The Unpleasant Process of Creating Doors in Video Games

Doors are for any artist who wants to convey their stories in a fluent and striking way (filmmakers, writers etc.) is always an important factor. Pulling a door at an important stage, at a nice angle, using it as a metaphor You can tell a lot.

However for game developers Doors are a different matter. Doors are not something we pay much attention to when playing games; we open the door and continue to experience the story. For game developers, the doors are the rasp of a lifetime. To find out why software developer and game developer We consulted an expert.

What are these game developers pulling out of doors? Game developer’s response:

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We can evaluate the implementation difficulty of doors in two contexts: The first is the difficulty of interacting. Every object we put on a scene in game engines is actually are visual things that can be passed through. In order to give physics to these objects, we ‘collider’ (collider) add.

A collider represents the physical presence of the object, but they are completely independent of the image. In other words, the image of an object can be small, but the collider that gives it physics can be large and vice versa. So the objects you see in games The area it actually occupies differs from its image.

In some game engines, when you get too close to the door, the character’s head passes through the door to the back. To prevent this, the collider of the door is made one click larger than the image of the door. Like this character’s head to collider It cannot slam into the door.

When we add a door handle to this equation, things get complicated, making the interaction of the character with the door very difficult for us developers, because the character, can’t reach the doorknob. Instead, he extends his arm to a more imaginary place. For this reason, we avoid using door handles, especially in FPS games.

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A second challenge to the Gates is NPCs (non-playable characters) issue. We can think of all the rooms as a separate area and as much as the playable characters. We have to code NPCs too. We determine the paths the NPCs walk with the system we call NavMesh, and these are automatically constructed.

NPC’s NavMesh that has to go from one room to the next through the door, sensing the door on its way, interpreting it, opening the door and getting to the other side is a very difficult thing in the NPCs wing. It’s very easy for an NPC to move from one room to another without a door, but When opening the door is added to the equation, another artificial intelligence model and interpretation comes into play..”

That’s why the doors;

It is either designed to open automatically on its own, so you do not interact at all, and when the trigger in front of the door detects you, it allows the door to open,

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Either the door is already open, you go through it,

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Either when your character approaches the door, an interaction button appears, when you interact, your character enters a pre-prepared door opening animation, regardless of where you are, and opens the door by positioning accordingly (The method used in The Last of Us: Part 2 and Red Dead: Redemption 2),

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Or your character interacts with the door by pushing without using the door handle, and the doors have the ability to move in both directions. (The method in GTA 4, Red Dead: Redemption and GTA 5.)

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In short, you now know how difficult it is for game developers to code doors in games and what methods they have developed to overcome this difficulty. Who knows, maybe it will allow us to open doors without the need for the above methods in the future. a game engine is developed.