Why wild foxes led you to treasure in Skyrim

GP did a good job summarizing the explanation, but there were a lot more details and at least one useful photo in the twitter thread. Transcribed and lightly condensed below for the convenience of others:

> Among Skyrim players, you'll occasionally see this tip: if you see a wild fox, follow it and you'll be led to treasure. Sometime shortly after shipping, we saw this going around online, and an informal investigation started. Who made foxes do this?!

> Skyrim uses something called 'navmesh' for AI navigation. For non-dev folks, this is an invisible 3D sheet of polygons that is laid over the world, telling AI where it can and cannot go.

> In most situations, you're seeing AI decide what do to (run at player, hide in cover, etc), use navmesh to make a path, and navigate along that path. Foxes are no different. But their AI is very simplified: they basically can only run away.

> So foxes flee. Why would they flee towards treasure? This is where it gets interesting. If you're close to an AI, it's in "High Process", or the most fancy, cpu-intensive pathfinding. It uses the full navmesh and will do things like line of sight and distance checks.

> To contrast, there's also "Low Process" - used for stuff like NPCs walking a trade route across the world. These are only updated every several minutes, and position is tracked very loosely.

> There is a sort of "Medium Process" for characters nearby, but who didn't need the complex pathing of combat. Because of the way the fox's AI worked (always be fleeing!) it's basically ONLY using this process.

> This is where understanding of how Skyrim uses navmesh comes in. Swaths of the outdoor world have simple navmesh. You don't need to add lots of detail in a space with basic topography, little clutter, or a low chance of combat. So wilderness = small number of big triangles.

> When you stumble across something like a camp, however, navmesh gets way more detailed. Added visual detail means added navmesh detail, and if we're placing NPCs of any kind, we also tend to add even more detail. So Points of Interest = big number of small triangles.

> You see where this is going? The Fox isn't trying to get 100 meters away - it's trying to get 100 triangles away. You know where it's easy to find 100 triangles? The camps/ruins/etc that we littered the world with, and filled with treasure to reward your exploration.

> So foxes aren't leading you to treasure - but the way they behave is leading them to areas that tend to HAVE treasure, because POIs w/loot have other attributes (lots of small navmesh triangles) that the foxes ARE pursuing.

> It's a nerdy little story, but I love it. Emergent Gameplay is often used to describe designed randomness, but this is a case of actual gameplay that NOBODY designed emerging from the bubbling cauldron of overlapping systems. And I think that's beautiful.

I opened this on mobile and you either have to log in or open the tweet in the app to read the entire thread (twitter login wall).

I was going to do neither things.

I like the Q&A summary.

1. It answers the clickbait like title question and in that way saved me a click.

2. It’s very clear, concise, easy to read and understand.

I agree. It disappoints me that GP is the top-rated comment right now.

I found it impossible to read since I don't have a Twitter account...

Happened to me too. Switch to desktop mode.

Yes, I've noticed Twitter has started doing this in the last few days.

I'd like to thank the bean counters at Twitter, because I'm not going to sign in, so this new feature means I'm going to spend a lot less time on Twitter.

Any nitter instance can help with such things. Here's one:

https://nitter.nixnet.services/joelburgess/status/1428008043...

P.S. Nitter also puts RSS links at the top of everyone's timeline, which is handy if you would rather use an RSS reader than a Twitter app.

You have to open it in a new tab. I can't click to expand threads or follow anything on twitter (it appears to start loading, then gives me the 'Sign up' prompt). But I follow a link in a new tab, it works fine

I believe it is their new rule. But it shows up only if you are using twitter for a while as logged out. Clear data from browser and it goes away, but will eventually show up again.

If on desktop, just block all cookies from Twitter.

To each their own, but I feel like the discoverability of the 'whole story' seriously suffers. Any time I try to follow a Twitter thread I can usually find 2/3 of the posts pretty easily while the rest tend to be buried somewhere in the memes and pointless banter.

