I cannot see how they can reasonably copyright the idea of having characters remember you which is basically all the nemesis system is. There are many ways to implement it that wouldn’t violate patent, of course it’s in WBs interest to not nose that one around too much
You can try, but WB will troll you in court for years and drown you out on legal fees to prove it isn’t a violation of a patent. So, most consider it not worth it.
You think that patent abuse is right, and that’s why everyone in this thread hates your comments. You think the system is fine. The fact that you are inside but can’t understand how corporations abuse the system and think others are wrong or misinformed when they oppose this abuse, is troubling. You think we are ignorant or misinformed, but no, we do know how intellectual property works. We disagree and find it disgusting for moral reasons that it works that way. That’s very different.
Patents genuinely are wonderful. The rockstar devs are going to be rewarded for their innovation. They will hire out licenses so that other games can use the tech they developed.
Remember when Amazon, Apple, ARM, Cisco, Facebook, Google, Huawei, Intel, Microsoft, Mozilla, Netflix, Nvidia, Samsung Electronics and Tencent all had to come together and form a super group to develop a royalty free video codec because something as simple as compressing and decompressing video was so god damn patent encumbered by people who just existed to suck money out of everyone.
Literally, every time software is patented, it ends up being used to screw with everyone, then eventually the patent expires ten years after the software was useful, or we have to waste huge amounts of effort to sideline it.
You sound like you need a history refresher on patents in the software industry and the disastrous effect that it has had in hurting innovation and consumers and how it is dominated by trolls and squatters.
I don’t know how to convey to you how important it is to incentivize innovation without worrying someone else will simply steal your ideas to make millions from your hard work you did inventing something while they literally did nothing.
If I make something and someone else can simply take it and dominate the market with it and pay me nothing for the work i did, why the fuck should I even bother making anything?
I don’t know how to convey to you how important it is to incentivize innovation without worrying someone else will simply steal your ideas to make millions from your hard work you did inventing something while they literally did nothing.
If I make something and someone else can simply take it and dominate the market with it and pay me nothing for the work i did, why the fuck should I even bother making anything?
Again, look at the history of software patents. Tell me a single time it incentivied innovation and wasn’t just used by patent trolls and wasn’t just a huge waste of time and money for the industry to spend time on.
I think you are wholey unfamiliar with software patents in general and are just going on some basic guiding principal and I can tell you right now, history has not played out in your idilic description at all and you are just coming off as ignorant on the topic.
Who cares? Give me great game mechanics. It will be the dated missions with you being always an inch from failure in an open world. Give me another Zelda pls. Or better yet (since I haven’t played it) Horizon Forbidden West.
They’ve built a library of small building blocks for character movements. These blocks can be combined in various ways to create a wide range of animations. … Instead of designing separate animations for each of these situations, they use these building blocks to put together the character’s movements naturally.
This sounds like shape keys, which is a technique already widely used in games and animation today. When you get shot in Battlefield, your character model plays a “getting shot” animation. When your character runs, it plays a “running” animation. When your character gets shot while running, these two animations are combined - it’s not a separate “shot while running” animation.
Would love to know if there’s actually some novel aspect to this “invention” but it seems more likely that this is yet another bullshit patent approved by a clueless clerk who did zero searches for prior art.
Edit: Read the patent. Not only does it describe nothing novel, it doesn’t even document what they did. All it says is basically “we created animation blocks and combine them”. The details are just a bunch of bullshit jargon spew:
attributes can include conditions, properties, events, flags, graphs, values, references, and variants
I think this would make it tough to enforce the patent if it’s actually commonly used. If I were somehow granted a patent on tap dancing, its common usage by others before me would probably cause my patent to be invalidated if I then tried to sue a tap dancer.
Not a patent lawyer, but IIRC, US patent law had some protections for things (including non-patented) that are already common practice.
Software patents get away with stupid shit like this all the time. Patent trolls claim they invented a software pattern and then sue everyone who uses it.
I work in patents. If it wasn’t novel it wouldn’t be granted, believe me.
I work in computer graphics software. My former employer preferred that engineers liberally apply for “defensive” patents because of how often people would get a patent for something we already did and then try to sue us for it. Plus we got a small cash bonus when our patents were approved. Through this process, I was granted six patents for my work there. It would be unwise to put something to text that could be used as evidence to invalidate the patents, so I’ll just say that my opinion on how low the bar is to getting software patents approved is definitely well-informed.
understanding the law and understanding how to assess novelty in a proper way
I’ll admit I have little understanding of the legal definition of “novel”, but insofar as the intent of the patent system, the current bar is way too low for software patents. Although remedied recently, the plethora of software patents that still exist for “(Something people have done for decades) but do it on a computer” is ridiculous.
