Video games are incredible. They transport us to new worlds, allow us to partake in otherwise impossible situations, and empower us in our every day lives. Games can make us feel like a part of something bigger than ourselves, permitting us to connect with total strangers in a way never before seen in human history.

视频 游戏是不可思议的。 它们将我们带到了新世界，使我们能够参与原本不可能的情况，并赋予我们日常生活的力量。 游戏可以使我们觉得自己比自己更重要，可以让我们以人类历史上从未有过的方式与陌生人建立联系。

Whether we’re wrangling horses and robbing banks in Red Dead Redemption 2 or scoring a clinch goal in Rocket League, experiencing video games is a special and wholly modern adventure. It’s easy to forget, but every encounter we have in our virtual worlds is made up of code. Every bank we rob is made of numbers, every goal scored dictated by a set of rules. These regulations are set in place by people, and — naturally — things aren’t exactly as they seem. Making a game is incredibly difficult, with a AAA title taking an average of 5 years to develop. Due to this, sometimes thinking outside of the box is necessary in order to get the product out the door and give people the brain-food they desire. Some of these tricks are extremely technical, exploiting screen clears to get rid of bugs or utilizing oversized End User License Agreements (really) to launch games correctly. Other tricks, however, sit right under a player’s nose, without them realizing they’ve been fooled at all. While the initial reaction may be that of animosity — who likes to be deceived? — in reality the artifices at play are ingenious and a testament to humankind’s unique ability to adapt and evolve past a problem with insightful and distinctive prowess.

无论我们是在Red Dead Redemption 2中争吵，抢劫银行，还是在Rocket League中取得进球，体验视频游戏都是一种特殊而又完全现代的冒险。 容易忘记，但是我们在虚拟世界中遇到的每一次相遇都是由代码组成的。 我们抢劫的每一家银行都是由数字组成，每个进球目标都是由一套规则决定的。 这些规定是由人们制定的，并且-自然-事情并不完全像它们看起来的那样。 制作游戏非常困难，AAA冠军平均需要5年的开发时间。 因此，有时需要跳出框框进行思考，以便将产品拿出门，并为人们提供他们想要的大脑食物。 其中一些技巧是非常技术性的，利用屏幕清除功能来消除错误或利用超大的最终用户许可协议( 确实 )来正确启动游戏。 但是，其他技巧就摆在玩家的鼻子下面，而他们却没有意识到自己已经被愚弄了。 最初的React可能是敌意，谁愿意被欺骗？ —实际上，发挥作用的技巧是独创性的，并且证明了人类具有洞察力和独特能力的适应和发展问题的独特能力。

牙齿的皮肤 (Skin of the teeth)

We’ve all been there — caught out in the open while enemies rain hellfire down around us with a flurry of lead and grenades, watching our health bar slowly chunk away as our character is pelted with an impossible amount of bullets and debris. Every pained grunt of our character reminds us that we’re one step closer to death and being launched back to the checkpoint. As we rush to find cover, we see our health bar at its lowest, meaning that one more hit would send us to the grave. Thankfully, we barely make it out alive, behind cover, able to heal our character and collect ourselves as we plan for a counter attack, our heart thumping in our chest. That exhilarating feeling of barely making it through an attack is no accident, however. Many of the biggest titles in the industry such as Doom, Assassin’s Creed, and Bioshock all utilize this mechanic to make those encounters feel that much more tense. Developers will intentionally extend the last few drops of health your character has to allow you to feel as though you made it by the skin of your teeth. In reality, if hit point percentages always stayed consistent, it’s very likely you would have died minutes earlier and would have had to redo the confrontation.

