+122951298321 to zwzsg's post.
This man speaks wisdom.
It truly is what's the problem with today's video games :E.
and IMO :
GAMES NEED MOAR INTERACTIVITY / Freedom in general.
A good ol' game in that regard that I'd point to is Chrono Trigger :E.
Graphics and gameplay.
Moderator: Moderators
Now we are getting somewhere... excellent post zwsg, even if a true "wall of text". I agree on the main point of grapics best being used integrated with gameplay and not just for decoration.
Look at TA, it has all those sophisticated physics, but were does it all sum up? Flash rushes, and is the flash vs flash combat making interesting use of all the physics? Not really.
Why are people removing springs ground deformations and impulse from their mods? They couldn't make it improve gameplay.
I am all for "more simulation", but with these problems in mind. But I also think abstracted, "stupid" game mechanics like those seen in for example starcraft have their place and shouldn't be looked down upon, becouse those are always introduced with gameplay in mind, sacrificing realism. The best is if a game mechanic does both.
It should be pointed out that the "more simulation" approach leading to "messier" gameplay as I said, not just for the player, but more importantly the game desginer as well. It's true that on the macropscopic scale so to speak, the random stuff even outs. However controlling were you end up in actual gameplay, what your units actually end up doing, is harder. Look at this quote from smoths OP, perfectly explains this point:zwzsg wrote:Granted, now some games are also touting their physic engine, with Havoc and stuff, but how many times have seen an OmgUberAdvanced raggdoll system used solely to make corpses conform to each step of a stair, but with zero influence on the gameplay, your character still walking on the stair like if there was nothing at all, again the corpse feeling like an hologram, that anyway dissolve into thin air after a couple seconds
So, 3D trajectories too. Ok that one has been more widely discussed, but still. Zpock points out that simulation based trajectory leads to a messier gameplay, where you can't quite predict at 100% what will happen, whereas instahit weapons leads to a a much more predictive environnement. I suppose it implicitly follow that in one game, player can win out of sheer luck, while in the other there's nothing but pure skill.
That's sure raising an interesting, but, BeingADefenderOfTheTrueTAFaithAgaisntTheHordeOfBlizzardHeathen that I am, I of course feels compelled to rebute it:
- TA & Spring are large scale RTS. You don't fight with two units, but with hundreds of units. By the law of statistics, when large numbers of random event are added, the results has all its randomness evened. So even if individual shots are random, the battle outcome is accuratly predictable.
- Zpock says: instahit weapons -> player can know exactly what will happen.
But I say: simulated trajectory -> player can intuitively feel what will happen.
And imo, the second is better, because it means you can grok a situation involving hundreds different kind of weapons, each with countless possibility, even with little experience, wherease in the first system, you have to learn tables by heart.
Yes, sometimes you'll see situation where a huge stroke of luck plays an overimportant role, such as the famous shell deviated by shield lands on commander, killing it, or the more casual loss of a unit due to a plane falling right on it, but I feel that these cases won't ruin the gaming experience since:
- They aren't that random actually, I'm sure if you leave them enough time hard core player will master the art of the skillfully redirecting plasma shots with deflector, the same way they learn to suck every ounce of every TA exploit. Or you should know and take into account in your plan that units walking below fighting bombers are at risk of receiving falling planes on their hand.
- The player with a bertha would have win anyway, it could have hit a fusion farm and trigger a chain explosion, or cripple the economy thus bringing a sure victory, or whatever.
- Such game deciding random event are actually so rare they bring more hilarity and whoahing of witnessing such special event than resent from loosing because of a roll of dice.
- BTW, don't tabletop games relies alot on dice throw, yet requires incredible strategical thinking?
My point is that as more fancy physics are introduced, it gets harder to balance and tune the gameplay so it's interesting. This means they should be introduced with care taken to gameplay, IE if you put in a ragdoll system, make it actually count and be useful to gameplay, and this is hard and usually neglectet as zwsg points out, just as with graphics introduced with no thought to gameplay.smoth wrote:Create the model, weapons, scripts etc.
This is a very complicated area, filled with many differing things that cannot be give a specific value, for example, how capable a unit is when it aims is part of it's height, animation speeds, weapon quirks etc. This can play havoc on balance and can be a real pain in the ass. People like to think DOT is actually valid in the realm of balance but it isn't really that relevant when you get into arcing, tracking and sustained(beams) fire weapons. You also run into issues with weapon accuracy/inaccuracy. Then there is how fast the weapon actual travels. It all takes a lot of work to balance.
Unit values.
This is a very difficult area, unlike a table top game this is all happening in real time so situations can vary drastically from unit to unit. My favorite area of interest is a ratio of how many can be produce and how capable are they in battle. How many GMs can outright kill a gundam(which one shots whole squads btw), it is valid but ultimately you will have to tweak the values over time.
