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.
Thief (Score:4, Interesting)
This will surely improve DOOM (Score:4, Interesting)
UOZaphod (Score:5, Interesting)
Protection (Score:2, Interesting)
Too bad we don't have smell-a-vision, the smell of burnt and decaying human flesh would lend that extra realism to the game.
Though if that's what you want, you could just volunteer for Iraq or Afghanistan.
All-in-all I find the topic rather morbid.
Let's play Doom again. (Score:3, Interesting)
Any one remember playing the original doom and getting to that one map where it was you and a massive room full of demons? I cheated to get through it. Now we can have hills of demon corpses. O.K. They most likely mean human corpses, but that's the least interesting to me. Unless they are thinking about decomposing corpses and how long it takes which could be very interesting game play in where a massive battle field that isn't cleaned up spreads disease and what ever troops are around that battle field end up dead.
Another thought would be revisiting the same areas/maps where previous battles were fought and the dead piling up over the generations the map has been used. Think of the dead becoming just part of the background or that they you have to bury them or burn them to prevent disease and end up making a new map if played several times.
Re:UOZaphod (Score:3, Interesting)
...corpses as far as the eye can see... (Score:2, Interesting)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darfur_conflict [wikipedia.org]
Estimated number of deaths in the conflict have ranged from 50,000 (World Health Organization, September 2004) to 450,000 (Dr. Eric Reeves, 28 April 2006). Most NGOs use 400,000, a figure from the Coalition for International Justice that has since been cited by the United Nations.
i'd rather they didn't lay around. it's nice to see the payoff for good play but this is supposed to be a game not an experiment in psychology (i'm guessing here, maybe it is :-)
Re:Realism (Score:5, Interesting)
Also, in team play. Want to block off a path? Litter it with your opponents' corpses.
This wasn't what I had in mind with ragdolls (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm responsible for some of this. Here's the first ragdoll falling downstairs [youtube.com], from 1997. Yes, that's how that cliche started. I'd written the first ragdoll system that really worked right, so it was time to make demos. The first try had six-legged bugs dropping through a funnel, which is tough technically but not very interesting. Then there was the big mecha toss [youtube.com], to show that we did heavy objects right. (Most game physics systems still get that wrong. The physically animated objects all move like they're very light. We call this the "boink problem". There's a cube/square law in contact handling that's not captured by the impulse/constraint systems.) So I was looking for a hard case that exercised the system and was way beyond what anybody else could do back then. The fall down a circular staircase was it. It's a tough multiple-collisions problem with friction against multiple surfaces, and contact computed against the polygonal geometry, not some oversimplified model. Every step and every stair railing is an individual object; the feet can slip through the space between the railings.
After we did that, everybody did ragdolls falling downstairs. It got to be a cliche, like caustics on shiny logos. One vendor in the early 2000s had a waterfall of bodies falling downstairs as a GDC demo.
Our original plan was that this was a step to physically-based character animation, where the chararacters really balanced and moved because their feet had friction with the ground. My eventual goal was real martial arts moves, where the throws really were throws. But the industry went off in a different direction - motion capture with interpolation. This provides a reasonably good look without having to solve all the control problems of robotics. The companies trying to solve the hard problem went bust, even after some systems that worked, so that didn't seem to be a direction worth pursuing.
So what did we get from game physics engines? Dead bodies. As CPUs got faster and the algorithms improved, lots of dead bodies. Then, "infinitely destructible environments". Disappointing.
Re:Yeah That's Always Bugged Me... (Score:2, Interesting)
So you see the idiotic spectacle of supposedly intelligent and goody two-shoes creatures reassembling on top of the corpse of their now dead companion, and ignoring him and continuing on with their patrol. Not aborting the patrol and returning to base because 1. they're under attack and 2. they need to report, which is the entire point of the patrol given they don't have walkie talkies.
Stupid. But CoH is no better with you attacking bad guys in bases while their buddies stand 30 feet away and do nothing, even though they clearly see and hear the fight.
Why are there no "hard" online games? Yeah, I know the market for competent people is mighty small compared to that of bumbling buffoons, but some of use want an MMORPG equivalent to Serious Sam on Serious mode.
It really does change the feel... (Score:3, Interesting)
And, uh, I loved it
There was still a technical limitation though, if you set it to keep them permanently and played a long round, your performance would degrade considerably over time.
Cheers.
Re:Realism (Score:5, Interesting)
If corpses are going to block projectiles, they need to be destructable. I could see this adding quite a bit of strategic element to even an FPS. I really wish that in battlefield 2 the tanks wouldn't immediately explode, because they made great infantry shields right up until they went boom, and presented a nice little mobile fortification.
If corpses don't somehow hold an interaction with the game, I see little point in their long lifespan. If I can't pile them high as a makeshift sand wall, or eat them to regen some health, sweep them along to digital heaven already.
Re:Realism (Score:3, Interesting)
Think what this could have done for Doom. Demons with variable mass! A demon in the hall that is too large to push past at 20% health, but you can at 60% (or if you have a Bezerker Pack). Demon corpses blocking the path of new demons. How about being able to pick up demon corpses and throw them at oncoming attackers?
Re:This wasn't what I had in mind with ragdolls (Score:2, Interesting)
For all intents and purposes, this is a dangerous patent, and should be invalidated or at least narrowed down ASAP.