A locomotion system for controlling animation of a character in a three-dimensional (3D) virtual environment comprising: a rendering engine; a core system logic communicatively coupled to the rendering engine for executing core game logic of the virtual environment …
This is basically a description of a game engine that supports movement and animation. Descent (1994) would be the earliest production use of such an engine.
The locomotion system of claim 1, wherein a key identifies one or more variables of the blackboard, the key comprising a human readable name associated with the variables to provide the selection criteria.
Congratulations, you just described “variables”, a concept at least as old as ENIAC (1945).
The locomotion system of claim 1, wherein the core game logic defines one or more desired physical movements to sequence the motion type objects blocks.
Yes, that’s one way to describe “animation”
The locomotion system of claim 1, wherein a selected archetype block defines a fallback archetype block, the fallback archetype block defining at least one new motion animation block or motion type block not present in the selected archetype block and inheriting any remaining motion type blocks and motion animation blocks from the selected archetype block.
Variables having a default value is the default behavior of most programming languages and software systems.
The locomotion system of claim 1, wherein a selected archetype block defines the character’s default animation.
Yea, we’re talking about animation here. Default value of animation description = default animation.
The locomotion system of claim 1, wherein a selected archetype block of the character is unique from a second archetype block of a second character and at least one motion type block is common across the character and the second character.
Inheritance, a property of most software designs since the 1980s.
The locomotion system of claim 1, wherein at least one of the motion animation blocks, the motion type blocks, and the archetype blocks is defined by a series of extensible markup language (XML)-based meta files.
Storing configuration in a data file. You’d be hard pressed to find an alternative. Maybe some genius will come along and find some way to represent it in JSON…
The locomotion system of claim 1, wherein a selected attribute of a selected motion animation block includes at least one of a clip set that is used by a selected motion of the character, an overloadable animation blend tree to be used for the selected motion, named additional clips within specific clip sets, parametric blends from sets that can be named, a Boolean that specifies whether play speed of the selected motion can be modified, a minimum speed, and a maximum speed.
This seems to be the main claim of the patent, but seems to have a huge amount of prior art (see links). “Parametric blends” and other terms are just jargon.
The locomotion system of claim 1, wherein the attributes of the motion animation block are custom float values.
Oh my god. Really? Shall we also include “doubles”, “halfs”, or maybe “rationals”?
The locomotion system of claim 1, further comprising one or more transition tables to control a relationship between motion animation blocks.
“Translation table” seems to just be referring to the graph topology of the system. Yes, graphs are the most common way to represent arbitrary N:M relationships.
The locomotion system of claim 1, further comprising an in-game graphical user interface for real-time modification of at least one of the motion animation blocks, the motion type blocks, and the archetype blocks.
Node-based editing; standard practice in all 3D modeling.
A computer-implemented method for controlling animation of a character in a three-dimensional (3D) virtual environment comprising: executing core game logic to render the virtual environment using a core system logic communicatively coupled to a rendering engine …
Yes, you already described what a game engine is and an animation system is. Game engines certainly do have animation systems…
The computer-implemented method of claim 12, wherein said animating the character further comprises identifying a second archetype block, the common set of motion type blocks and the motion animation blocks of the second archetype block altering the animation of the character as a game story defined by the core game logic develops.
Picking animation keys based on game logic. What else would you base it on exactly?
The computer-implemented method of claim 12, wherein said animating the character further comprises identifying a fallback archetype block of the archetype block, the fallback archetype block defining at least one new motion animation block or motion type block not present in the selected archetype block and inheriting any remaining motion type blocks and motion animation blocks from the selected archetype block.
Yes, default values do be defaultin’.
A computer program product for controlling animation of a character in a three-dimensional (3D) virtual environment, the computer program product including a non-transitory computer readable storage medium having program instructions embodied therewith, the program instructions executable by a device to cause the device to perform a method comprising: executing core game logic to render the virtual environment using a core system logic communicatively coupled to a rendering engine …
Yep, software sure does run on computers. Computers are neat. And they have storage.
