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Sorry, can't do scarves.
(sopuli.xyz)
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this post was submitted on 27 Feb 2026
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I appreciate the joke, but the rules are exactly why they go "oof". The scarf has higher requirements for precision and a more constant overhead than a one-off giant summon.
You could make them go "oof" on the summon if you added a requirement that the lava properly flow along the ground and interact with all characters near the event.
I mean, there's a scarf.
And then there's a scarf
I think the better question is "How many polygons do you want and what do you want them to do?"
Real time simulation of fabrics is a ongoing field of study. It has years of research behind it.
The physics of knitting is so complicated that SciShow fucked it up and had a bunch of people mad at them.
Textiles are complicated crazy wonderful things. The drape of a fabric is going to be related to the materials it’s made of (cotton, linen, wool, acrylics and polyesters, blends of all of the above and more to various percentages…) as well as just the process of making.
Woven is very sturdy and doesn’t stretch. You can’t unwind the whole thing by getting it caught on something. Your jeans and slacks are probably made of woven material, because otherwise you’d accidentally lose your pants to the bump of a nail in a chair or something.
Knit stretches, but accidentally bump into a door hinge and you’ve unraveled a good chunk of your sweater. It’s good at moving though. Most things are done on knitting machines in “stockinette” stitches - look for little ‘v’ shapes.
Gotta keep in mind that the upkeep of clothing was something people use to be spend several hours a week on - beyond just laundry. Weaving takes forever and it’s not particularly exciting. Just imagine how many outfits you’d have in 1600 BC or 1600 AD versus now.
It’s just really crazy that we are all surrounded by billions of tiny fibers that were twisted into single strands that then become fabrics that then become clothes. Each stage presents uniquely complex and beautiful physics problems.
Generally simulated fabrics look good as long as it is flapping in the wind like a flag and has no chance of interacting with any other objects, such as the person wearing a scarf.
"You can choose to play as a mighty warrior, or a free-floating sentient scarf. One or the other."
The last two-minute-papers video on the subject makes it look like a solved problem, until you notice the stats in the corner are measuring "minutes per frame"
Exactly, the first request is so vague that you can just implement it in a way that doesn't require any complicated programming magic, but a scarf has the implicit expectation to swing around and not intersect with the player or itself. Or worse, expect the player to summon a demon wearing a scarf!
(Still a good joke though)
Or you could go the JRPG way and make the scarf clip through everything including on cut scenes where the devs had 100% of control over the position of everything.
Scarf on the demon is probably fine :) They can bake it into the new movement frames. Player has all kinds of focus and real time physics :)
Let me translate. Adding a completely new object with new rules is easy compared to modifying exist assets and it's new a clothing peice. Cosmetics are hard to implement, especially a fucking scarf which is on top of all the major animation areas. Do the animations still look good? Do I need to adjust the cutscenes to account for which scarf is being warn? How does this affect lighting?