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Microsoft Input Devices Games Technology

Kinect Hacked To Play Max Payne, Left 4 Dead 2 30

TechieAlizay points out a post at Geekword.net about a man who hacked Microsoft's Kinect to play Max Payne. "This hack was possible due to FAAST (a toolkit for Kinect), OpenNi/Nite and GlovePIE. Here's how the hacker describes the different control gestures: 'As you can see, the leaning left and right stuff is all there – and moving your body forward and back moves you back and forward. The reload and interact gestures are becoming pretty standard for me now, and pain killers are popped with an upward motion of the left hand. What makes this special though is the leg movements that activate bullet time. The result is bullet time diving for real! When this game hit just after the Matrix film came out, it caused a big stir – with Kinect augmentation it gets even better. The one thing that needs fixing is weapon select; this will be handled by the +/- buttons on the mote in future, I think.'" Another video shows Kinect controlling Left 4 Dead 2. In addition to future PC support, Microsoft is reportedly working on an official SDK. Yet another recent hack of note allows a human to control a humanoid robot with an impressive level of accuracy. Just be careful if you play the Kinect boxing game; somebody might call the police.
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Kinect Hacked To Play Max Payne, Left 4 Dead 2

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  • I imagine Max Payne might cause an inordinate amount of broken ribs with all that jumping around. L4D2 could be fun, though.

    • The more I read about MS Kinect hacking, the more I become convinced that there's already a sex simulator aimed at Kinect. I just don't want to go searching and find out.
      • I'll save you your sanity- there is. Right now it's limited to simple fondling, but they're not done yet. (Well, sort of- MS has already stated that it won't be available through any official means, so unless the devs are cool with it being released to the homebrew market, they're SOL.)

        • Wonder what type of controller it would ship with . . . and if you'd get your very own bottle of "kinect-y jelly".
  • You need the right tools for the right job and it's no different with gaming. Keyboard&mouse for first person shooters, arcade sticks for fighters (or so I'm told; not a fan of the genre), and controllers for platformers.

    I have seen only one game that the kinect best fits and that's the dancing one from the commercial. I'd never play it but it fits. An exercise game would work, too. Everything else just looks like extremely awkward and inappropriately shoehorned in (see 3rd party Nintendo DS and Wii

    • by morari ( 1080535 )

      I agree. Those videos made playing look just as much fun as falling on a rusty nail.

    • This is true. Part of what makes video games fun is that with one button press, you can jump 10 feet in the air, make a headshot from 30 yards away and do all kinds of stuff you couldn't do in real life. These motion control hacks are interesting, but also clunky and weird - extend your left foot to run? Um... okay. That kinds of defeats the purpose of motion control since your gestures have little or nothing to do with what your onscreen character does. Motion controls are best (and I use that term loosely
    • by SoVi3t ( 633947 )
      several other games work just fine. The fitness games are great, and the Kinect Sports game is fantastic, even thought the physics and AI is horrible at times. The whole point of this is that it shows that 3D movement can be done on the 360's Kinect. Sure, you may not agree with the current ways of moving the character, as shown in the videos, but the options ARE there now. Currently most games on the kinect (or in development) are rail shooters and games that only allow limited movement (ie Table Tenni
      • The trouble is that either the movement is realistic (table tennis) but limited to games where you always return to the same spot (fitness type games) or it's unrealistic movement because you have to stay in view of the camera (no combat roll, good luck turning your character around while viewing TV still). I don't think that it was hard. I just think that it's not the best (by a loooooong shot) controller for these games.

        • by SoVi3t ( 633947 )

          The trouble is that either the movement is realistic (table tennis) but limited to games where you always return to the same spot (fitness type games) or it's unrealistic movement because you have to stay in view of the camera (no combat roll, good luck turning your character around while viewing TV still). I don't think that it was hard. I just think that it's not the best (by a loooooong shot) controller for these games.

          the best? no. Better? yes

          • Better than what? For a third or first person shooter, I'd take (in order from best to worst) keyboard&mouse, wiimote, dual analog stick controller, and I guess kinect would be about here because I can't imagine anything worse. Ok, I would put kinect above punchcard computers. Other than that... ok, above or maybe on par with DS games that require you to blow on the microphone. Or any game that requires voice input.

            Besides, I yell at my games enough.

    • The Kinect isn't all bad. Party games are fun and I could see it having a definite market. I think it will need a handheld peripheral to accommodate shooting, but that's nothing more than a battery and a button.

      I'm interested to see what they do for Steel Battalion and the Star Wars game.

      As a sidenote, you mentioned general gaming catagories (FPS, Fighter, Platformers). Perhaps this is the official beginning of a new genre?
  • Why is the Max Payne player holding a Wii controller?
    • In the summery is written he is using GlovePIE [glovepie.org] That can be sued to use all kind of controllers, including wiimote, on a PC.

      Since having a controller to control traditional (not made from the ground up kinect) games is a good idea i think the wiimote is a good alternative for this:
      -It has a button. (shoot)
      -It has a joystick.
      -It is wireless (bluetooth), and can be connect quite easy to a PC.
      -It was reverse enigeered some time ago, no hard hacking to do.

      And lost but not least:

      Why not?

  • Well very begrudgingly, he said they knew about the efforts of PC enthusiasts and didn't mind. UK users can see the short interview for Click at the CES here http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006m9ry [bbc.co.uk]
  • Unfortunately, there is too much lag on the Kinect for any serious gamer to use.

There are two ways to write error-free programs; only the third one works.

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