The computer program product of claim 15, wherein said animating the character further comprises identifying a second archetype block, the common set of motion type objects blocks and the motion animation blocks of the second archetype block altering the animation of the character as a game story defined by the core game logic develops.
Are we really going to enumerate all the permutations of engine + animation + defaults claims?
The computer program product of claim 15, wherein said animating the character further comprises identifying a fallback archetype block of the archetype block, the fallback archetype block defining at least one new motion animation block or motion type block not present in the selected archetype block and inheriting any remaining motion type objects blocks and motion animation blocks from the selected archetype block.
It sounds more like they’re using more fundamental movements than what you’re describing, not running animation+shot animation but more like:
Both reloading a particular weapon and mantling over a walk require you to lift your arms, so the root movement of lifting your arm to reload an LMG is the same one used to grab a ledge overhead, etc.
Basically they’re just categorizing movements based on use case and direction so they can string those individual movements into different and unique patterns for individual actions.
Pressing an elevator button uses the same arm movement as opening a door, which uses the same wrist rotation movement as turning the key in a car, etc. So they just break down individual movements in the same way an LLM breaks down a voice into phonetics to string new words together.
It’s definitely possible they’re doing something novel internally, but the details that would support that interpretation are missing from the filing. One of the requirements for patents is that it “sufficient disclosure of the invention so that it can be reproduced by others”. I would say I qualify as an expert in the domain covered, and I have no idea what they’re actually doing based on the patent alone.
I don’t know how old you are, but I feel like younger people say this more often than older people.
As someone who saw the transition from 8-bit to 16-bit to 32/64-bit in their childhood, graphics were everything from the 80s until at least the 2000s. Each new generation was leaps and bounds better than the last; I remember the discussions in the playground being centered around nothing but graphics every time a new console was announced. Nobody talked about the games.
Nowadays we have incremental updates at best, so now people care less and less about graphics like they used to. Not me, though. I’m still a graphics slut and an absolute whore for path traced games. I’ll play a game I don’t enjoy if it has the latest in graphics tech.
I’m old and hold the opposite opinion. Those first few generational leaps were amazing. But I feel like we’ve long reached the point that almost any experience can be conveyed with impact.
I enjoy the new bells and whistles. But these incremental upgrades come coupled with skyrocketing costs, longer development times, and fewer risks. Indie gaming is still innovating of course, but I miss when AAA studios were churning out risky, unique titles.
Yeah but Rockstar won’t using that they were using just standard animations so it’s fine that they’ve come up with around animation system cuz they use their own engine.
I understand their reasoning… My point is why patent a locomotion style when no one gives a shit if the game is shit. I don’t think a great looking walking animation is going to move the needle as to a game’s sales.
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And in no other games! Patents aee truely wonderful aren’t they.
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Yeah, just like WB did with the Nemesis system, right? Oh wait.
I cannot see how they can reasonably copyright the idea of having characters remember you which is basically all the nemesis system is. There are many ways to implement it that wouldn’t violate patent, of course it’s in WBs interest to not nose that one around too much
You can try, but WB will troll you in court for years and drown you out on legal fees to prove it isn’t a violation of a patent. So, most consider it not worth it.
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Yeah, imagine if there was an area of software development where people could freely view, copy and modify each others works.
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That would imply there are no devs or even entire companies working on open source software and getting paid.
Just because you work on open source, doesn’t mean you don’t get paid.
Where can I get the crack you’re smoking
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Dude, maybe you do work on patents and know your shit. But boy are you clueless about the video game industry.
I thought the man was joking then I saw his smooth brained response below. Software patents are cancer and shouldn’t exist.
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You think that patent abuse is right, and that’s why everyone in this thread hates your comments. You think the system is fine. The fact that you are inside but can’t understand how corporations abuse the system and think others are wrong or misinformed when they oppose this abuse, is troubling. You think we are ignorant or misinformed, but no, we do know how intellectual property works. We disagree and find it disgusting for moral reasons that it works that way. That’s very different.
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Comment by you, about 5 hours ago.
Fuck off corpo.
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We will get like two games out of this before the patent expires cuz Rockstar takes 3 console gens to make 2 games.
They made GTA V then GTA V again then GTA V again then GTA V for VR, that’s loads of games.
Rockstar have just innovated by releasing exactly the same game every single generation.
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Bethesda will sue them for copyright infringement any day now
Releasing the same thing is our thing, man!
Or those gigantic multi million dollar game dev corporations could afford to, you know, pay to license that shit for their own games.
