Where Do Red Dead Redemption 2's Birds Go?

#rdr2 #birds #ornithology #redeadredemption2

English, French, and German captions provided by Lawrence.

[any_austin]

The code used to be the other way around with the number at the end, but they changed it for some reason, so make sure you get it right. I'm actually so worried about you getting it wrong that I'm not even gonna write out the incorrect one for fear that you won't read this carefully enough and just copy/paste the wrong code.

Anyway, I'm a big fan of animals in games and I want to follow more of them. I did that video about Mario's fish a while back and I feel like we could revisit that topic only better sometime. I'm also still playing Starfield and having some really lovely moments with it. It's not a perfect game but there's some really neat things to talk about it with it that we may get into soon. Do you guys like industrial pipes?

[tjimicole]

Fun fact. When you get too close to a "library use only" book, the librarian will snatch the book from you, run around with it for a bit, then just pick a random direction and run until they're out of sight of you and can despawn.

[judy]

when he said "is that what real ducks do" I was FULLY expecting a cut to him trying to scare the heck out of some birds outside to run after them at full speed

[JPLeBreton]

I'm a veteran game developer who's worked on a few games with ambient birds, and you've definitely hit on a common principle when we're building stuff: for ambient life, you generally want to be able to easily author where they first appear (designers pre-place spots where animals can spawn, eg place some duck spawners around ponds), do some simple idle behaviors while the player is around, and then react to the player or another character if they interact. And the question of "how do we get them off-screen as simply as possible?" naturally leads to answers like "pick a direction / a distant point / a world edge and fly towards it until we get far enough away from the player / we stop rendering for a bit" and then they're "culled" (the engine despawns them and frees up the resources to think about other stuff).

In most games, I'd guess giving a bird the ability to *land* after flying around is like, by far the hardest part of that whole life cycle. You could try pre-placing perch points the way you'd place spawn points, but the number and variety of those you'd need to approximate realistic/interesting behavior would probably be very large (ie lots of dev labor). And different kinds of birds would want to land in totally different spots! Ducks land on water, ground feeders like doves land on grass, songbirds land in low/mid-tree cover, birds of prey would want to land on tall treetops or rock features so they could scope for prey, etc. OR you could try to give them some heuristics to reason about the world and *dynamically* pick landing spots, but that would probably involve 3D pathfinding (which would need to rely on precalculated world data that would eat up RAM) and/or other math-intensive stuff that would gobble up CPU time that's needed for more critical things. If you just watch birds in real life and try to understand what they're thinking about when they take off somewhere and land somewhere else, there's a lot going on, and it's dependent on so many things, and simulating all of that in a game that's actually supposed to be about cowboys riding around shooting stuff... it's a very impressive game in many respects but I'm not surprised the RDR2 team decided "nah they're just not gonna land" and left it there (if not everywhere in the game, then in the generic cases where you studied them).

That said, as a jaded old dev who's kinda done with shooting stuff I would *love* to work on an open world game someday that goes really deep on ambient life and has animals doing all kinds of cool intricate behaviors. Game devs build our brains and technologies around solving new interesting problems like this, and it often involves the same kind of curiosity that compels you to make these videos, trips to the library, and looking at stuff in nature! Thanks for continuing to make cool videos like this!

[peperonypeperony]

An underrated detail of these videos that I really like is how you always make the player character a researcher for the topic you're covering. For example, in this video you could have easily used modding tools to make following them easier (super sprint, super jump, turning into a bird, etc. would have made this a lot easier) but instead you chose to follow them as Arthur. The same goes for the unemployment surveys—you could probably just dive into the game files, noclip, use console commands, etc., but you choose to follow people as the character. Choosing to play by the rules of the game really adds to the immersive feeling of these videos, like you're studying virtual worlds as if they were real rather than just asking and answering questions about videogames.

[RDR-Mysteries]

10:00 John James Audobon was also an artist and some of his paintings of birds appear in game, you can find his painting of the (extinct) Carolina Parakeet in a mansion in St. Denis

[tkri]

10:41
Hello, I am a librarian and I would like to inform you that “Library Use Only” generally does NOT mean that only the library staff can look at it!! It simply means that the item cannot leave the library, as in it does not get checked out to anyone. However, librarians would be very very happy to let anyone look at the book! They just don’t want anyone to take the book somewhere else for fear that it may become lost or damaged.

This is very common with books that are either old and rare (definitely the case with your library’s Audoban book) or books that are expected to be frequently needed for quick reference by multiple people (i.e. a book that we don’t want one person to hog, preventing everyone else from using it).

