[sluggosaurus]

While I'm duly impressed by the achievement of hyper-realistic door physicals, the effort:payoff ratio seems completely wack. I think these game developers are overthinking it. Minecraft does doors right in comparably simple way, and I think few if any players have a problem with it; it's a more popular game than any game with fancy doors. The most realistic doors in the world won't make a bad game any better, while simplistic doors won't make a good game any worse.

[lazugod]

> Minecraft does doors right in comparably simple way, and I think few if any players have a problem with it

Ha. This is an amusing claim given that redstone, the whole complicated circuitry used in advanced Minecraft machines, was arguably added for the purpose of powering doors. Years of work have gone into all of the community-made piston doors of various sizes and features. And all interactive components like buttons and pressure plates have to have their signal duration balanced against how long it takes to walk through a door.

Even ignoring redstone, though, doors are complicated to design in the exact same ways. Which way do they swing open? Depends how you’re facing when you place them… unless the game detects double doors, and reverses the second one to match. And each door has to have a corresponding vertical trap door, which can either be flush with a floor or with a ceiling. Which way do trap doors open? Well, whichever way works best with the ladder below them. Oh, which means trap doors must also act like ladders. In fact, you can climb a wall of nothing but trap doors in the game.

What about water? Trap doors can be waterlogged, and that’s a common way to hide irrigation. But normal doors intentionally aren’t. Why? Because doors are the most common early-game tool for scuba diving - a placed door becomes a free pocket of air. Does it seem realistic? No, and maybe they could fix it, but then that would affect anyone who uses doors as entrances to underwater houses, as well as make scuba diving more difficult.

Players argue about the use of doors for diving; they argue about whether they should be able to shoot arrows through the windows in doors; they argue about whether every new tree should bring a new type of wood, and thus a new type of door.

Doors are hard, no matter how simple the game.

[sluggosaurus]

I'm utterly unconvinced. Point by point:

Redstone: The surprising complexity of a redstone torch does not confer complexity to a minecraft door, even though you could use that torch to open or close a door. A minecraft door has one binary state relating to redstone, powered or unpowered. That's it. The redstone functionality a minecraft door has is very simple by the standards of many other redstone-capable blocks in the game.

Piston doors: Can be arbitrarily complex, but these do not confer complexity to regular minecraft doors.

Placement: Minecraft doors are not the simplest block in this regard, but they are far from the most complex. Just compare them to stairs. Stairs have four attributes: facing[east,west,north,south], half[bottom,top], shape[inner_left,inner_right,outer_left,outer_right,straight]. There are 80 ways any stair block can be configured. There are only 64 configurations of a door block in minecraft (as far as the player need be concerned, it's only half of that since half a door implies the other half, similar to an extended piston.) Incidentally, there are 9 materials a door can be made out of, but 48 materials stairs can be made out of. And 8 of those 48 stairs have the special behavior of turning into other material, while only one of the 9 door materials has special behavior.

Waterlogging: Regular minecraft doors have never waterlogged. Waterlogging is complexity added to other blocks in the aquatic update, but doors were not changed. There was no complexity added here. And doors are not the only blocks which weren't updated for waterlogging; there are dozens of other blocks like this.

Trapdoors: Are more complex than regular minecraft doors. Trapdoors being complex does not mean that regular minecraft doors complex.

Players wishing doors had more complexity: Is not doors being complex.

> Doors are hard, no matter how simple the game.

Doors are extremely complex in some games, and significantly less complex in others. Complexity is not a binary trait. I claimed that minecraft doors are comparably simple, particularly when compared to the doors in TLOU2. I stand by that.

[nyanpasu64]

> that would affect anyone who uses doors as entrances to underwater houses

Given the current Java waterlogging mechanisms, even if doors acted like slabs and trapdoors, they would still hold out water source blocks present on one face. It would still break scuba diving though.

[Anon_troll]

> Minecraft does doors right in comparably simple way, and I think few if any players have a problem with it

See https://bugs.mojang.com/browse/MC-149060 "Villagers "spam" doors by opening and closing them really fast"

Or https://bugs.mojang.com/browse/MC-69281?jql=text%20~%20%22do... to see the 6000+ bug reports related to doors.

Or watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aiEq0bJcAz0 "Villager door spam"

[williamdclt]

Minecraft-style door animations (ie, no animation) would absolutely break immersion in a game with a realistic style. You can make a game that does not look realistic, but that's a completely different art direction, we can't just wave away complexity

[sluggosaurus]

Okay, comparisons within a particular artistic style then: Splinter Cell vs Metal Gear Solid V. MGSV has somewhat realistic doors, but much simpler than the door system SC:CT has. I've heard quite a few player complaints about MGSV, but never that the doors are less complex than the doors in a stylistically similar game ten years older. Splinter Cell gets some praise for doors, but Metal Gear doesn't get criticized for for falling short of that high bar.

Another example from beenBoutIT: The Last of Us and its sequel have the same sort of style. The sequel has superior doors but is generally considered an inferior game. The quality of the doors really doesn't seem to be a major factor in how these games were received.

Minecraft itself: minecraft doors having no animation was not a foregone conclusion derived from the broader style of the game. Minecraft pistons do have animations when extending or retracting. I've never heard a player complain that minecraft doors are lack what minecraft pistons have.

I think that most video game players are accepting of doors behaving in unrealistic ways. Simple doors don't actually bother most players, and complex doors usually go unappreciated by most players. Contrary to what the video claims, doors can 'just magically fly open', and players don't care.

[adnzzzzZ]

There's value in getting things right no matter how long they take and no matter if people will notice it or not. I personally don't hold this view too strongly but I can understand other gamedevs who do.

[sluggosaurus]

I understand how artists would think that way. Obviously they have passions and care about details few except other artists would notice. But on a commercial project, shouldn't managers reign in on this sort of thing and redirect the efforts of artists in a more productive direction?

[yissp]

A first-person perspective avoids some of the issues discussed in the video, like camera placement. I imagine it's also easier to animate if you only need to worry about the player's hand and lower arm.

[beenBoutIT]

Managers need to be able to spot OCD spirals and keep things on track. Having perfectly realistic doors isn't that important - the end user only notices them when they break. TLOU2 is remembered most for being less great than TLOU and not for its superior door mechanics.