The worst trick is launching a game with No Micro Transactions at launch but then adds them weeks to months later with a vengeance.

11:31 Dude a big thank you for the shout out here ❤

I'm a dev and that's all pretty much accurate, yeah. Also, multiplayer games are a NIGHTMARE. There's so much you need to do for it to actually feel like you are playing with people in real time. Like, most of what you see isn't what the other player is doing right now. The game is just predicting the path the other player will follow until it receives the information that the other player is changing direction. That's why when there is some significant lag, other players keep teleporting - it's just the game falling hard to predict where the other player is going to go due to network delays, and then readjusting their trajectory. Same thing for shooting and hitting other players. The shots don't hit in real time actually, they hit the prediction of where the game thinks the other player will be. If the other player actually moves and the prediction fails, again due to lag, it seems for you that you hit, but the opponent leaves unscathed because you didn't actually hit them. There some actually pretty complicated engineering into making online games, especially shooters, feel good and fair.

Most famous one is when they fool you by saying "in game footage"😅

I can offer some insight into number 6. In most game engines (all?), the physics, lighting, etc can get pretty wonky the further you stray from the center world point of (0,0,0) for your xyz position. This is due to something called floating point precision. The cause of this is say that your x position is saved as an 8 digit number and it currently is 10.856911. All the physics, lighting/shadows, and position of objects around you are calculated with 6 decimal points of precision. Now lets say you fly your space shipment ten kilometers to the right. Your new x position 10,010.856. Because you moved and your position is now into the ten of thousands, the decimal point precision has lost 3 points. Here increases the chance of seeing issues like shadows flickering, z fighting etc. Now to RESOLVE, many developers will move the whole world around you (aren't you special ;) ) at the inverse of your movement so that the player is always at (0,0,0). It's a common trick. No Mans Sky does this, Outer Wilds does this, I've done this. It's possible that Bethesda only calls this function when you're in your ship and doesn't really worry about it when you walk around (or it does it after the player has walked a certain amount.) EDIT: well DAMN... I paused and now see you already touched on this for number 5 lmao. Anyways number 5 and 6 are basically the same problem and same solution.

How space in video games works: take ship. Add box of "stars" around ship. Make planets that move in and out of the box as you move your ship towards them. Everything is about your ship. Your ship makes the universe exist. How multiplayer works: you aren't actually seeing the other player. You're seeing a bot that is getting the inputs from another player's controller. You're alone. You're just controlling bots in each other's games that are labelled "players" and running the controls you input in real time.

My favorite illusion is Falcon sayong "Number 2" for the #1 spot.

Saying "two" instead of "one" when describing 2-D games that are actually 3-D... genius.

One of my favorite tricks they use is disguising loading screens as some sort of gameplay. For example, when you have to slowly squeeze through a narrow gap between two rocks, that's the game loading the next area you're entering into. It's a clever way to not interrupt the games immersion with a classic loading screen.

Space is like a paint drawing of a landscape. You have your levels of perspective. For instance, on the scene you're showing on starfield you have three levels of depth. Near objects like the asteroid field is drawn in 3D, since you can reach them with your ship, then you have the closer planets, those normally are part of the skybox, since you're not supposed to come near them without a cutscene, and finally you have your far away stars, those are basically 2D dots on the screen that you rotate with your character, because they are representing a unreasonable distance, which no matter how much you fly to that distance in "normal" means the size of the object is pretty much the same. Thats why the term is called "skybox" actually, on the older days it was literally a box around the level with a texture that rotates appropriate and show objects that should not be reachable by the player using perspective tricks.

One of the crazy ones I learned recently was that ins Dragon Age Inquisition the "sprint" button when riding a horse doesn't actually make it go faster. It's goes the exact same speed when sprinting or not, all they did was add animations to make it look like it was going faster.

The fact that the creation engine is still a thing is enough for a whole video in itself

Most of these are not really that surprising, but what did catch me off guard was that bit about online multiplayer.

This was the best Gameranx list video in a long time, give us more technical stuff like this, it was great

8 million subs = Falcon face reveal!

Racing games like Mario Kart have what's called a "rubber banding" effect, where if one player falls too far behind, they get a hidden boost of speed, while the lead player gets slowed down a little, in order to keep the race tight and exciting.

