Activision Blizzard

Activision's single Networking patent tackles the challenge of downloading game content during active play without disrupting the player's connection. The system starts downloads at a conservative speed, then gradually increases the rate toward a ceiling while monitoring ping, packet loss, and the gap between data sent by the server and data actually received by the client. When any of these three signals indicate instability, the mechanism responds in proportion to the severity, either stepping the download speed back down or pausing entirely for a cooling-off period before attempting to resume. This staged approach replaces earlier methods that would download at a fixed rate regardless of whether the player's connection could handle the load.

The Graphics patent addresses character animation in multiplayer environments, where running cloth physics for every visible player would be prohibitively expensive. Instead of simulating fabric in real time, the technique identifies the most expressive moments in motion-capture data, the peaks and valleys of force curves that define how a character moves, and uses those dominant poses as nodes in a motion graph. For each of these poses, artists pre-bake inverse blend shapes and normal maps that describe how attached cloth should deform and shade, so that when a character transitions between poses the cape or cloak follows along through standard mesh blending and shader weights. This strategy avoids both the rigidity of hand-authored animation clips with fixed blending windows and the unpredictability of motion-matching systems that search an entire animation database every frame.