Look at TA, it has all those sophisticated physics, but were does it all sum up? Flash rushes, and is the flash vs flash combat making interesting use of all the physics? Not really.
Why are people removing springs ground deformations and impulse from their mods? They couldn't make it improve gameplay.
I am all for "more simulation", but with these problems in mind. But I also think abstracted, "stupid" game mechanics like those seen in for example starcraft have their place and shouldn't be looked down upon, becouse those are always introduced with gameplay in mind, sacrificing realism. The best is if a game mechanic does both.
Very nice Text zwzsg. We should force every gamedeveloper on this planet to read this text at least five times.
I think ground deformations and impulse are a great thing to balance the big units against the small and cheap ones and makes gameplay much more interesting. The main problem for the developer is, that you can't balance the units by just comparing cost, buildtime and dps anymore. For example in TA-based mods: If you start with vehicles, you are faster on open terrain, but your units will get a lot of trouble in chokepoints due to ground deformation. If you choose kbots, you have an advantage their, but your units are slow on open terrain. Currently it just depends on the map and the result is, that vehicle are better in nearly every game.
Its a pitty that currently no Mod I play makes good uses of this features. The only real problem I see with ground deformations is, that if a game gets too porcy, the land became impassable (Maybee a featurerequest, that grounddeformation increase map hardness could be a solution) and the only solution left is massing air or long-range-plamsa. The problem with impulse I can remenber were very light units blown over the whole map.
In AA the stated reason was primary performance. Caydr did a lot of stuff trying to improve performance and reducing filesize (which I can't really understand, when I consider the size of the maps)Why are people removing springs ground deformations and impulse from their mods? They couldn't make it improve gameplay.
I think ground deformations and impulse are a great thing to balance the big units against the small and cheap ones and makes gameplay much more interesting. The main problem for the developer is, that you can't balance the units by just comparing cost, buildtime and dps anymore. For example in TA-based mods: If you start with vehicles, you are faster on open terrain, but your units will get a lot of trouble in chokepoints due to ground deformation. If you choose kbots, you have an advantage their, but your units are slow on open terrain. Currently it just depends on the map and the result is, that vehicle are better in nearly every game.
Its a pitty that currently no Mod I play makes good uses of this features. The only real problem I see with ground deformations is, that if a game gets too porcy, the land became impassable (Maybee a featurerequest, that grounddeformation increase map hardness could be a solution) and the only solution left is massing air or long-range-plamsa. The problem with impulse I can remenber were very light units blown over the whole map.
Zwzsg is right, graphics are there to explain the gameplay and he makes a series of excellent points..
Zpock I dont think me and smoth disagree with you that there elements of starcraft that are great (there are quite a few I could name that I wish I could utilize in spring) however starcraft is NOT the ultimate game, and it does not have the supreme balance it is only one aspect of what can be done, and honestly I just wish people would stop passing it off as the holy bible of gaming when its not.
To attempt to address an issue I will start here. Zwzsg is right about graphics demostrating gameplay, however unfortunately mainstream gaming has advanced graphically beyond 2d sprites. This is not entirely our fault but as gamers in general we have voted with our wallets and demanded better graphics. There is a price for better graphics and that is less interaction, If you want a photorealistic tree, with 1000's of polygons then I cannot make that tree have a collision detection that is also 1000's of polygons and have it sway in the wind and allow you to climbe it, or afix ropes to it or so forth. Essentially you run into the issue of in order to maintain the level of graphics people have come to expect one has to limit what can be interacted with. Farcry is a good example they tried to make that game more interactive and succeeded better than most, it had limited ground deformation, trees that cast realisitc shadows, and actually aided in stealth, as well as limited physics. However you couldnt deform terrain under foliage, probably because of the way they setup the ability to generate that many trees on screen, they could not dynamically reposition them in real time without a serious hit to preformance. Additionally physics calculations become extremely intensive, anyone who has taken a physics course will tell you theyd rather not try to figure out the acceleration of a object by vector to another object with only limited information, its intensive and complicated, and the variables can quickly add up. So you can make a graphically intense game where everything is interactive via real physics and explosions deform all terrain, but you wont be able to run that on your average PC. There is always a tradeoff somewhere.. and as we have seen we have voted for better graphics..
Spring however is NOT commercial gaming.. here we have an open source engine this is a chance to do both. We can have both pleasing graphics and good gameplay. Its not even difficult we just need to work together, developers, modders, players, if we all feed off of eachother in a giant circle we can improve gamplay and graphics and push the engine as far as it will go.
