Art of Roads in Games

Re:Art of Roads in Games by shalmanese on Sunday February 08, 2026 @11:29PM (#46941597)

Another area of hidden complexity is doors in video games. Almost no game has life sized doors because they introduce gameplay issues, almost all doors in video games are at least 30% bigger than in real life and you see an overabundance of sliding doors vs swinging doors because of the complexity swinging doors bring to video game physics.

https://lizengland.com/blog/the-door-problem/

https://www.ign.com/articles/putting-doors-in-video-games-is...

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Re:Art of Roads in Games by bestham on Monday February 09, 2026 @01:42AM (#46942267)

This was also confirmed by a Valve developer recently about a bug in HL2:

https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@TomF/115589925206309168

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Re:Art of Roads in Games by account42 on Monday February 09, 2026 @04:00AM (#46943181)

Also in their VR titles Valve made all doors swing in both directions because that feels more natural to players when there is no haptic feedback from not being able to push open a door.

The scale difference mentioned in gp isn't just doors though but any structure you can pass through. Many games houses with larger interiors than exteriors and video game ventilation ducts are comically large.

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Re:Art of Roads in Games by yoricm on Monday February 09, 2026 @03:10AM (#46942839)

That's an impressive bug hunt. Same code, different behavior. I can't imagine how much time the guy spent on finding this one. And how much satisfaction once he finally nailed it.

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