Physics Cards... the adventure gaming revolution!

[Nikolas]

Aaahhhh, I get it now - it's kinda like the difference between plugins and script modules, yes?

At last I got it too.

Ok. This sounds amazing I have to say! So many possibilities. It doesn't have to work on adventure games it can work any way. Lets keep an open mind...

[Kinoko]

Yep, I have it now too. Eureka!

[Nikolas]

Yep, I have it now too. Eureka!

* Nikolas claps his hands *

I have to admit that at first I thought that it was something like Pokemon (Don't kill me please), or something like magic (games with cards...)

heh

[2ma2]

We have been discussing HL2 puzzle solving before and the phrase that will bleed in my cornias is this:

"Imagine taking a coin, and trying to unscrew some screws with it but it wont fit. Then whacking it repeatedly with a smiths hammer so it got thinner. Right, now you can unscrew those screws."

Needless to say, I'm paraphrasing, but I think the general idea of it came through. The cool part is that you could basically take any piece of scrap metal to make a primitive screwdriver.

But physics sschmysics; imagine when the AI card comes along, and the parser'll never be the same. Why smell corpses when you can interrogate people and make them tell where they hid the god dam thing instead. Ever spoken to a conversational bot? Imagine it being resonable and acting accordingly to basic psychological principles.

[Andail]

2ma2 has predicted the Psychology-card.
I can't wait

[Vince Twelve]

Duh, we already had that.  Don't you remember all the hype about the PS2's uparalleled Emotion-Engine?  Yeah... neither did game developers.

Similarly, while the physics cards are neat for the new types of gameplay they could allow, I predict that even if they become common place, gameplay won't change.  Developers will just use them so they can add another bullet-point to the back of the game box:

-Exploding crates splinter and fly through the air with realistic physics!

-Dead bodies flop around with "Rag-Doll Physics Mach 2" (tm)

or

-That guy's clothes move like they're real and stuff!

I only wish that developers (and publishers) would care more about substance than style.

[Nikolas]

Considering that today is 2005 (and alomst 2006) and we have the opportunity to make games like ti was 1998, adn with other engines like it was 2002 it is not far behind, there will be a module or a plug-in that will take advantage of the physics-card.

Maybe AGS 3.7 (just for the argument) will have the ability to play with this type of card around. And then Vince and everyone acytually we can make our gameplays in our games more perfect than it is.

It is like I would never thought of having such a high quality of music in a game. But things change and now not only music is amazing but I can make my own game with amazing music (music that I compose !!!!! hehe).

Just think about it in a possitive way. I'm allready dreaming of ways to use the card. And who knows, maybe some games (KQIX), or other half finished 5-year projects would benefit from that... 

[Huw Dawson]

Sometimes, reading Tom Clancy's Net Force Explorer books get's you really interested in VR.

This Physics card, if it lives up to expectations, seems like, to me, it would break free from the standard linear scripted events of today. It would make adventure games so much more interesting... I mean, should I use this crowbar to jimmy open the door, or to smash right through it?

Though using VR gloves would be the next step up. This would give us the technology to create an actual VR game that didn't require a couple of million pounds and a horde of script... COOL! 

[esper]

I just had to say this:

I just ordered "Nocturne" off Ebay. I bought it from England, which means I wound up paying double for it (damn conversion rates... And why am I paying in GBP? why not in Euros?) but that doesn't matter right now.(1)Ã,  Ã,  Ã, But anyway, Nocturne: This game was made quite some time ago.... I think like in 1995.(2)Ã,  However, I have not yet seen an adventure game that rivals it. Even some of the newer adventure games like Broken Sword and Neverwinter Nights (3) don't hold a candle to it. Nocturne offered some of the best gameplay and storylines I have ever seen in a game, plus some features that were WAY ahead of their time... The main character, The Stranger, had a trenchcoat that flapped as you turned with real-time physics. The light that he could mount to the end of his guns had such realism that you could forget it was a game (4), and the monsters actually looked like they were getting shot where you were shooting them, including different animations for the different types of weapons you were using against them. It had realistic blood spatter. Even though the game used fixed 3D environments, you could swith from third person to a first person "nightvision" mode, which was exceptional. All in all, one of the most fantastic games ever.

My point for having said all that (5) is this: in 1995, Nocturne used a realistic physics engine. Then, they said they were going to make a Nocturne 2, in which you play as minor character and vampiress Svetlana Lupescu. Eventually, they scrapped the project and renamed Svetlana: BloodRayne. They gave her bigger boobs and a worse attitude, and turned it from intelligent adventure to mindless bloodbath. I don't know if they maintained the physics engine since I wouldn't be caught dead playing BloodRayne. But it was, and still is, the best thing I have ever seen in a game, and I have never seen it duplicated, not even in games like Doom 3 or HalfLife 2.

