Starfield’s Giant Pile of 20,000 Potatoes, Explained by Game Developers

ign.com:

Last week, a Starfield player stuffed 20,000 potatoes into their ship’s cockpit, then attempted to close the door. The clip went viral, with awe-struck reactions from players and game developers alike.

But we weren’t just impressed at the audacity of someone going through all the trouble of gathering that many potatoes. Digital Foundry’s John Linneman called the clip “mind-blowing” because all of the potatoes “have physics.” But what does it mean for something to “have physics”? Why is everyone fussing so much about a pile of 20,000 tumbling potatoes in a game about being a cool space explorer?

We spoke to a number of game developers to get their insight on what’s really going on in the potato clip, why more games don’t let players do this kind of thing, and whether or not 20,000 tumbling potatoes really is as impressive as it seems.

Nikita Luzhanskyi, an Unreal Engine developer at Pingle Studio, gave me a detailed rundown of what happens when two objects collide with one another in a game. Here’s the super duper basic version of it: In real life, where physics are simply happening at all times. But in virtual spaces, computers take time to calculate all the physics happening to all objects at any given second. So the more potatoes (or whatever else) you throw into the mix, the more calculations need to be done, and the more complex things get.

“When they say that a game has 60fps, this means that in one second the game engine must process input data from the player, apply it to the game world, calculate the interaction of objects and systems in the game, and render the image on the screen,” Luzhanskyi explains. “And it must do all this sixty times in a second. When we talk about the physical interaction of objects in the