Olga was already there when I stumbled toward the gap, her body taking the brunt of the storm. She planted her feet wide, magic greatsword wedged sideways across her chest like a steel crossbar, and every ti a minion slamd into her, sparks leapt off the blade.
She wasn’t built to tank, not like the shield-bearers, but she gritted her teeth and held on all the sa, roaring curses so vile I thought even the monsters might be offended.
"Hurry the fuck up, you bastard, soone gotta fill in this gap, god damn it, fine, I’ll do it!" she bellowed at us, muscles straining as another three bark-things clawed over her sword onto her pretty face.
...
I hestitated for a mont.
I guess this was where I have to make a stand for myself.
"I’ll be there!" I yelled.
Not before long, I stood still in the middle of formation, next to archers pumping arrow, supports drinking mana potions, and mages trembling fingers.
I clicked through my inventory on the floating UI, while my mind, however, did what it always did when things got dire... It started wandering.
And among my arsenal of ga-breaking inventions... There’s one that I always could rely on.
Navsh.
The word popped in like a spark, and I clung to it like a lifeline.
Navigation sh, most players never think about it, but to it was everything I need in this situation to be a pseudo-tank to hold a formation, now...
Every creature in a 3D ga, whether so slobbering raid boss or a shopkeeper NPC humming in town, all moves on paths the devs baked into the world.
You can’t have a monster walking through a wall, right? Obviously, so you build the world into blocks, nets, chunks... polygons stitched together into an invisible lattice, telling them where can they walk, where they can’t walk, even better yet, how’s their Line of Sight for stealth stuff.
And then you feed it to the NPC’s behaviour system, or what the community simply calls AI (for so reason that still irks because AI is not real in my opinion), we get what we call a navsh. A giant web of "yes, you can step here" and "no, idiot, you can’t walk through that table."
It’s dynamic, too, and that’s the beauty of it.
You drop a crate in front of a door? The ga updates the navsh by linking the two.
Suddenly that straight line from A to B is blocked, and the AI reroutes, maybe it decides to climb? Maybe it circles around another door? Every update, every new object, the web shifts and warps, teaching the NPCs what’s solid ground and what’s forbidden.
That’s the very basic concept of navigation in 3D gaming, but letting the players update your environnt can make the navsh very buggy, hence why 90% of gas have objects that are immovable and indestructable (cough cough bushes and trees in GTA), or in singleplayer puzzle gas, you can move stuff, but there weren’t any NPC around to ss up with the ga’s physic... Unless you’re a Source engine ga maker, those dudes are very wild... But that’s a different can of worms.
And ? I knew sothing about nodes that the monsters didn’t.
After searching my inventory... I found it, my beloved ga-breaking instrunts.
With a grin, I pulled from thin air a massive cloth sack, sealed tight with rope at the mouth.
It dropped into my arms with a thump heavy enough to rattle my shoulders. To anyone else, it looked like a bag of potatoes, or maybe sand, harmless and pointless. But only I knew the truth...
Inside was sothing heinous, sothing unthinkable, sothing that no player even thought about bringing with them onto the dinner table, much less a raid battle field.
Inside was cheese, wheels of it. Dozens, maybe hundreds (exaggerating of course), of cheesewheels stacked on top of each other until the bag bulged like a barrel.
Food were not objects the devs considered to be an obstacle.
Cheese so dense, so perfectly round and weighty, it might as well have been wheels.
Olga risked a glance over her shoulder, face twisted in fury:
"What the hell are you doing with that bag?!"
"Trust !" I yelled back, sprinting toward her, "Now move aside!"
She swore sothing in Russian but quickly obeyed, shifting just enough for to barrel past and drop the bag with a ground-shaking thud right in the center of the gap.
Then I hopped up, boots landing square on two of the cheesewheels pressing against the fabric.
It squelched faintly under my weight, but I try not to notice how disgusting it was, because what mattered was the reaction.
The minions ca at , claws raised, jaws snapping.
But the mont they reached the sack, their heads jerked sideways in unison. Their bodies lurched left, right, skirting around the bag like a river split by a boulder.
None of them touched , none of them even saw or acknowledges my existence.
The navsh had updated, the sack was now a solid object that were unmovable. To the AI, I didn’t exist, in their graph 3D head, the entire sack and whatever on top of it were a giant hole inside a chunk that if they step in, they’ll fall to their death, like the void or sothing.
"Hoh..." A sound of recognition was directed towards .
The mage’s voice carried through the din, amused in that maddeningly cool way only powerful casters managed.
He folded his arms, elents and arcane still glowing in his eyes and mouth, and tilted his head like he’d just discovered an interesting dollar bill on the sidewalk.
I couldn’t help but laugh, loud and unhinged, as I swung my sword into the crowd.
One hand cut through bark-flesh while the other punched whatever strayed close enough or tried to walk past , my body moving with the relaxed rhythm of soone punching a practice dummy.
The monsters ignored , sliding past in a neat, useless parade, and I carved them down like tall grass.
"Formation is stable!" I shouted, high on adrenaline and disbelief, my voice cracking with manic pride, "Avenge the fallen, my comrades, Stalin would be proud of your unwavering strength! Do not let her death be in vain"
Is it racist to assu they’re communists just because Olga’s Russian? Eh, whateves.
Dozens of heads turned toward . Allies froze mid-swing, healers peered out from behind their trees, even tanks risked a glance over their shields.
All they saw was , standing a head taller than before, balanced on so bulging sack of who-knows-what, cutting down minions that didn’t even try to fight back.
And the truth was absurdly simple.
It was a god-spot exploit.
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