If they can afford to pay the CEOs millions of dollars for their golden parachute as well as their yearly salary, then they can afford that license.
If you think a game that doesn’t have that is a failure, then both your expectations as well as that game both deserve to fail.
Why license endless patents if you can save money by just not doing that
Greedy ceos is a bad justification for software patents
You sound like you need a refresher on basic intellectual property protections and why they are essential.
Remember when Amazon, Apple, ARM, Cisco, Facebook, Google, Huawei, Intel, Microsoft, Mozilla, Netflix, Nvidia, Samsung Electronics and Tencent all had to come together and form a super group to develop a royalty free video codec because something as simple as compressing and decompressing video was so god damn patent encumbered by people who just existed to suck money out of everyone.
Literally, every time software is patented, it ends up being used to screw with everyone, then eventually the patent expires ten years after the software was useful, or we have to waste huge amounts of effort to sideline it.
You sound like you need a history refresher on patents in the software industry and the disastrous effect that it has had in hurting innovation and consumers and how it is dominated by trolls and squatters.
I don’t know how to convey to you how important it is to incentivize innovation without worrying someone else will simply steal your ideas to make millions from your hard work you did inventing something while they literally did nothing.
If I make something and someone else can simply take it and dominate the market with it and pay me nothing for the work i did, why the fuck should I even bother making anything?
TIL that open source doesn’t exist.
TIL that morons here don’t know the difference between software patents and copyright licenses.
Again, look at the history of software patents. Tell me a single time it incentivied innovation and wasn’t just used by patent trolls and wasn’t just a huge waste of time and money for the industry to spend time on.
I think you are wholey unfamiliar with software patents in general and are just going on some basic guiding principal and I can tell you right now, history has not played out in your idilic description at all and you are just coming off as ignorant on the topic.
Let’s take a look at countries with no patent laws and compare their innovations that contributed to the rest of the world:
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We need a video game “taco bell” to take on this stupid “taco John patented taco Tuesday slogan”
Did they just patent procedural animation?
Who cares? Give me great game mechanics. It will be the dated missions with you being always an inch from failure in an open world. Give me another Zelda pls. Or better yet (since I haven’t played it) Horizon Forbidden West.
This sounds like shape keys, which is a technique already widely used in games and animation today. When you get shot in Battlefield, your character model plays a “getting shot” animation. When your character runs, it plays a “running” animation. When your character gets shot while running, these two animations are combined - it’s not a separate “shot while running” animation.
Would love to know if there’s actually some novel aspect to this “invention” but it seems more likely that this is yet another bullshit patent approved by a clueless clerk who did zero searches for prior art.
Edit: Read the patent. Not only does it describe nothing novel, it doesn’t even document what they did. All it says is basically “we created animation blocks and combine them”. The details are just a bunch of bullshit jargon spew:
Software patents need to die.
Not shape keys, but something more akin to Unity’s animation layers. This kinda stuff has been in games for a decade or so.
Their novel discovery: They figured out nobody had patented this yet
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I think this would make it tough to enforce the patent if it’s actually commonly used. If I were somehow granted a patent on tap dancing, its common usage by others before me would probably cause my patent to be invalidated if I then tried to sue a tap dancer.
Not a patent lawyer, but IIRC, US patent law had some protections for things (including non-patented) that are already common practice.
EDIT: Clarity
Software patents get away with stupid shit like this all the time. Patent trolls claim they invented a software pattern and then sue everyone who uses it.
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I work in computer graphics software. My former employer preferred that engineers liberally apply for “defensive” patents because of how often people would get a patent for something we already did and then try to sue us for it. Plus we got a small cash bonus when our patents were approved. Through this process, I was granted six patents for my work there. It would be unwise to put something to text that could be used as evidence to invalidate the patents, so I’ll just say that my opinion on how low the bar is to getting software patents approved is definitely well-informed.
I’ll admit I have little understanding of the legal definition of “novel”, but insofar as the intent of the patent system, the current bar is way too low for software patents. Although remedied recently, the plethora of software patents that still exist for “(Something people have done for decades) but do it on a computer” is ridiculous.
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A brief search shows a variety of publications that seem to do what is described by the patent:
https://history.siggraph.org/learning/neural-animation-layering-for-synthesizing-martial-arts-movements-by-starke-zhao-zinno-and-komura/
https://advances.realtimerendering.com/destiny/siggraph2014/animation/index.html
https://www.cs.ucdavis.edu/~neff/papers/correlationMapsEG07.pdf
https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/AnimationLayers.html
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This is basically a description of a game engine that supports movement and animation. Descent (1994) would be the earliest production use of such an engine.