11:57 You mean "number 1",Falcon my friend.😁

Location based dolls has been multiplayer for ages. Same thing with old reflections that duplicated assets in a different parallel space. These logic and logistics based deep dives are great.

As a Dev, I'm surprised at how accurate all of this is. This is great research!

So what you're saying gameranx is that we ARE the center of the universe!! Thank you for confirming my confirmation bias!!!

I always tell people the same thing when they are confused about where to go in a level: "Go to the light Carol Anne. Go to the light."

8:22 "When you jump in Outer Wilds you're not actually moving, the planet goes down under you" so Outer Wilds is basically a Chuck Norris simulator?

The lack of Goomba's and ? Boxes, is truly the only thing missing from Elden Ring

Chuck Norris doesn't jump, he pushes the planet away.

Man videos like these make me wish I had pursued a career in game development at an earlier point in my life. I bet it’s super interesting to work on all these types of things.

The Tim Curry C&C space easter egg is glorious

The many games playing at the same time, one for each separate player, explains something that I have always wondered about. In City of Heroes there is a power that makes a random object appear out of nowhere and be thrown at an enemy. Sometimes it is a safe or a piano or a filing cabinet or whatever. Anyways if you are on a team and someone used that power, to each different player the object would be a different object, now I know why.

That multiplayer bit was very fascinating 🤔 I never even considered something like that but that’s really cool

This engine moves space around you - professor Farnsworth

What is Falcon's favorite beverage? . . . Falcon Punch.

That Space one, isn't that how it works in Futurama where thr Ship doesn't move but everything else moves around it? Or was thst Rick and Morty? 😂

Thank you for being AWESOME GameRanx

A good example for the online multiplayer part is how different ragdolls are. Ever had one of those moments when you see a funny ragdoll and you wanna show it to your friend but its different on his screen?

With the recent controversy with games “journalism” attacking gamers yet again, we really need to elevate channels that not only cover the basics, avoid politics, and most importantly don’t attack us. There are certainly issues from individuals acting in horrible ways, holding anyone who’s male and picks up a controller isn’t the way to hold individuals responsible though. I’m sure the team sometimes wants to weigh in on things, but you’re taking the right approach by just delivering great content that people want to watch with consistency. Don’t let the “silence is violence” minority apply pressure to your formula. You’re going to hit 10 million easy just doing what you’re passionate about.

Introducing new enemies is really common in games. They sometimes introduce them as bosses and then they become common enemies later on

The time I actually looked into how online multiplayer works was how I discovered what rubber-banding is. Basically, if your internet is slow, there's a lot more guesswork going on, and at some point, the game goes off-script. When your game can connect to the main server, it gets new information, which can result in you (or other players) getting tossed around. It's like playing a board game and discovering you forgot to trigger an effect three turns ago, then quickly trying to patch up what should have happened before you continue playing.

My favorite scaling trick has been the docks and Normandy in Mass Effect for way too long now.

The hammers and axes in AC Valhalla grow significantly when you swing them vs them resting, once I noticed I couldn't unsee it, and it just bugged the crap out of me

Re #2, those also make for some of the funniest bugs when it isn't pulled off correctly. Like, in Marvel's Avengers Academy mobile game (now shuttered), Dracula could turn into a swarm of bats. On-brand so far. But in a mistake both creepy and hilarious, the devs messed up the camera follow. If you were tracking Dracula when he transformed, instead of switching to follow the bats, the camera would dip below the ground surface and continue tracking the sprites for Dracula's body parts. THOSE sprites had been disassembled (head, torso, legs) and piled up "underground" directly below the bats, where they'd slide around until they were needed again.

9:11 as a game dev the easiest way to describe it is this: You see a representation of the other players and a collection of their interactions on the world around you is kept track by the server itself. It's not a real time 1:1 combination of your games, but rather a remote interaction between them. Additionally it'd be insane to have all of the different possible data shared between all of the players cause, well, firstly there's a security issue with that because you would have to allow other players active knowledge of every detail of where you are and what you are doing which would be a nightmare for situations like cheaters, but also that'd be way too much unnecessary data being sent between your computers when realistically you just need the state of the other players and what in the world is being effected, which is all handled by the server host. Netcode may vary, ofc. Like, couch coop games likeee, say, Baldur's Gate 3? BG3's couch coop is basically the truest multiplayer you can have, sorta deal.

