Great article. It's such a seemingly trivial detail - modelers adding a piece of apparel (high heels) that ends up potentially having huge unintended consequences by physically altering the height of the player model when equipped.
I remember playing an early 3D game that had a similar problem when they added support for alternative animal mounts. Most of the physics, structures, etc. were built with a standard horse model in mind, so the dragon mounts, etc. introduced all kinds of goofy looking clipping issues.
Slightly related, but whenever I see high heels in video games I'm reminded of this comic by Double-XP:
One of my favorite exaggerated examples of this is the (completely sidestepped) challenges of anime mods like Grand Theft Neptunia V, and the entirety of the Loyalists channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MboDzmsrFHQ
When animations are hardcoded based on an original character's dimensions, do you try to scale your mod's girl-sized models to the original character sizes? Do you try to remake all the animations? Or do you just focus on making the funniest possible content? The latter approach is taken here, and it's an absolute joy.
(As one might expect of GTA dialogue, this likely isn't the most SFW of demos, so caveat emptor.)
This problem exists in the Dead Rising series as the main character can put almost any item on. There is hacks in the code specifying things down to the bone id to try to overcome this issue.
I love these easy-to-illustrate examples where a request seems simple, but adds a lot of trouble for the person implementing it. "It's just adding a new skin for their footwear, how hard could that be?"
This just reminds me of the gross laziness of EA and its Sims franchise. The last installment costs well over $1000 to buy in full but they never bothered to implement height difference in a game that pretends to simulate daily life. And sure enough, putting on heels in the game just makes the character shorter to compensate.
And they recently told their consumers to go fuck themselves, as they won't ever make a sequel and instead continue pumping lazy "content packs" for a buggy game that's obviously running on an outdated and very tired engine.
As someone who writes code for a living, I've also helped people ship a few games (freelancing).
But trying to make my own 3D game from scratch is more often than not in a standstill, because doing the art is difficult and so is getting good at it.
Even something as simple as wanting to scale down my country's geography into 7x4 km chunked terrain presents problems - while the geological features are there, even with work on making the finer details look more realistic, I'd still need to make rivers that flow realistically from higher altitude above sea level down to it and then merge with the sea, which is easier said than done.
Don't even get me started on the idea of modelling, rigging and animating characters with complex finite state machines and whatnot.
Of course, a part of it is probably just managing scope and expectations (this project might take a decade without going full time to release something mediocre, even if learning a lot in the process), but it's pretty cool just how many details there are to the craft.
Yeah, I've done game programming and tried to make some on my own, but I'm just bad at art in general, and I've tried to get better a few times but my mental state makes it harder for me. Generally I've just used asset packs for my unfinished projects, or made ascii art games (dwarf fortress style), but I do enjoy hard-surface modelling sometimes. Floppy creatures are just hard to rig and animate and everything though, and I really suck at 2d art (though I do enjoy shader programming)
I have thought about trying to recruit one of my more artistic friends to make a game together, but then I'm bothering a whole other person to do a project that will never see the light of day haha
Meh. Let's maybe focus on the plenty of actually heinous stuff Putin has done (and continues to do) instead of psychoanalyzing and vilifying a slightly eccentric fashion choice?
I wear heels daily (because I like them and find them comfortable - no problems with my height with or without them), and I strongly doubt that that's going to turn me into a tyrannical world leader any time soon.
If they do it in private, then yes you might call it a lame insecurity.
If they do it only at public events where they're constantly being photographed in groups of people, it's smart image control. A leader is a symbol, and different height differences project different messages visually. That doesn't mean you need to be the tallest, but being the shortest in every photo may give voters a perception that works against you. It's not vanity; it's reality.
Actors stand on apple boxes all the time in film and TV shows, because the director wants a specific height difference between characters to arrange a shot just right, that isn't the actual actors' height difference. Not lame insecurity -- it's producing the image that communicates what you want.
It works for actors because the director controls the camera, but for a politician, it has the opposite effect (at least in a democracy, russian politics isn't too far from a TV show anyway).
Sarkozy was mocked all the time for being short and insecure about it, nobody ever noticed that François Hollande was small until they appeared together after Hollande's election: he was in fact smaller than Sarkozy but nobody had ever noticed that before.