我们都去过那里-陷入空旷之中，而敌人则用一连串的铅和手榴弹向周围洒下地狱火，看着我们的健康吧慢慢块状消失，因为我们的角色被大量子弹和碎片击碎。 对角色的每一次痛苦的抱怨都使我们想起，我们离死亡更近了一步，并被送回了检查站。 当我们急于寻找掩护时，我们看到我们的健康条处于最低点，这意味着再遭受一击将把我们送到坟墓。 值得庆幸的是，当我们计划反击时，我们几乎无法活下来，在被掩盖的情况下能够治愈自己的性格并自我救赎，我们的心脏在胸口th动。 然而，那种勉强通过攻击来使人振奋的感觉并非偶然。 业内许多最大的头衔，例如 《毁灭战士》，《刺客信条 》和《 生化奇兵》都利用这种机制使这些遭遇更加紧张。 开发人员将有意延长您角色的最后几滴健康状况，使您感觉仿佛是由牙齿的皮肤造成的。 实际上，如果命中率百分比始终保持一致，则很可能您会在几分钟前死亡，并且不得不重做对抗。

隐形指导 (Invisible guidance)

This isn’t the only developer deception at play when you’re participating in a hostile encounter. Naughty Dog’s adventure epic Uncharted — known for its waist-high wall cover shooting sections — utilizes enemy A.I. to make a player feel like they’re in one of the adventure movies the game is trying to emulate. When a player leaves cover, the enemy accuracy shifts to 0% for 3.5 seconds (around two rounds,) giving the player a few precious moments to fire their shot without tearing away the illusion of being fired at. This also allows the developers to curtail the enemies to their specifications. The lighter class soldiers will have a slower firing rate as well as have an extended period of 0% accuracy as compared to medium and heavy soldiers, giving them an air of being more difficult with something as simple as a few behind the scenes number tweaks. The way Nathan Drake moves throughout the world during those firefights in Uncharted isn’t even left completely to player agency. Uncharted, as well as many other third person games like Red Dead Redemption 2, employ what’s known as “thumbstick correction” in order to create smooth animations. Thumbstick correction is responsible for maneuvering players around objects they’re about to collide with, as well as stop players from running off of ledges and plummeting to their deaths. It’s often heavily employed when a character has to push their way through large crowds, especially during interactive cinematics. The way the character sidesteps the NPCs (non-playable characters) in frame — without the player’s input to do so — is thumbstick correction at work. While it may not create the same tense feelings the health mechanic will, it subtly guides players through worlds without fully stripping agency from them and is imperative in making the playable character and their allies feel real.

当您参加敌对的遭遇时，这并不是唯一的开发者骗局。 调皮狗的冒险史诗《 神秘海域》(Uncharted)以其高腰围墙射击部分而著称，它利用敌方AI使玩家感到自己就像在游戏试图模仿的一部冒险电影中。 当玩家离开掩体时，敌人的准确性会在3.5秒内(大约两回合)转移到0％，这为玩家提供了一些宝贵的时间来射击，而不会破坏被射击的幻想。 这也使开发人员可以减少敌人的规格。 与中型和重型士兵相比，轻型士兵的射击速度较慢，并且精度提高了0％，这使他们感到更加困难，因为一些幕后数字调整很简单。 内森·德雷克(Nathan Drake)在《 神秘海域》(Uncharted )的那些战斗中在全球范围内移动的方式甚至还没有完全留给玩家代理。 《神秘海域 》以及许多其他第三人称游戏(如《荒野大镖客：救赎2》 )都采用所谓的“ 指尖校正 ”来创建流畅的动画。 指尖校正负责操纵玩家要撞到的物体，并阻止玩家逃离壁架并坠落至死亡。 当角色必须穿过大量人群时，尤其是在交互式电影中，它通常被大量使用。 在没有玩家输入的情况下，角色回避帧中NPC(不可玩角色)的方式是在工作中进行指尖校正。 尽管它可能不会产生健康机械师会产生的那种紧张感，但它巧妙地引导玩家穿越世界，而又没有完全剥夺他们的吸引力，并且必须使可玩角色和他们的盟友感到真实。

思维世界 (Thinking worlds)

Playable characters interacting with NPCs and enemy A.I. aren’t the only time these tricks are applied however. Sometimes the world building itself is left to contrivance. Bethesda’s legendary Skyrim employed what’s known as “Radiant Questing” to organically flesh out their incredible landscape. Radiant Questing refers to the “Radiant System” present in Bethesda’s game engine, which recognizes a player’s individual skills and progress. The system then rolls out quests appropriate to the player’s actions. Radiant Questing is a two-fold trick. One; it’s able to mold quests to the player character and their play style without them ever realizing the game is changing, and two; it assigns quests based on areas the player hasn’t been to yet. When the player is set to find an ancient sword, the game will (more than likely) direct the player to a cave or stronghold they hadn’t previously discovered. By forcing the player into unknown areas, Bethesda both extends playtime as well as guarantees that the player will see every inch of their envisioned environment.

