There are so many things being tracked all the time in the game for puzzles and the power arm. Yet despites literally tracking sunshadows for some puzzle completion for example it runs almost smoothly with (in my 170h) no crashes. On a 6 yo portable console??
Botw was already impressive but I could grasp it with the shaders and also there weren’t that much physics puzzle. Objects were more static, there wasn’t the two other maps, enemy diversity was limited, same for weapons. There was less of everything overall but I thought it was the limit of the console and the possible engineering around it.
Is there any resources on how they managed to pull this off? White papers, behind the scenes, charts, …?
I’m guessing the way they do this is much simpler than you’re imagining. They don’t have to track the whole shadow. They just have to see if the targets are being hit by sunlight or not during daytime hours.
Even easier, they can probably check the game clock and see if the event occured and objects were in place within a given time frame (ie, when the shadow would be cast)