Counterpoint: Zelenski is a short guy and I don't think it hurts his image. He comes off as something of a bulldog. The fact that he's fit helps a lot mostly he's good at using what he has and crafting an image off of that, rather than trying to fake something.
The high heels haven't hurt Putin politically since he's a dictator but it's ruined the careers of other politicians like Ron DeSantis.
Thank you for mentioning DeSantis. It helps that Zelenski also built an image of being a battle-hardened soldier.
When Zelenski was criticized by a reporter during the meeting with Trump for not wearing a suit, his comeback was that he'll go back to wearing suits ("costumes" though I hear that may have been a mistranslation on his part) when the war is over. The reporter was trying to frame his attire as disrespectful to the President, Zelenski's response made it clear that he'd have found wearing a suit disrespectful to his people who don't have the luxury of returning to civil life until the war ends. Make of that what you will but it signalled confidence and empathy. It came off as authentic. Trying to compensate his height with footwear would have had the opposite effect and conflicted with this.
DeSantis on the other hand tried to appear "tough" and decisive but was ridiculed for his footwear because it was so obvious and so exaggerated that it made him appear extremely insecure about his height. But I think it would have looked even worse if he had been in Zelenski's position (and wearing a uniform) because of this contradiction.
Not only do heels modify someone's height, they also modify the range of motion for doing something like squatting down.
For kids this isn't a problem, they can squat all the way down without issue. But as an adult, regaining that lost mobility is a process!
But, try this: elevate your heels by an inch. Then try 2 inches. You'll find that you can more comfortably squat down the more your heels are elevated. It also impacts center of balance and the angles at which your back is at while squatting.
I read once that people in a certain country were accustomed to doing work in a squat position, perhaps due to lack of chairs/seats for the poor, but I thought it was cool after being forced into a chair/desk posture for my entire life. I've also heard that catchers in baseball retire because their knees give out after the constant squat/crouch position, catching pitches at home plate. Should catchers wear high heels? Got to watch "A League of Their Own" again...
There are also wedges/slant boards for this purpose.
Lifters also have another purpose: they provide stability by connecting your feet more "solidly" to the ground. Other gym shoes (cross-trainers, running shoes) have padding in them... which is awesome for running but that squishiness can translate to instability when you're literally doubling or tripling the amount of weight.
Consequently, some lifters who have the ankle mobility will lift without shoes. Given the state of most gym floors, that's a no from me, dawg, but hey to each their own.
I think I read this door one closer to when it came out, because it sounded familiar (and it was also really interesting both times). Specifically for me, never having worked in gaming.
The physical world stiletto shoe challenge rests on the engineering of the "shank and heel" piece, the actual heel and the weight supporting shank that arcs under the foot between the in and outsole.
These can be steel, titanium, thick plastic, etc. The integrity and trustworthiness of the stiletto relies on these often very thin pieces staying undeformed and rigid wrt each other despite human mass scale forces bending, twisting, rolling and threatening to break the heel and shank join.
The other (often neglected) challenge is having flooring materials that stand up to a few million pascals of pressure concentrated under that tiny heel. They'll often punch holes right through pre-war parquet flooring, or the bottom of a small wooden boat - yachtsman watch for stilettos like hawks
Yeah, this is a major design point for commercial aircraft interiors, and handling the point loads often favors materials like foam-core composites that usually lose out to e.g. honeycomb core composites on most other performance figures.
> These can be steel, titanium, thick plastic, etc
Modern materials! I didn’t realise stiletto heels are post-WWII tech.
Apparently it was steel heels (Français) or steel arches (Ferragamo) that enabled the shoe. I wonder if there was more overlap with aircraft or ammunition manufacturing…
Now that I think about it, a nitinol arch compositing would afford lightweight yet flexible support and grounding authority, particularly if you could composite towards a stiffer alloy at the stick end.
Meanwhile I'll note that raised heels were originally menswear - derived from riding boots, where the heel keeps the stirrup in place, but gradually got taller for conspicuous display, then disappeared along with most of the rest of peacocking.
I remember playing an early 3D game that had a similar problem when they added support for alternative animal mounts. Most of the physics, structures, etc. were built with a standard horse model in mind, so the dragon mounts, etc. introduced all kinds of goofy looking clipping issues.
Slightly related, but whenever I see high heels in video games I'm reminded of this comic by Double-XP:
https://imgur.com/a/pUg6sCV