与NPC和敌方AI互动的可玩角色并不是这些技巧的唯一应用。 有时，世界建筑本身也要保持创新。 贝塞斯达(Bethesda) 富有传奇色彩的天际(Skyrim)采用了所谓的“辐射搜寻”(Radiant Questing) ，有机地充实了他们令人难以置信的风景。 “辐射任务”指的是贝塞斯达游戏引擎中的“辐射系统”，它可以识别玩家的个人技能和进步。 然后，系统推出适合玩家行为的任务。 辐射任务有两个窍门。 之一; 它能够根据玩家的角色和他们的游戏风格塑造任务，而无需他们意识到游戏的变化，并且有两个； 它根据玩家尚未去过的区域分配任务。 当玩家准备寻找一把古老的剑时，游戏将(很有可能)将玩家引导到他们之前未发现的洞穴或要塞。 通过迫使玩家进入未知区域，贝塞斯达既可以延长游戏时间，又可以确保玩家看到自己所设想的环境的每一英寸。

你看不到的东西不存在 (What you don’t see doesn’t exist)

Envisioning an environment is a monumental task in and of itself. Game worlds have become colossal landscapes, full continents filled to the brim with content to explore and discover. Gone are the polygonal, gray, sparsely populated cities in games like Grand Theft Auto III, replaced by the luscious mainlands of the likes of The Witcher 3 and Horizon Zero Dawn. Rendering these massive terrains can be a logistical nightmare; Horizon Zero Dawn’s map is somewhere to the tune of 4 miles wide, while The Witcher 3’s map is an unbelievable 86 square miles (136 square KMs). Displaying something that huge presents some obvious problems due to software limitations, and the way developers work around this is pretty incredible. Games such as Horizon Zero Dawn use all kinds of interesting workarounds to run as glamorously as it does. For example, as the player pans the camera in Horizon Zero Dawn, the game derezzes the terrain previously viewable and only renders what’s viewable in the camera field. This drastically negates the load on the system’s RAM and allows those beautiful vistas to be viewed with little to no chugging or frame drops. It does so nearly instantaneously, so the player has no idea the ground they were on just a minute ago no longer exists. Horizon — along with most open world games — also employs countless texture trickeries to conserve memory. If the player were to zoom in indefinitely in Horizon, they would find the beautifully textured 3D assets of the numerous trees littering the landscape would change from a hyper realistic vision of a tall tree swaying in the wind to an ugly, flat, 2D texture. This process can be called “LOD’ing”, or “Level of Detail”. It’s an incredibly complex process, as there’s a very thin line between “optimizing performance by utilizing distance” and “that bush is jarring and distracting.” Most games utilize LOD’ing in some fashion, but open world games take it to the most extreme. Without LOD’ing, games would chug to a grinding halt as most gaming consoles aren’t powerful enough to fully render miles of 3D assets and terrain. Still, the player will be mostly oblivious to the quality of this rendering.