Congratulations, you just described “variables”, a concept at least as old as ENIAC (1945).
Yes, that’s one way to describe “animation”
Variables having a default value is the default behavior of most programming languages and software systems.
Yea, we’re talking about animation here. Default value of animation description = default animation.
Inheritance, a property of most software designs since the 1980s.
Storing configuration in a data file. You’d be hard pressed to find an alternative. Maybe some genius will come along and find some way to represent it in JSON…
This seems to be the main claim of the patent, but seems to have a huge amount of prior art (see links). “Parametric blends” and other terms are just jargon.
Oh my god. Really? Shall we also include “doubles”, “halfs”, or maybe “rationals”?
“Translation table” seems to just be referring to the graph topology of the system. Yes, graphs are the most common way to represent arbitrary N:M relationships.
Node-based editing; standard practice in all 3D modeling.
Yes, you already described what a game engine is and an animation system is. Game engines certainly do have animation systems…
Picking animation keys based on game logic. What else would you base it on exactly?
Yes, default values do be defaultin’.
Yep, software sure does run on computers. Computers are neat. And they have storage.
Are we really going to enumerate all the permutations of engine + animation + defaults claims?
I guess we are…
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Sir you are too level headed for the internet
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This has been done for decades. Anyone that respects this patent is an idiot.
It sounds more like they’re using more fundamental movements than what you’re describing, not running animation+shot animation but more like:
Both reloading a particular weapon and mantling over a walk require you to lift your arms, so the root movement of lifting your arm to reload an LMG is the same one used to grab a ledge overhead, etc.
Basically they’re just categorizing movements based on use case and direction so they can string those individual movements into different and unique patterns for individual actions.
Pressing an elevator button uses the same arm movement as opening a door, which uses the same wrist rotation movement as turning the key in a car, etc. So they just break down individual movements in the same way an LLM breaks down a voice into phonetics to string new words together.
It’s definitely possible they’re doing something novel internally, but the details that would support that interpretation are missing from the filing. One of the requirements for patents is that it “sufficient disclosure of the invention so that it can be reproduced by others”. I would say I qualify as an expert in the domain covered, and I have no idea what they’re actually doing based on the patent alone.
Meanwhile at Bethesda:
Hey look, I figured out how to animate them to look at you! What? Walk naturally? No I don’t have time for that.
The modders will figure that part out.
The Fromsoft locomotion is already perfect for games. People care about good games, not graphics or realism.
I don’t know how old you are, but I feel like younger people say this more often than older people.
As someone who saw the transition from 8-bit to 16-bit to 32/64-bit in their childhood, graphics were everything from the 80s until at least the 2000s. Each new generation was leaps and bounds better than the last; I remember the discussions in the playground being centered around nothing but graphics every time a new console was announced. Nobody talked about the games.
Nowadays we have incremental updates at best, so now people care less and less about graphics like they used to. Not me, though. I’m still a graphics slut and an absolute whore for path traced games. I’ll play a game I don’t enjoy if it has the latest in graphics tech.
I’m old and hold the opposite opinion. Those first few generational leaps were amazing. But I feel like we’ve long reached the point that almost any experience can be conveyed with impact.
I enjoy the new bells and whistles. But these incremental upgrades come coupled with skyrocketing costs, longer development times, and fewer risks. Indie gaming is still innovating of course, but I miss when AAA studios were churning out risky, unique titles.
Same. The PS3/360 era was the last one where graphics wowed me. The 2 gens since have been incremental graphically.
I’m likely older than you.
Edit: why down vote? Were you born in the 60s?
Yeah but Rockstar won’t using that they were using just standard animations so it’s fine that they’ve come up with around animation system cuz they use their own engine.
I understand their reasoning… My point is why patent a locomotion style when no one gives a shit if the game is shit. I don’t think a great looking walking animation is going to move the needle as to a game’s sales.
As long as GTA 6 has male strip clubs I’ll be happy.
Anybody remember Euphoria? Also seen in that canceled Indiana Jones game.
ues, euphoria was used in gta4 and Jedi unleashed
I hate this. Same with WB patenting the Nemesis system then not even bothering to milk it.
Time to get to work writing the alternative cola recurring enemy system I guess…