Skyrim Discovery ends 10-year-old mystery

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A 10-year-old debate between The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim fans have finally come to an end, thanks to a former Bethesda developer who worked on the game. This week, Bethesda surprised fans with the reveal of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Anniversary Edition, the latest reissue of the game for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One and Xbox Series X with loads of new content. That said, that wasn’t the only surprise Skryim the fans had this week. Speaking to Twitter, the aforementioned developer Joel Burggress finally confirmed the suspicions of many fans that foxes lead players to cherish, but not on purpose.

In a lengthy Twitter thread, Burgess explains that when players began debating this theory shortly after launch, the game’s development team quickly launched an “informal investigation” to infer who drove the foxes to do it. However, what this investigation revealed is that no one did that. Not only did no one confess, there was nothing about it in the game’s scripts. So what was going on? Well, the team finally figured out that it was an AI navigation technology called Navmesh, “an invisible 3D polygon sheet that sits on top of the world, telling the AI ​​where it can and can not go “.

“In most situations you see the AI ​​deciding what to do (run over the player, hide in cover, etc.), use navmesh to plot a path and navigate that path,” Burgess said. “Foxes are no different. But their AI is very simplified: they can * only * run away. If you scare a fox it runs away.

Burgess continued:

“If you’re close to an AI, it’s ‘High Process’ or the most fancy, CPU-hungry path finder. It uses the full navmesh and will perform tasks like line-of-sight checks and On the other hand, there is also “Low Process” – used for things like NPCs walking a trade route across the world. These are only updated every few minutes and the position is tracked. very loosely. The bandit stabbing you in the face, however, performs navigation tricks a few times per second. There is a sort of “middle process” for characters nearby, but they didn’t need the complex tracking Due to the way the fox’s AI worked (always run away!) it basically ONLY uses this process. This is where an understanding of how Skyrim uses navmesh happens. Sections of the outside world have a simple navmesh. You don’t need to add a lot of detail in a space with basic topography, little clutter, or low combat chance. So desert = small number of large triangles. However, when you come across something like a camp, navmesh becomes much more detailed. Added visual details mean added navmesh details, and if we’re placing NPCs of any sort, we tend to add even more detail as well. So Points of Interest = large number of small triangles. See where this is going? The Fox doesn’t try to get 100 yards away – he tries to get away 100 * triangles *. Do you know how easy it is to find 100 triangles? The camps / ruins / etc that we have littered the world with and filled with treasures to reward your exploration. So foxes don’t lead you to treasure – but the way they behave leads them to areas that tend to HAVE treasure, as POIs with loot have other attributes (lots of little navmesh triangles) let the foxes pursue. For gamers, however, it’s the same. “

Burgess goes on to note that none of this was intentional, but is simply the product of the bubbling cauldron of overlapping systems.

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is available on just about any modern platform you want to play on, including the latest PlayStation, Xbox, and Nintendo consoles, as well as PC. Whichever platform you choose to play on, be sure to follow every fox you see.



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