5 minutes later edit: it appears this has already been said many times by others. Oops. Ngl I got too excited for the chance to talk about libraries and forgot to check beforehand

[grmlindad]

i feel so validated in knowing i'm not the only person thinking about the lives and paths of random pixels on a screen.

[coolerpeon]

An interesting thing to think about regarding this channel is that Any Austin seems to refuse to use mods or hacks. Really makes the experience of personally observing the in-game events more like an adventure rather than a basic question and answer.

[PacdemonStudios]

11:44 I get the feeling that it was at least one person's entire job at one point to make sure the birds flying away wasn't jank, most games just have them shrink down and disappear after a certain amount of time. The fact that they stay spawned flying continuously as long as you have eyes on it means they probably considered someone would do this. I mean, they made the horse's balls shrink in the cold.

[audun]

There's a hilarious thing you can do with birds in RDR 1. Equip dynamite, go into dead eye and target the bird. (The reticule is invisible, but it's still there.) Since dead eye guarantees a hit, you've just launched an improvised surface to air missile.

[OstroGothic]

I'm a published author on birds (scientific papers, not a book) and I'll say that tracking down the source for "common knowledge" animal facts is surprisingly difficult. Some of it is from the 1800s, some is from academic papers with paywalls. It's a mess and it sometimes leads to incorrect things being repeated for decades because, like you said, why would they lie? Most of the time it's not a lie, it was a bad observation made and people just assumed they did the proper work. One i always remember is that "komodo dragons aren't venomous, their mouths are dirty and their prey dies from secondary infections". This isn't true, komodo dragons are venomous AND their mouth is full of bacteria. Actual professional biologist would say this factoid because they assumed that they guy who coined it had done his due diligence and it wasn't for like 60 years that someone double checked and found out it was wrong - they have active venom glands. Moral of the story - double checking information is always good

[polly_pasta]

"Library use only" means you can only look at it in the library, maybe in the special collections room

[ethics_gradient]

Ok so, I have a degree in computer games programming and having done work on some games and worked with people in the games industry, I can tell you that for subsystems like birds in games that just need to look kinda ok but don't really justify spending significant dev time on, that there will be a very simple system with "cheats" and shortcuts to make the end result look "good enough". So with the bird movement data you collected, there is most probably a % chance after the initial startle animation that the birds will circle nearby to allow the player a chance to shoot at them in the air, then they will pick a direction to fly in (most likely determined to be away from the player's direction of travel) that will basically look like they're flying away from the player indefinitely if you are chasing them. They will also be granted a movement speed greater than the player so that they can eventually escape the players view distance at which point they will be despawned. This is also most certainly the cause of the fact that when you lost sight of the birds you were not able to reacquire them, as they are most likely despawned if another game object breaks the player's line of sight with them, and they are in their "startled flight" behaviour routine. To keep the game optimised and performant, most peripheral subsystems will just be quick and dirty, like the cardinal just decreasing size and shrinking into the distance until size = 0 and then despawn.

[reliquiaen]

I enjoy doing this with npcs also. Most recently I decided to follow cyberpunk npcs after you've done a quest with them. I followed Judy around Night City for what must have been forty minutes. She walked a bit, got in her car, drove around. At first it seemed like she was driving home but then she didn't, she made a turn right before where her house is. I followed her and eventually wondered what would happen if I tried to force her to go home by like... gently nudging her car towards turns in that direction. Her van was invincible, it took no damage from my bumping it (or from bumping other things around the street), but it did TRUCKLOADS of damage to my car. I ended up getting launched across the street by her and lost track of where her van went. Always interesting to see when npcs have A Place™ that they hang out at but they don't seem to go back there. They just despawn and teleport back.

[Wuggle]

You should do where power lines go in red read redemption 2

[MegaSailorJupiter]

librarian here! if a book says its library use only, it just means you can’t check it out, but you can still look at it while physically in the library! reference texts are, like you seemed to surmise, hard to find books, so we don’t like to lend those out as often, since if they go missing, we might not be able to get another copy.

[fran]

The birds go to their charging stations, to keep watching us. John Marston knows

[styfen]

I used to work in the Entomology department of a museum, and the sheer amount of books in the walls (yes the museum has hidden passages inside the walls for the staff, along with rooms for storage and staff and stuff all in there) on animals of all types was breathtaking. That stuff just doesn't make it online because it's too expensive and also has copyright issues. So all the things you're probably looking for are in museums, universities and old libraries.

[sejeong_simp]

I started watching this video because I thought it would be silly and fun. Then you got to how you dug for information and researched for the video - to verify the information you were presented. That is really a topic I have seen coming up more and more these days, with people not knowing how to dig for information or refusing to do so altogether. It was a nice refreshing change of pace to see the winding research path you took. Your videos are always a pleasure, cheers.