A blog post can be equally "to the point" as a Twitter post, your SEO might suffer but I'd imagine 99% of bloggers really don't care. And FWIW, anyone can setup a WordPress in just a few minutes assuming you use a *.wordpress.com, to name just one of many free blogging platforms.

if you don't have a twitter account the thread is actually impossible to read FWIW.

Twitter blocks the page with a pop-up that can't be closed, so a blog post would be a huge improvement.

It's a sad world if we have all this technology and yet have to contend with either Twitter blogposting or a blog post with ads, 1.600 extra words and 50Mb of scripts you don't need.

I think it makes a big difference if you have a twitter account or not. Without one navigating through the thread is much harder, on the edge of being a dark pattern, and you can't use unrolling bots.

> It forces the author to compress as much information as possible into every paragraph and split up their thoughts.

But it doesn't. GP's summary fits in a tweet.

The author just split his text whenever he ran out of characters. He didn't compress any information.

One very recent[1] problem for me is that Twitter has started hiding threads behind a login-wall. As a non-user that makes it impossible for me to read beyond the first few posts.

Very few blogs puts such a requirement on their readers.

[1] It started happening last week.

I, not having a twitter account, literally can't navigate through the tweets to read them.

What GP said doesn't seem condescending.

You can't even read a thread on Twitter without working around their constant badgering for you to sign up.

The web interface is absolutely horrendous on desktop and on my phone.

Level of perceived versus implied condesension is a function of cultural communication style. People in some countries just talk like that.

I understand the lack of a blog, but even many blogs of late I have seen have adopted the frequent "meme interlude" style that I find ... unprofessional.

Okay, so I'm a snob.

I do have to laugh though when I open the HN comments and the top comment is not about the content of the link at all but is some orthogonal gripe.

It’s literally unreadable to me.

  Part 1
  Part 2
  “Show this thread”
  Spam
  Spam
  Spam

“Show this thread” just opens a full page Twitter sign-up modal. Being subject to such games is degrading enough that I refuse to play along.

If you can make an infinite tweet chain then compressing information cannot be an argument since it isn't something necessary. And if you cannot, you may potentially be unable to provide all the information you want or worse needed for the topic at hand. In any case a blog post isn't required to be big in size with very condensed text.

I didn't bother reading it because Twitter wanted me to sign in. I came here for the synopsis.

An html blog post doesn't prevent you from using paragraphs.

We even have a tag just for this <p>

A blog has actually a lower barrier because it doesn't require a Twitter account. It can potentially also load much faster and has actual text formatting.

I don't hate the threads, but the GIFs were getting in the way. Like Medium posts that start with random Unsplash images.

The problem is that a good chunk of us can’t participate in the discussion because the content is locked behind a Twitter sign in modal.

Note that the parent boiled away all the noise to the actual information -- which could have been contained in a single tweet.

I wouldn't have bothered wading through all that to get to the simple little factoid. I appreciate the post, therefore.

You can fold threads that don’t interest you.

> 2021: HN: That fact the world still doesn't conform to what we want after 14 years means the world is still wrong.

That's not necessarily arrogance. Look at Windows 11. Sometimes the world just has perverse incentives to make everything suck.

>do you think developers are the only people who deserve to consume information?

I think he just meant the overall narrative was hard to read, I think it was too.

I don't know what 'non-tech crowd' has to do with it. They can read blogs and paragraphs and other formats too...

Not GP, but the point was that what he wrote should be an article/blog post instead of in a chain of tweets. It's not about the length or conciseness at all.

That they also summarized it in one paragraph for the audience here on hn is separate from that point

My opinion is, that the author, the one putting the work in decides the format and platform to use, but people are also free to dislike the format.

Twitter won't allow me to read the thread, I have to create an account. A blog post would be better.

You just complained about GP not liking something, insisted it was cool and fun just because you thought so, man the irony is astounding.

GP's comment was fun and cool, every time someone posts something like this, you have to come in and throw your 2 cents in. We all know how you feel about it by now, if you hate it that much don't click on the HN comments. just let it be!

Even if it had been in a blog, if it was interrupted with memes and meanders,it would be a bad article.

