The Details of Dead Bodies in Gaming 195
Via Stephen Totilo's Second Player blog, his most recent post at MTV concerns dead bodies in videogames. This rather morbid topic may seem like a small concern, but it's a big deal for the people making the games. From the article: "Dead bodies have been vanishing in games for decades because of technical difficulties. Old 2-D games -- like just about anything on the original Atari, Sega and Nintendo systems -- could only display a limited number of character graphics, or sprites, on a TV screen at one time. Letting a zapped enemy lie prone on the playing field caused problems, limiting the amount of new things, like new on-rushing enemies, that could be drawn onto the screen. 'You would end up sacrificing one of your precious moving objects to display an essentially useless dead body,' [game designer Ralph] Barbagallo said." With the advent of the newest generation of consoles, Totilo explains, we now have the luxury of corpses as far as the eye can see.
Realism (Score:2, Insightful)
One step further (Score:3, Insightful)
Not a problem anymore (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah That's Always Bugged Me... (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm all for stacking the dead up chest high in the game but if you're going to do it then you should also make the in-game characters react with horror or whatever's in-character for them.
Re:Realism (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sick of bushes that either don't exist as immaterial, or are like a spike of some mithril adamantium substance that causes a truck to flip over.
Re:Realism (Score:3, Insightful)
Uh oh, a wooden police barricades. No way I can get past that. I guess my character isn't flexible enough to crawl under it, or strong enough to just push it over. Nevermind the rocket launcher that I'm carrying.
Re:Thief (Score:3, Insightful)
Notice I said "typically" and "you" as in the average player. Sure, some people never played it at the hardest setting, so what? They're games, they're supposed to be fun. Sometimes I played it on expert and occasionally I just wanted to be a bastard and kill every single enemy. You know, play the game, not just move through it at the hardest setting checking off levels like it's some kind of task to be completed.
Even if you played to kill it was never going to be Quake-like since outright battling would inveitably lead to your death so the stealth element wasn't lost, just lessened.
Re:UOZaphod (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:This wasn't what I had in mind with ragdolls (Score:5, Insightful)
"Our technology for high-quality ragdolls is patented. This broad patent covers most spring/damper character simulation systems. If it falls, it has joints, it looks right, and it works right, it's probably covered by our patent."
Thank you for stifling innovation yet again.
Re:This wasn't what I had in mind with ragdolls (Score:2, Insightful)
Those who can, do. Those who can't, whine. It's a hard problem. There were some spectacular failures in the early days of game physics, the most notable being Trespasser, the licensed Jurassic Park game. That was the first attempt at a major physics-based game, and it was a disaster. The Trespasser post-mortem [gamasutra.com] (Gamasutra login required) describes what went wrong and who blew it. Dreamworks lost a lot of money on that debacle.
Re:This wasn't what I had in mind with ragdolls (Score:4, Insightful)
So, now, those who can, are not allowed to. Its that simple.
Re:This wasn't what I had in mind with ragdolls (Score:2, Insightful)
I think the gp's point was precisely that, thanks to you, nobody can any more.