[yallpendantools]

You know there are software which are so marvelously monumental, they inspire me to improve in my craft. Among them in no particular order

- The Witcher 3 (honorable mention, for all its jank, Skyrim) - Sublime Text and vim - Krita and Procreate - Early Google Chrome - Redis and Postgres

Seeing "steve-yegge.medium.com" on the HN frontpage averts me by reflex. Like, I'm suddenly inspired to learn more about agriculture. Or contracting, I heard that could be lucrative. Heck, I'd even go full hipster and open a bookshop in this economy.

Steve, you probably don't give a shit about my opinion but I just want to know from which Jamaican zip codes do you source your supply.

[dyauspitr]

What jank does Skyrim have. The whole thing is like 6 GB.

[lexicality]

You're thinking of bloat, jank is things like putting a cauldron on your head and the physics engine firing you into the stratosphere.

[vunderba]

The bucket on an NPC's head while you rob them blind is my favorite example of a shining success of the line-of-sight system while simultaneously being a spectacular failure of basic AI.

[rzzzt]

Jank is the third derivative of bloat.

[DonHopkins]

And wank is the derivative of jank. GTA had Hot Coffee. The Sims almost had Hot Potty!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30359560

The other nasty bug involving pixelization that we did manage to fix before shipping, but that I unfortunately didn't save any video of, involved the maid NPC, who was originally programmed by a really brilliant summer intern, but had a few quirks:

A Sim would need to go potty, and walk into the bathroom, pixelate their body, and sit down on the toilet, then proceed to have a nice leisurely bowel movement in their trousers. In the process, the toilet would suddenly become dirty and clogged, which attracted the maid into the bathroom (this was before "privacy" was implemented).

She would then stroll over to toilet, whip out a plunger from "hammerspace" [1], and thrust it into the toilet between the pooping Sim's legs, and proceed to move it up and down vigorously by its wooden handle. The "Unnecessary Censorship" [2] strongly implied that the maid was performing a manual act of digital sex work. That little bug required quite a lot of SimAntics [3] programming to fix!

[i_think_so]

Duuuude. That is *deep*!

[bravetraveler]

It's foolish to even start listing, but here's one: physics bound to FPS

[vunderba]

Speaking of physics, the giant striking you with a hammer and launching your body into orbit.

And of course, can’t forget the classic Skyrim pathfinding jank. The number of enemies that would go aggro only to get stuck on a bush or a slight change in elevation while you stand there at a distance peppering their face with arrows until they die.

[KK7NIL]

Are the quake, goldsource, source, etc engines jank? Because they all did this, to some extent.

It might be harder to find an engine from the early 2010's that didn't tie at least some physics to FPS.

[wasabi991011]

Your examples are from 10 or more years earlier that Skyrim's creation engine.

That is to say, the older engines could have been limited by hardware requirements, or maybe decoupling physics from fps is an innovation that appeared between 2004 and 2011. Or maybe they are also jank.

Notably, the source 2 engine (2015) decoupled physics from fps (as I understand).

[KK7NIL]

I'd say Skyrim was just around the border where you started to get engines which uncoupled physics from FPS.

This only really matters for competitive games though, so it's not surprising it wasn't prioritized.

[bravetraveler]

> to some extent

You answer your own question! Not remotely to the same extent. Quake, for instance, gave a small advantage for jump height [with high FPS]. Skyrim would outright break.

Also, you've listed three generations of the same family; goldsrc, the child of Quake, predates Skyrim/Creation by at least a decade. Of those, Source would be the timely match. Not even close to the same amount of jank. Just... no. You aren't tricking me into writing lists.

I don't really intend to be critical of Skyrim, like many: I love the jank. It's expected. It's a Bethesda game.