I'm glad you enjoyed it, GP's comment should have nothing to do with whether you liked the article or not.

Twitter is garbage, its format is garbage. I certainly appreciate GP cutting through the cruft.

I don’t. I either login or sign up. If I click the little x (which used to work) it takes me back.

iOS 14.whatever is mostly latest.

I got a login popup when I tried to view a larger version of one of the images.

Nitter is wonderful, but has limitations:

- It still tends to include too much per-tweet overhead in presentation.

- It limits the length of the full thread presented.

- Individual nodes frequently go down and/or are rate-limited by Twitter. (I'm on about my 3rd principle instance at this point. It's begun timing out / getting rate-limited in the past week.)

Threadreader solves all of these issues for long Twitter threads, and is the preferred option in this case IMO.

In particular if you're doing pathing for tons of npcs (as they are) you really want to keep that optimized. In Guild Wars at launch for one of our expansions we had huge CPU issues with our game servers - it turned out designers had laid down really long elaborate paths for NPCs like guards and townspeople and the server was calculating all those paths at once when players entered a new zone, so it was saturating the game server. I had to build an auditing tool so we could scan all the zones for long paths and replace them with simple ones.

Bethesda has been building this specific type of game for decades so at this point things like npcs having complex patrols or other behavior is something they've figured out how to do well.

Even looking back I don’t see why you would care. The fox runs away. The fact that it doesn’t run away to a perfect radius away is probably better.

Ah, makes sense. Thank you!

it doesn't know density. density is a property of the triangle placement. More triangles in "dense" areas. Pick a random triangle, you are likely to fall into a dense area.

The twitter thread isn't super clear about the exact mechanics. But If I had to guess, maybe the fleeing fox randomly chooses the path to follow, and because there are more possible paths in the dense parts of the map the odds of selecting one of those is higher. i.e. if I have 6 possible paths to my right, two to my front, and two to my left, if I randomly pick a path there is a 60% change of going right.

Perhaps NPCs should mention it, on occasion.

In Ghost of Tsushima, foxes lead the player to shrines, which grant certain items. In The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, you can befriend dogs by feeding them and they'll lead you to treasure. Not foxes sure, but almost the same thing. I wonder if the developers of these games were inspired by Skyrim's "feature".

I don't know about Japan, but as far as I know the fox tradition in China has no element of leading people anywhere. Foxes, like anything else, may practice various magical arts notably including shapeshifting. (They are much more common as the subject of stories than other things are, but not very different in kind.) They may pursue any number of idiosyncratic goals. A common theme is that they take the form of a human woman and have sex with a human man; this may either be benign behavior or something more nefarious such as a way to slowly drain the man's life force.

The sexual theme is so common that 狐狸精 "fox spirit" became a term of abuse for overly sexual women. Chinese people like to translate the term into English as "vixen".

Wait, why?

I'd imagine foxes would flee to burrows or just about any hole where they can hide, but why would there be any treasure there?

TIL my bins are full of treasure.

Because if you do, your competitors won't, and will poach your customers with hard sell techniques until they reach a network effect required to make you irrelevant.

In the long run, there can be only one, the little diversity we have is the effect of national network effects established in the first years of growth that proved hard to overcome, especially Twitter in US. Without US, Twitter will be steamrolled and you will only have exotic alternatives like vkontakte and weibo.

That’s a good point. If I had to guess, I think over time there is a natural limit to the amount of user saturation. People are mostly aware of the platforms and their features and have probably made up their minds as to whether they want to join. Parts of the existing user base are probably getting sick of the engagement and lessening their usage.

Yep, platforms are getting silly. On Reddit the other day I got the usual popup about accepting cookies, but once clicked, instead of just setting the cookie it showed a popup saying that I need to switch to the new theme to accept cookies. As in, I'm forced to use their new theme just to click a button and then switch back to using the old theme (like any sane person).

I should also mention Privacy Redirect as an add-on to automatically redirect you to nitter, openstreetmaps, invidious and others: https://github.com/SimonBrazell/privacy-redirect

I especially like how it replaces Youtube embeds with invidious embeds.