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This seems suspiciously like a "save game" feature. Many games even auto-save which functions suspiciously like what they are describing as a "trigger point".
While I am sure this is new and innovative, it still reminds me of when pyramid schemes mostly converted to MLM terminology. I had a friend that tried to convince me that MLM wasn't a pyramid. So, I had him draw their sales hierarchy on a sheet of paper for me.......
Yes. And this description gives me Alone in the Dark (2007) vibes: they explicitly stylized chapters and subchapters as episodes on dvd. Would they make something original to build a game around this idea? Would it be linear-only, for games like TLOU with limited choices? Or it's just about patenting everything that's not nailed down?
I think it would only stand out if you would be able to rewind and passively watch the in-engine recording of your whole previous gameplay (like in cybersports, or clip editors in some games), with an option to jump in at some sections. But it's a little too much to implement smoothly, having no reason.
By pure chance, I am watching Edge of Tomorrow as we type. (It's a Tom Cruise time loop movie, if you haven't seen it.)
A game with a story line built around that concept would be very interesting, for sure. However, the old Sierra adventure games came to mind, specifically Space Quest and Leisure Suit Larry, where you just had to keep trying different things until you didn't die. It was fun back in the day, but it got old really quick.
Implemention in a sports game is a cool idea, though.
Returnal
Yeah. I was just thinking that they were describing rogue like games.
Many emulators have been doing something like this for quite a while. Its called a "saved state." In some cases, a saved state can introduce bugs into the game play and mess up your progression, but that is just in emulation.
Hell, Nintendo has this on their Switch online emulator. Are they going to have to remove that from NSO because Sony patented it?
Nintendo did it on the wii
yeah this can only work if implemented by the devs. The only reason this can be done for some older emulated games is that there is only a megabyte or two needed to capture the state of the entire system. Not several gigabytes.
I was under the assumption the collections that utilize this system do it by just saving the inputs and timestamps and simulate them as such rather than understanding the entire whole state. I'm not sure how it works with non-seeded elements
I do agree with you about the dev focus. It would be way more complex even though if feasible if you can simulate without it graphically but you I can't imagine it just being a system similar to recording or achievements
that only really works with deterministic systems though. You could do that with a 6502 or simple systems because you could perfectly predict what the state of the system would be in just by replaying inputs. everything up to predicting all cache misses.
consider a badly written game on a modern console (remember that save states should work for any game) in which physics is tied to framerate. Follow the chain... framerate depends on system speed... which, indirectly depends on the ambient temperature (a console running in a hot climate would throttle earlier than one running in an air conditioned cool room). And because modern systems execute more than one process, it also depends on what else is running (were you downloading a game in the background, slowing down the game ever so slightly?) or unpredictable things such as interrupts on certain system timers. And the list goes on and on. Even if the game didn't have physics depending on framerate, differing deltaTime on each frame means different floating point rounding errors happen, which could accumulate over time.
So in this case, replaying inputs does not get you the exact state. you were in. there are just too many variables.
No game should save gigabytes. Even megabytes can be too much. If the game is very linear a save could mean a single number. Even if it has character cosmetic customization and a convoluted plot with lots of choices it's still usually in the kilobyte range. The larger saves (overall) would be sports games like rally racing where the game needs to be able to provide a thorough replay of every race.
system state is not the same as a save file. System state is the cpu registers, the process' entire memory space (because you don't know what the game might do at any point) gpu context, etc.
edit: example: the save file for older games was measured in bytes. System state is much larger han that. It contains everything not just what the developer decided to allow you to save.
I just had a revolutionary idea: what if every time you reach a new point in a game, it showed you a certain sequence of icons related to that point in the game. Then, if you ever want to play that part of the game again you can just insert that same sequence of icons into an option of the game and it'll play from there.
Then people could also share the sequences they discover with their friends, allowing said friends to skip part of the game if they want to.
Just got flashbacks of Lemmings from my childhood when reading this comment, lol
So many people did not read the sarcasm from this lol
I was afraid I was too old and people wouldn't even know games used to do this.
The OG Crash bandicoot had this as memory cards were not widely used at the time. So you would write down the sequence to to get back to that section.
That’s how our games worked in the 80’s. Most of them used passwords. I remember one that used a tic-tac-toe looking thing where you entered a combination of dots to load your game. I think it may have been Mega Man. Zelda was the first one I remember that actually saved your game. There was a battery in the cartridge.
Mystical Ninja for SNES did this
Ohhh they're doing an apple and inventing F5 + F8 save states
That's not what the article says. This is basically a save game for every-ish moment in the gameplay + a facility to launch the game at the scene you're watching a video of, which is massive amounts of data + progress sync, so if they figured out how to do that at scale, it's legit innovation.
So isn't this like what stadia wanted to do with its integration with YouTube where you could watch someone's letsplay and there'd be a button that could take you to where they were so you can experience it or see if you can do better?
How were they able to patent it if something like this was already described by another company years ago?
Not enough info in the article to tell the difference, I'd say. Maybe because this should apply to your local games? IDK
So... they're inventing level codes you can re-enter to start from there.
I'm massively impressed by Sony, clearly revolutionary technology right there.
This sounds like chapters with more steps. That, or the snapshop quick save whatever it's called feature found in most emulators.
Another software patent that no one should respect because it does something that was done 30 years ago.
did they grant a patent for a mission select screen
New Sony Patent Will Let You Replay A Game From Any Point Possible
Possible points: beginning of the game
Sounds like a billion save files taking up space