 info…

If you can keep filing new patents, and the new patents are so important that the old patents are worthless, then you're improving the product space tremendously.

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.

Re: Nintendo filed numerous patents for Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom mechanics

#123

Post by [deleted] »

mcphage wrote: post #112
capableweb wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> I'm 90% sure The Sands of Time had some gameplay feature about turning back time somehow. 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.

[deleted]

Re: Nintendo filed numerous patents for Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom mechanics

#124

Post by seba_dos1 »

acomjean wrote: post #23
racl101 wrote: post #11

Huh, didn't think there were that many new and innovative things even though the game was fantastic experience. 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…

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-...

Also "Life is Strange", or "Thinking with Time Machine" mod to Portal 2.

Re: Nintendo filed numerous patents for Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom mechanics

#125

Post by jncfhnb »

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote: post #92
jncfhnb wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not quite. It’s pretty rare to be jumping off and standing on top of moving physics objects in 2D platformers. Like in Mario almost everything you can stand on is static or following a fixed movement pattern.

I'm also wracking my brain for this situation in one of the many metroidvanias I've played. There are many which let the player freeze enemies so they can be used as platforms but the enemies are also not moving by that point. 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 pl…

Physics objects are generally poor fits for 2D platformers. They’re random which betrays slick level design (and endangers sequence breaks in some games). They probably fall too fast to interact with. They potentially accumulate. 2D platformer characters tend to not experience physics aside from gravity to begin with and sliding momentum as they usually cannot rotate and don’t expect to encounter forces from collisions.

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.

Re: Nintendo filed numerous patents for Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom mechanics

#126

Post by mcphage »

toast0 wrote: post #122
mcphage wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Isn't this the system working as designed? If you want your thing to be protected, you've got to keep improving and refining it. When your 20-year old product is competitive with today's product, you lose your patent protection. 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 info…

If you can keep filing new patents, and the new patents are so important that the old patents are worthless, then you're improving the product space tremendously. 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.

If it makes your old patent worthless, because your new stuff is so much better, that’s fine. If it makes your old patent worthless, because it’s hard to use your old patent without running afoul of your new patent, because they’re overlap too much—that’s not working as intended.

Re: Nintendo filed numerous patents for Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom mechanics

#128

Post by youraverageuser »

freejazz wrote: post #77
RetroTechie wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What benefit? Most "inventions" hit the world @ large as soon as products incorporating them are released. Same world @ large gets the details after someone pokes around in those products & figures out how they work. 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 mostl…

Can you share any literature on economists debating whether the patent system is worth it? I'm not familiar with materials like that, and it's been my experience that the patent system isn't really a debate outside of the hackernews and software development communities.

Boldrin & Levine: Against Intellectual Monopoly.

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...

Re: Nintendo filed numerous patents for Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom mechanics

#129

Post by mitthrowaway2 »

jncfhnb wrote: post #116
mitthrowaway2 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Megaman X has an ice-skateboard that you can summon and then ride.

Could you find a video or reference to this? I can’t recall it.

https://youtube.com/shorts/qm5M0bt8VVI

My apologies that it's a youtube short. I couldn't find any better video.

Re: Nintendo filed numerous patents for Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom mechanics

#130

Post by rcarmo »

keiferwiseman wrote: post #81

Tears of the Kingdom is just Breath of the Wild with Garry's Mod tacked on. Still a good game though

I don’t think so. Unleashing a cannon-topped Roomba into an enemy camp while you send stragglers over trees with a bouncy stick (mushroom fused to a stick) is quite enjoyable.
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