It seems unfathomable that ten years after the Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim launched, the game could still have any secrets yet to be uncovered. But following on from yesterdays developer revelations about a bee derailing one of the most well-known (and memed) openings in video games, another development secret has been revealed, this time regarding the game’s treasure hunting foxes.
The story comes by the way of Joel Burgess, who was a developer at Bethesda during the creation of Skyrim. In a series of tweets, he outlined one of the games biggest post-launch rumours about mysterious foxes that would appear and lead players to treasure chests and other goodies.
Burgess outlined that after the game released, a number of players would tip each other off that if you followed the game's many foxes, they would lead you to areas of the map filled with treasure. Since this had never been a deliberate feature that had been added into the game, Burgess was naturally confused, and quickly sought to uncover how and why this was happening.
From consulting with other members of the development team, Jean Simonet, Jonah Lobe, and Mark Teare, it quickly became apparent that the culprit was not part of the game’s script at all, but part of the navmesh system, “an invisible 3D sheet of polygons that is laid over the world, telling AI where it can and cannot go”. Once spooked, the foxes were supposed to flee along a generated path, using the navmesh for guidance. But for some reason, the fox would automatically flee towards the area with the largest number of triangles on the navmesh.
The answer to this strange behaviour was eventually discovered: it was happening because the fox fleeing would travel 100 triangles away, as opposed to using real-world measurements, such as 100 metres away.
"You know where it's easy to find 100 triangles? The camps/ruins/etc that we littered the world with, and filled with treasure to reward your exploration," said Burgess.
Areas of interest like camps and treasure caches contained large numbers of triangles due to the increase in detail, and so in its hunt for a lot of triangles to travel over in order to flee, the foxs' AI routine pretty much always took them to a camp or something similar. In Burgess’s words: “foxes aren't leading you to treasure - but the way they behave is leading them to areas that tend to HAVE treasure, because POIs w/loot have other attributes (lots of small navmesh triangles) that the foxes ARE pursuing”.
So there you have it: another story of how tricky and unpredictable game development can be. And another example of how, ten years after launch, games can still throw up surprises, quirks, and interesting tales here and there.
For more from Skyrim, check out the news of it receiving an FPS boost on Xbox Series X, our favourite console-friendly Skyrim mods, and the copy of Skyrim that sold for $600.
Liam Wiseman is a Freelance News writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @liamthewiseman.
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The story comes by the way of Joel Burgess, who was a developer at Bethesda during the creation of Skyrim. In a series of tweets, he outlined one of the games biggest post-launch rumours about mysterious foxes that would appear and lead players to treasure chests and other goodies.
Burgess outlined that after the game released, a number of players would tip each other off that if you followed the game's many foxes, they would lead you to areas of the map filled with treasure. Since this had never been a deliberate feature that had been added into the game, Burgess was naturally confused, and quickly sought to uncover how and why this was happening.
From consulting with other members of the development team, Jean Simonet, Jonah Lobe, and Mark Teare, it quickly became apparent that the culprit was not part of the game’s script at all, but part of the navmesh system, “an invisible 3D sheet of polygons that is laid over the world, telling AI where it can and cannot go”. Once spooked, the foxes were supposed to flee along a generated path, using the navmesh for guidance. But for some reason, the fox would automatically flee towards the area with the largest number of triangles on the navmesh.
The answer to this strange behaviour was eventually discovered: it was happening because the fox fleeing would travel 100 triangles away, as opposed to using real-world measurements, such as 100 metres away.
"You know where it's easy to find 100 triangles? The camps/ruins/etc that we littered the world with, and filled with treasure to reward your exploration," said Burgess.
Areas of interest like camps and treasure caches contained large numbers of triangles due to the increase in detail, and so in its hunt for a lot of triangles to travel over in order to flee, the foxs' AI routine pretty much always took them to a camp or something similar. In Burgess’s words: “foxes aren't leading you to treasure - but the way they behave is leading them to areas that tend to HAVE treasure, because POIs w/loot have other attributes (lots of small navmesh triangles) that the foxes ARE pursuing”.
So there you have it: another story of how tricky and unpredictable game development can be. And another example of how, ten years after launch, games can still throw up surprises, quirks, and interesting tales here and there.
For more from Skyrim, check out the news of it receiving an FPS boost on Xbox Series X, our favourite console-friendly Skyrim mods, and the copy of Skyrim that sold for $600.
Liam Wiseman is a Freelance News writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @liamthewiseman.
Continue reading...