Just how the f*CK did Nintendo developed tears of the kingdom?
There are so many things being tracked all the time in the game for puzzles and the power arm. Yet despites literally tracking sunshadows for some puzzle completion for example it runs almost smoothly with (in my 170h) no crashes. On a 6 yo portable console??
Botw was already impressive but I could grasp it with the shaders and also there weren't that much physics puzzle. Objects were more static, there wasn't the two other maps, enemy diversity was limited, same for weapons. There was less of everything overall but I thought it was the limit of the console and the possible engineering around it.
Is there any resources on how they managed to pull this off? White papers, behind the scenes, charts, ...?
Because they're not constantly tracking any of that stuff. It checks once at specific trigger points. If everything is satisfied for a thing to happen, the thing will happen.
Take the sun for instance. You just need to check if the time is at a certain time. It is literally just checking if a number is close enough to another number for the trigger.
Programming must be some arcane eldrich knowledge to some.
But to programmers, its a Thursday.
@OP The answer to your question is Object Oriented Programming.
Now I want to check if blocking the sun rays using contraptions will still allow to finish the puzzle. To see if our hypothesis is correct. They might have done it some other clever way.
The seamless interaction between objects is sublime. There are so many times where you're like "I wonder if..." and the game handles your guess without any hiccups.