There’s been a longstanding rumour amongst Skyrim players that if you follow a fox ingame, it’ll lead you to treasure. Now a former level designer (and current studio director at Capy Games) has taken to Twitter to explain why.
Joel Burgess quickly explains that foxes leading players to treasure was never a deliberate part of Skyrim.
“Emergent Gameplay is often used to describe designed randomness, but this is a case of actual gameplay that NOBODY designed emerging from the bubbling cauldron of overlapping systems.”
It turns out that Skyrim uses something called “navmesh” for AI navigation, which is basically a series of adjoining triangles laid over the world, telling AI where it can and cannot go.
Skyrim uses something called ‘navmesh’ for AI navigation.
For non-dev folks, this is an invisible 3D sheet of polygons that is laid over the world, telling AI where it can and cannot go.
This red stuff is navmesh. You can read about it here: https://t.co/3vutoKhEHk pic.twitter.com/W37PHbxeDi
— Joel Burgess (@JoelBurgess) August 18, 2021
A bulk of Skyrim is made up of big, empty spaces and in those areas, developers didn’t need to create a very complicated “navmesh”. Or as Burgess puts it, “wilderness = small number of big triangles.”
However places like camps, with plenty of NPCs, need a more complicated “navmesh”. “Points of Interest = big number of small triangles.”
Now, foxes are programmed to flee anytime a player gets close, with the game’s AI believing it has reached safety once it is 100 triangles 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.”
You see where this is going?
The Fox isn’t trying to get 100 meters away – it’s trying to get 100 *triangles* 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. pic.twitter.com/6dETjBSLi0
— Joel Burgess (@JoelBurgess) August 18, 2021
“So foxes aren’t leading you to treasure,” continues Burgess. “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.”
The whole thread was inspired by the recent story about Skyrim’s developer Nate Purkeypile and the iconic introduction to the game which was derailed by a bee glitch.
In other news, Ryan Reynolds has revealed that while he played games like Fortnite as research for his new movie Free Guy, he had to limit himself from getting too immersed through a fear of having too much fun and forgetting to take his kids to school.
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