US Patent #11,189,068 - workflow innovations for AAA game map editors.
AAA game maps are huge, and the people building them spend most of their day in the editor doing the same compound operations over and over: drop a prop set here, pattern this lighting rig along that ridge, re-snap a group of objects to the new terrain heightmap. Every editor exposes the primitive ops; few make the compound ones first-class.
This patent covers a macro-based editing workflow for game map editors: capturing a sequence of editor actions as a parameterised macro, with the inputs, the spatial context, and the side effects all preserved so the macro can be replayed in a different place with different parameters.
The practical effect: level designers stopped writing the same operation by hand on every map.
US Patent #11,189,068.
Why patent it
- The interesting bit is the parameterisation across spatial context - the macro understands that “drop a prop set” means different concrete objects depending on biome, terrain slope, and adjacency.
- Replay isn’t just record-and-rerun; it’s a graph the editor can reason about, undo cleanly, and surface back to the designer as a reusable verb.