构想环境本身就是一项艰巨的任务。 游戏世界已经变成了巨大的景观，充满了探索和发现的内容的大洲遍布了整个世界。 在《 侠盗猎车手3》 ( Grand Theft Auto III)等游戏中，多边形，灰色，人烟稀少的城市已经消失，取而代之的是《巫师3》和《 地平线零黎明 》等甜美的大陆。 渲染这些巨大的地形可能是后勤上的噩梦。 地平线零黎明(Horizo​​n Zero Dawn)的地图宽约4英里，而巫师3(The Witcher 3)的地图令人难以置信的是86平方英里(136平方公里) 。 由于软件的局限性，显示巨大的内容会带来一些明显的问题，开发人员解决此问题的方式令人难以置信。 诸如《 HORIZON Zero Dawn》之类的游戏使用各种有趣的变通办法来像它一样迷人地运行。 例如，当玩家在水平零黎明时摇摄相机时，游戏会撤消先前可见的地形，只渲染在相机字段中可见的地形。 这极大地消除了系统RAM上的负载，并使观看这些美丽的远景时几乎不会出现颤动或掉落帧的情况。 它几乎是瞬间完成的，所以玩家不知道他们在一分钟前的地面已经不存在了。 Horizo​​n (与大多数开放世界游戏一起)也采用了无数的纹理技巧来节省内存。 如果玩家无限期地在Horizo​​n中放大，他们会发现乱抛垃圾的无数树木的精美纹理3D资产将从风中摇曳的高大树木的超现实感变为丑陋，平坦的2D纹理。 此过程可以称为“ LOD'ing”或“详细程度”。 这是一个非常复杂的过程，因为“通过利用距离来优化性能”与“灌木丛正在震撼和分散注意力”之间的界限很窄。 大多数游戏都以某种方式利用LOD'ing，但开放世界游戏将其发挥到了极致。 如果没有LOD，大多数游戏机的功能将不足以完全渲染3D资产和地形的里程，因此游戏将停滞不前。 尽管如此，玩家仍然会忽略该渲染的质量。

不可能跳 (Impossible jumping)

The unconscious nature of these developer tricks are key to their execution. If the player is able to easily see through the facade, it becomes that much more difficult to keep them invested. Part of the draw of video games are their ability to make it feel like you’re doing the impossible, exploring unimaginable places and completing unfeasible actions. These actions, however, are often not entirely our own. Platformers enable us to make incredible leaps, use problem solving to navigate environments, and utilize level design to progress within the game. It feels incredible when a jump is performed precisely, the player character landing exactly where needed, especially when a game has incredible controls like Castlevania or Super Meat Boy. Unsurprisingly, developers have multiple ploys to delude players into thinking they’re just that good at platformers. One of these ploys is “Coyote Time.” Coyote time, named after Wile E. Coyote as he stays suspended in the air for a few seconds before falling, is exactly that. Most platformers employ coyote time to curb the difficulty of jumps. If the player is a few frames too late as their character approaches the edge of a ledge, coyote time allows for them to hover for a frame or two before falling, giving the player the ability to make the jump in time. To the player, it feels as though they timed the jump perfectly, but in all actuality they were a split second too late. Another popular way to cheese jump mechanics is what’s known as “jump buffering” or “input buffering.” Basically, jump buffering gives the player a small buffer (a few frames) to hit a button early, but still complete the jump as intended. If a player is falling and knows they have to leap off the ground as soon as they land, some platformers allow for a split second of early input to still complete the instruction. It makes the player feel like their timing is impeccable, as well as create a satisfying mechanic, despite the fact that they jumped the gun early on their second leap.