If mods aside from BA/AA/XTA suffer from a poor or uninteresting gameplay it is only because the player base does not seem to care enough to give any useful constructive feedback. If you dont enjoy gundam or EE or SWS, or 1944 or kernal panic, or what have you.. its not the modders fault completely its your fault.. You failed to go give input on what you didnt like or what you did or how it could be improved.. or even offer to help. Mods do not function in a vaccum and modders cannot read minds we can only improve or work on something if we get ideas and input from players otherwise we assume we are good and dont touch anything, because as the phrase goes if it isnt broken dont fix it..
The whole thing is a cycle and it needs all parts to work together to get good results, infighting and disagreements and so forth only hamper everything..
Players->Modders->Developers->Modders->Players
This is the circle and if it doesnt go around it doesnt work..
Zpock I dont think me and smoth disagree with you that there elements of starcraft that are great (there are quite a few I could name that I wish I could utilize in spring) however starcraft is NOT the ultimate game, and it does not have the supreme balance it is only one aspect of what can be done, and honestly I just wish people would stop passing it off as the holy bible of gaming when its not.
To attempt to address an issue I will start here. Zwzsg is right about graphics demostrating gameplay, however unfortunately mainstream gaming has advanced graphically beyond 2d sprites. This is not entirely our fault but as gamers in general we have voted with our wallets and demanded better graphics. There is a price for better graphics and that is less interaction, If you want a photorealistic tree, with 1000's of polygons then I cannot make that tree have a collision detection that is also 1000's of polygons and have it sway in the wind and allow you to climbe it, or afix ropes to it or so forth. Essentially you run into the issue of in order to maintain the level of graphics people have come to expect one has to limit what can be interacted with. Farcry is a good example they tried to make that game more interactive and succeeded better than most, it had limited ground deformation, trees that cast realisitc shadows, and actually aided in stealth, as well as limited physics. However you couldnt deform terrain under foliage, probably because of the way they setup the ability to generate that many trees on screen, they could not dynamically reposition them in real time without a serious hit to preformance. Additionally physics calculations become extremely intensive, anyone who has taken a physics course will tell you theyd rather not try to figure out the acceleration of a object by vector to another object with only limited information, its intensive and complicated, and the variables can quickly add up. So you can make a graphically intense game where everything is interactive via real physics and explosions deform all terrain, but you wont be able to run that on your average PC. There is always a tradeoff somewhere.. and as we have seen we have voted for better graphics..
Spring however is NOT commercial gaming.. here we have an open source engine this is a chance to do both. We can have both pleasing graphics and good gameplay. Its not even difficult we just need to work together, developers, modders, players, if we all feed off of eachother in a giant circle we can improve gamplay and graphics and push the engine as far as it will go.
If mods aside from BA/AA/XTA suffer from a poor or uninteresting gameplay it is only because the player base does not seem to care enough to give any useful constructive feedback. If you dont enjoy gundam or EE or SWS, or 1944 or kernal panic, or what have you.. its not the modders fault completely its your fault.. You failed to go give input on what you didnt like or what you did or how it could be improved.. or even offer to help. Mods do not function in a vaccum and modders cannot read minds we can only improve or work on something if we get ideas and input from players otherwise we assume we are good and dont touch anything, because as the phrase goes if it isnt broken dont fix it..
The whole thing is a cycle and it needs all parts to work together to get good results, infighting and disagreements and so forth only hamper everything..
Players->Modders->Developers->Modders->Players
This is the circle and if it doesnt go around it doesnt work..
Anyone here ever play racing destruction set? Now that was a cool game. The graphics sucked but if you used your imagination the thing was wild! The premise of the game was that people want control of their cars. You could actually use camaroes, vw bugs, 4x4 trucks, motorcycles, sprint cars, and indy cars. Furthermore you could set the vehicle up with a number of different engines, usually at least three choices per car. And each vehicle generally had 2-5 tire choices, too. Indy cars maximized out engines-wise with slicks racing least-powerful optioned vw bugs with snow tires on ice tracks was one of our all-time favourites. Throw in land mines, rockets, and slicks and you had yourself a blast.
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Felix the Cat
- Posts: 2383
- Joined: 15 Jun 2005, 17:30
well, the ai programmers are up there with the patchers. their work also goes over all mods being that ais are to run for all mods.
lua guys should go between moder and dev because their work is also for all mods however, it is open to modification and is much higher level then say ai.. of course moders are on an even higher level.
(high level in programing denotes a how far you are from pure hex code, low level going to something like assembly which is right above machine code. Think of it like depth, the higher you are the further you are from the very deep parts of the development)
lua guys should go between moder and dev because their work is also for all mods however, it is open to modification and is much higher level then say ai.. of course moders are on an even higher level.
(high level in programing denotes a how far you are from pure hex code, low level going to something like assembly which is right above machine code. Think of it like depth, the higher you are the further you are from the very deep parts of the development)
