Developers are impressed with The Last of Us: Part 2's rope physics

News by Stephany Nunneley-Jackson Former News Editor

Published on June 20, 2020

The interactive rope in The Last of Us: Part 2 has developers, artists, and programmers giving huge props to Naughty Dog.

A scene showing the rope in action can be watched in this The Last of Us: Part 2 clip which was posted to Twitter.

This is making me want to cry.

And my primary skillset is "Level Designer", not any of the various jobs that would be required to actually figure out how to make this work.

— Notewell Lyons (@ItsNotewell) June 20, 2020

Tears well spent though, considering the end result!

— Andrea Migliazza (@OneLightingGuy) June 20, 2020

According to the co-game director Kurt Margenau, the awesome rope work you are seeing was made possible by programmer Jaros Sinecky.

This is the work of the incredible physics programmer Jaros Sinecky. He owned this system among others, building on the work he did for U4 (drake wrapping the winch around stuff). Of course doing it with slack is MUCH harder than a taught winch ;) Jaros finds a way.

— Kurt Margenau (@kurtmargenau) June 20, 2020

It took only three. Definetly not 6 month. And we didn’t cry( Just sweared a lot :) ). Our physics programmer Jaroslav did most of the heavy lifting here. He is crazy good.

— Maksym Zhuravlov (@MaksZhuravlov) June 20, 2020

Here are just some of the devs, artists, and coders who have replied to the original tweet. You will see some work at EA, Funcom, and others who had a hand in games like Ori and the Blind Forest and Overwatch.

Yeah I assume this was only even possible b/c of the significant tech base from the rope implementation in Uncharted 4 (about ten of us from valve witnessed this today during a group stream playthrough and just about s**t)

— James Benson (@James9475) June 20, 2020

I am now prepared for every single tech artist on twitter to flood my feed with "after watching that TLOUII clip, I wanted to..."

ROPE PHYSICS EVERYWHERE

BUT THEY AREN ROPE PHYSICS

ITS A MATERIAL FUNCTION SOMEHOW

— Douglas Copeland (@Ebonscale) June 20, 2020

And they still primarily see the flaws or should I say kinks in this feature while the rest of us are amazed.

— David Clyde (@DaytimeCoder) June 20, 2020