这些开发人员技巧的潜意识本质是其执行的关键。 如果玩家能够轻松地透视立面，那么使他们保持投入变得更加困难。 电子游戏的吸引力之一就是它们具有使您感觉自己正在做不可能的事情，探索难以想象的地方并完成不可行的动作的能力。 但是，这些动作通常不完全是我们自己的。 平台开发人员使我们能够取得令人难以置信的飞跃，使用问题解决方案来导航环境，并利用关卡设计在游戏中发展。 当精确地执行跳跃动作时，玩家角色正好落在需要的地方，这尤其令人难以置信，尤其是当游戏具有令人难以置信的控制(例如恶魔城或Super Meat Boy)时。 毫不奇怪，开发人员有多种欺骗手段，欺骗玩家以为他们只是擅长平台游戏。 这些策略之一就是“ 土狼时间” 。 土狼的时间，以Wile E. Coyote的名字命名，因为他在悬空之前在空中悬浮了几秒钟，正是这样。 大多数平台游戏者会利用土狼时间来控制跳跃的难度。 如果玩家由于角色接近壁架边缘而迟了几帧，则土狼时间允许他们在摔倒前悬停一两帧，从而使玩家能够及时跳跃。 对于玩家而言，感觉好像是他们完美地安排了跳跃的时间，但是实际上，他们为时已晚。 奶酪跳跃机制的另一种流行方式是所谓的“跳跃缓冲”或“输入缓冲”。 基本上，跳转缓冲为播放器提供了一个较小的缓冲区(几帧)以尽早按下按钮，但仍可以按预期完成跳转。 如果玩家跌倒并且知道他们必须在着陆后立即跳下地面，一些平台游戏者会在稍早的时候输入一秒钟以完成指令。 尽管他们在第二次飞跃的早期就把枪拔了，但它使玩家感到自己的时机无懈可击，并创造出令人满意的技工。

现代魔术 (Modern magic)

Many of these tricks are pretty industry standard, and the list is seemingly endless. These are just a few examples of what developers do to make our games in the best way they can. Whether a player knows it or not, they’re experiencing the combined efforts of ingenuity and problem solving. Developing a game (or anything, for that matter) is akin to mathematicians thinking divergently to solve an equation. When people engage with a video game, they are activating code, and while the worlds may be unlike anything we have seen before, sometimes even more lifelike than life itself, at the end of the day they’re an amalgamation of math, coding, engineering, and human innovation. As long as developers are creating these wonderful worlds, they will find unconventional and unexpected solutions to the obstacles that present themselves. These ingenious solutions are responsible for making gaming feel like a unique, fair, and conquerable hobby. The pioneers who devise these answers are consistently creating a stronger, more stable foundation for the industry as a whole. Despite the fact that we are being gulled into the intended experience, those who create these resolutions are experts in their craft. The hope is that we revel in their expertise and allow ourselves to be whisked away to the worlds designed for us, purposefully ignorant of the smoke and mirrors at play, instead appreciating the fact that we may never know exactly how these programming magicians achieve their tricks. With any luck, we wont dig too deep, rather permitting ourselves to just sit back, relax, and believe in the magic.

这些技巧很多都是行业标准，看似无休止。 这些只是开发人员以最佳方式制作我们的游戏的一些示例。 无论玩家是否知道，他们都在经历着独创性和解决问题的共同努力。 开发游戏(或其他任何事情)类似于数学家为解决方程式而发散地思考。 当人们玩电子游戏时，他们正在激活代码，尽管世界可能与我们之前所见过的任何事物都不一样，有时甚至比生活本身更栩栩如生，但归根结底，他们融合了数学，编码，工程和人类创新。 只要开发人员创造了这些美好的世界，他们就会发现非常规且出人意料的解决方案，以解决自己遇到的障碍。 这些巧妙的解决方案使游戏感觉像是一种独特，公平且可战胜的爱好。 提出这些答案的先驱者不断为整个行业创造一个更强大，更稳定的基础。 尽管事实上我们正沉迷于预期的经验中，但创建这些决议的人都是他们的专家。 希望我们沉迷于他们的专业知识，并让自己被带到专为我们设计的世界中，故意无视比赛中的烟雾和镜子，而不是欣赏我们可能永远不确切地知道这些编程魔术师如何达到目的的事实。 。 运气好的话，我们不会挖得太深，而是让自己坐在那里放松，相信魔术。

Hello everyone! Thank you so much for reading. I have nothing but the upmost respect for the people who create the experiences I love so much, and I highly recommend looking deeper into the techniques used to hide the small cracks in gaming. The work they do is incredible! Thanks again!

大家好！ 非常感谢您的阅读。 我对创造如此热爱的游戏的人们表示敬意，我强烈建议您更深入地研究用于隐藏游戏中细微裂缝的技术。 他们所做的工作令人难以置信！ 再次感谢！

Jared McCarty

贾里德·麦卡蒂(Jared McCarty)