This is me in Red Dead Redemption 2.
It’s an action-adventure game with over 60 hours of stunning gameplay.
I’m about to brush this horse, and you’re going to see the dust fly off.
Games today are meticulously detailed.
They’re mysterious and heartwarming, and colorful and stylized.
And inside every one of these games — Fortnite, PUBG, Rocket League — you’ll find... these.
Put thousands, sometimes millions, of these tiny triangles together and you can make
a person... or a car...
or an entire world.
But you never see them.
So… why triangles?
Take another look at this game.
Technically, what you’re seeing is all squares.
Your screen is divided into pixels, and each pixel can display exactly one color.
That’s been true since the earliest video games.
Like Pong.
“It was just squares, right, so it was just like a pile of squares to make two paddles and one square
that was the ball. And the fact that I could move something and it moved, was like super beautiful.”
That's Brett Bibby.
He grew up playing Pong — and now he leads the engineering team at Unity, one of the
top game engines in the world.
A game engine basically gives you the tools you need to build elaborate environments.
“Let’s imagine you wanted to make a wild west game and you wanted to ride into town
and have a shoot-out.
So you might start off just creating some boxes, to represent the saloon, the bank and other
things.
The main road.
And it would just be all white.
You would just try to get a sense of size and scale.”
"Kind of like Legos, right. Just trying to get a sense of the space.
And so I'm iterating and developing it slowly."
And when you’re done, the detailed game that you made needs to show up as pixels on a players’
screen.
That process is rendering.
And the player’s computer is going to have to do a ton of math to follow through.
In the last 20 years, the amount we can show on screen per second has gone up — way,
way up.
This is a standard measure of computing power.
It tells you the number of calculations the machine can perform per second.
… in billions.
You’d think that a more powerful computer would make it easier to render games.
And it does.
Except that gamemakers keep competing to add more and more detail, pushing the limits of what even
the newest technology can do.
So the game engine’s job is partly to keep the number of computations needed for each
detail as low as possible, so that gamemakers can fit more in.
Which brings us back to these guys.
Triangles are used almost exclusively in rendering for video games.
They're a way for a game engine to batch pixels, allowing the player's computer to
process more detail.
From the computer’s point of view, everything in your game really looks like…
This.
The game engine creates sets of instructions that the computer translates into pixels on
your screen.
This “V” means these are coordinates for vertices — the corners of some kind of shape.
Imagine playing connect the dots.
You’d use straight lines, right?
Especially if you didn't know what shape you’re making yet.
The player’s computer is playing three dimensional connect the dots, sometimes thousands of times
every second.
For them, the equivalent of straight lines is flat surfaces.
Flat surfaces are the easiest to render because they don’t require a computer to do any
additional math to figure out curves or dents.
So the game engine needs to convert curved surfaces into flat ones for the player's computer
to process.
And it turns out, the best way to do that is through triangles.
Try picking out three dots in the air in front of you.
No matter where you choose to put them, they’ll always be on the same plane.
York: “The surface of the triangle is always flat.”
And no other shape with vertices is like that.
York: “If you have four points, then those four points could actually describe a very
complex object —”
“Four points can describe a pyramid for example.”
“That results in a more mathematically complex, higher processing power ask just to figure
out the pixels on the surface.”
So triangles it is.
Triangles and the ongoing improvements in game technology make it easier for creators to
develop the beautiful games that exist today.
“So in the old days it was like, well this is what I can do: I can have a fixed screen
with 8 things moving on it."
"I think nowadays, pretty much whatever you want to create, you could find a way to create."
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Including my favorite, which is all about how to make that classic snake game.
They have a premium membership too, which can offer unlimited classes
on how to improve your gamemaking skills.
Or whatever else you're excited about.
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Skillshare doesn't directly impact our editorial at all. But their support helps make videos like this one possible.
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