That fact that falcon said no.2 instead of no.1 is just pure sophistry😂😂

One of the greatest scale changing weapons I think is when you pick up the reikling shield in Morrowind and drop them, the shield grows like 3x as big

If only life worked like the movement technique in The Outer Wilds. I wish the universe revolved around me. LOL.

I really appreciate Falcon, Jake and the Gameranx team. This is the next best thing to relaxing in a den or room with a new gaming magazine!

The Mario trick with the shrunken head/arms works because it requires 0 lines of code and no changes to the mario model. The animation just scales a couple of bones in the Mario rig and the parts of the body attached will scale down and fit inside the box without clipping.

That multiplayer tidbit just completely blew my mind

Just a wee note, the Creation Engine isn't from 1999, it was first used on Skyrim, before that they used the Gamebryo Engine. A lot of the code from Gamebryo survived the transfer, but it was a enough of a change to rename it as a brand new engine.

Falcon his name is AFTERMATH like the record label 😂 then the letters (XCVII) are the numbers (97) hence the A97 😂

Love the Tim Curry face when mentioning space

Falcon either flying high or has been sipping too much. Slurring his words and not knowing how to count. Holy moly! 😂

All art, digital or physical are an illusion to the eye. Shaders do amazing trickeries to the eye, it can make an object on a paper look like it’s popping out.

this is, by far, my favorite channel on KZfaq. And it's honestly not close.

That shadow banning cheaters thing is brilliant.

7:18 When I was young, when driving a car with my parents I always imagined that the whole planet is rotating in opposite direction than we go and we are actually stationary :D

*edit, posted this before i heard them say the exact thing in this video 😂 One of my favourite 'illusions' is fallout 3 where a train is actually an NPC with a hat on, it's fucking wild that that's the workaround.... But it works 😂

Shoutout to boundary break!

3:40 In most FPS games, a weapon on the ground and a weapon you are holding are technically 2 different things. A ground weapon is an entity in the game world with its own coordinates, models and some times physics. It can interact with other objects in the game world. By contrast, a weapon you are welding is off in its own world, sometimes called a viewmodel. You import the lighting from the game world onto the weapon to give the illusion that it is inside the game. When you pick up a weapon, the object on the ground is destroyed and a first person swap to weapon animation is triggered. Likewise, when you drop a weapon, your viewmodel is destroyed and an entity is spawned in front of you.

Thanks Gameranx!

I love the little tricks that devs use to make games come to life. Valve including developer commentary in their games, provides you a lot of interesting information. Like in Portal, how they realized that people seem to refuse to look up unless prompted to, but instead of using big bright arrows or objective markers, they use the environment to guide players' eyes upwards.

Halo definitely did a good job with this

As a Programmer, I can confirm a lot of things are a trick when it comes to computer but I love seeing just how creative these developers get 😂

Another day another gameranx video, thanks guys 😊

Your last point is very useful in 2D game dev! being able to separate things on that 3rd dimention allows for a lot of computation to be saved. For example you have a "layer" for the player and a "layer" for the world like the ground and walls. Then for collisions with these you only have to chack these two layers and not the whole gamespace! It was quite cool to see something like this, which a novice like me uses daily, show up in your video.

Always a good day when you start with a falcon top 10 😌

*clicks on video *hears falcon's voice Me happy!❤

This is a good video. You should do more of these sort of behind the scenes type videos.

1 trick: MICROTRANSACTIONS ☠️

I love this kind of stuff, part 2 please!!!

7:18 so THATS why alot of Japanese games the character is sliding when moving and not making contact with the ground and using inertia to move, this always bugged me in games

A trick I'm quite fond of is your health bar. When it appears your almost out of health, you actually still have a decent amount. Making you able to "barely make it", not realizing the game is straighup lying to you.

Did you ever think your channel would be one of the largest gaming channels?

'Instructive Level Design' - describes it as 'benign.' Proceeds to describe *the* fundamental way of not making your game unapproachable for new players.

5:52 Star Citizen begins smashing down your doors "WHAT DID YOU SAY!!"

Tiny head Mario is absolutely hilarious.

The initial scene of Bioshock, just after you get the first plasmid, was a master-class in this. Everything is falling apart, but not until you move past the place it's about to block. Play it again up to there, and just take a very leisurely stroll thru the area from where you get the plasmid to where you get the pistol and you'll see what I mean.

Thanks for letting me know a puppet is better than me in multiplayer... soul crushing.

A very positive spin on this. Very glad to see you've stepped back from describing the illusions as "lies". Very fun and informative!

You forgot to mention the part where they literally only render the stuff that's actually on the screen to save on resources. It's kind of entertaining when a game is doing so much stuff it starts to lag slightly then you spin around and for a brief second the area is blank until the engine catches up and renders everything. It's also why things like clipping errors commonly used for speed running can happen, in that extremely brief moment between it isn't there and then it is there you can sometimes sneak into a place you shouldn't be, then when the object (a wall, usually) finally renders it has to shove you out of the way and can sometimes shove you the wrong direction so you're out of bounds. Zelda speedruns are especially famous for this trick.

6:57 "The engines don't move the ship. The ship is stationary, the engines move the universe around it." - Cubert J. Farnsworth, Futurama, A Clone of My Own

The netcode point becomes a huge deal in combat flight sims like DCS where you're dealing with incredibly fast moving objects trying to intercept other incredibly fast objects from tens of miles away. Even relatively small differences in apparent position can result in a missile missing by hundreds of feet from the server's perspective but look like an incredibly near miss, close enough for the proximity fuse to have gone off, from a player's perspective.

I love gameranx. Been watching them since middle school and I’m 20 years old now. I’ll never stop watching their content no matter what they’re making but this video confused the hell out of me I support them no matter what but I just really wish they would come up with some more fresh topics that really seems like they’re running out of ideas again I love all the hard work they put into their videos, but it’s looking like the rivers running dry EDIT: Jake falcon if y’all read this again, I’m not trying to knock y’all’s craft. I just wanna see y’all thrive still a very loyal supporter💚💚

Some of the tricks game developers use are pretty creative

The physics explanation reminds me of trying to wrap my brain around the fact that we have a gravitational pull on the earth the same as it does us.

Nice video, but being flashbanged in every number was something else

For number 6 I think No Man's Sky would be a better pick than Starfield.

10:00 so that's why I get shot during "lag" when I already left the enemy line of sight? Because the puppet wasn't fast as me LMFAO

Shovel Knight absolutely did use its 3D aspect... it was a 3DS game. Although since most people played their 3DS in 2D mode all the time, they wouldn't have noticed, but if you cranked up the 3D slider it actually used that to great effect.

Unity isn't primarily a 3d engine. Actually, it's considered one of the best 2D engines out there.

One of my favourites is faking high speeds. I think it's mostly used on open world games in which the map itself isn't that big, like GTA San Andreas. The cars are actually moving quite slow, but they added fog, motion blur and "speed lines" (like if it's wind) to fake it all.

The multiplayer thing makes sense , ive definitely felt the packet loss thing on the receiving end . When you shoot at someone and they don't die , and it looks like they shot you once, but then you get a full magazine mailed to you in half a second. " On my screen you died first "

Falcon was feelin goofy on this one huh lol

I really like the shadow ban idea. Instead of banning them, let them keep playing however they want but not have any ranking.

These tricks are really cool didn’t know about these

This video really embraces "Tell, Don't Show"

Someone's gonna mod that question mark and goomba in now 😂

6:57 That's how it works in Futurama too.

The 3D construction of the Shovel Knight is heavily utilized in the 3DS version with the stereoscopic 3D. I know it can be done using only a sprite based engine, like Wario Land on the Virtual Boy, but I'm pretty sure this way made the Yacht Club job's way easier to adjust it for the 3DS

Nice meta-trick at the end there, dude.

Player runs 500 feet. You traveled for MILES and DAYS Player spends 30 minutes in the basement fighting beasts. The entire night has passed. It's now morning outside.

3:42 think Falcon got too focused on the name. Pretty sure it's simply Aftermath XCVII (97)