FOOTNOTES

1 Even though I spent two whole lines and a parenthetical clause on it.

2 a quick Google search proves me right.... It was GotY 1995

3 both of which I also just bought

4 An example:


5 Besides having an outlet for footnotes, which I think are cool after having read the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and especially after playing the IF game, which was probably the only video game in history to incorporate footnotes.

[TheYak]

That's good to hear.  I bought the game second-hand from someone else (though my net cost was closer to $3 US) and I've yet to play it.  I tried the demo, but most of it was spent approaching the camera with the Ego's head/hat tilted down, tilting it up quickly and whispering, "I'm Batman."  I'll have to actually try playing it instead of amusing myself. 

I recall it having interesting physical reactions, lighting and being one of the first with realistic shadow-casting but my hardware at the time crippled my experience.  As for Bloodrayne, be glad you never played it.  It was tripe.  Mediocre reviews were done by people hypnotized by breasteses.  It was nearly complete crap.  Never buy a slew of budget titles when experiencing gaming withdrawl.

[Vince Twelve]

As for Bloodrayne, be glad you never played it... It was nearly complete crap.

But the movie's gonna rule!  How could it not, with such an experienced and talented director?

The main character, The Stranger, had a trenchcoat that flapped as you turned with real-time physics. The light that he could mount to the end of his guns had such realism that you could forget it was a game (4), and the monsters actually looked like they were getting shot where you were shooting them, including different animations for the different types of weapons you were using against them. It had realistic blood spatter.

This is kind of the point I was trying to make.  When realistic physics are plausible, they're used not to improve gameplay, but to add bells and whistles to the graphics and a few more bullet points to the back of the box.

However, this does kind of highlight a good counter point to my argument:  While a moving cape and blood spatter don't add directly to the gameplay, they do add that "cool" factor that can make the game just that much more fun to play, and isn't the enjoyment of the player the ultimate goal?

That being said, even if the physics don't add to the gameplay, they can cut down game development time and costs.  Would you rather spend time in a 3d animation program animating the cape's many different possible movements, or would you rather just let the physics system calculate all of that real-time? 

Regardless, I conclude: physics, yay!  But physics cards, nay!  Because it's just another expensive thing that makes my crappy system unable to play all the latest games.

Thank god for 2d adventure games!

[esper]

However, this does kind of highlight a good counter point to my argument: While a moving cape and blood spatter don't add directly to the gameplay, they do add that "cool" factor that can make the game just that much more fun to play, and isn't the enjoyment of the player the ultimate goal?

heh... There was one problem, though. Imagine this:

It's the nineteen-twenties. You are the Stranger, paranormal investigator and exterminator. As you wander about in complete darkness, with your prototype nightvision goggles on to prevent the undead legions that lurk in the darkness from seeing your flashlight, you see movement out of the corner of your eye. Determined to get the drop on your target, you pull off the nightvision goggles, which switches you to a beautifully rendered 3D third person perspective. Your trenchcoat flaps about you as you rip your twin pistols from their holsters beneath it and aim, switching on the mounted flashlights as you do. Light fills the area, illuminating a huge, hairy Loupus Garou, or werewolf, as he dives past you and rips the throat from the townsperson you were leading to safety. Hurtling yourself backwards, your coat still flapping, you open fire on him. The eerie light your guns give off for a moment create a bright halo as you aim them at the camera, and the way the light bends around your quarry is almost ethereal. The shadows it casts are long and dark. You spin, following the fleeing Garou with a hail of gunfire, and your trenchcoat swirls about you.
   You hear the sound of the werewolf screaming as your silver-tipped bullets tear into his ribs, exploding outward behind him into the gloaming darkness as a thick black splatter of chunky, coagulated blood mixed with organ matter. The werewolf slumps to the ground, dead.

As you stand and dust yourself off, the overall coolness of the battle and the pleasure derived from the victory wear off as you realize your trenchcoat has somehow inexplicably gotten lodged inside your hat, and is now stretched unrealistically up, stiff as a board, and refuses to come out of the damn hat no matter how hard you shake the mouse back and forth in attempts to dislodge it.

I think this is why they model the animations rather than letting a physics engine take complete control. Nocturne was, as I have said, the coolest game ever... But it sucked when your coat got stuck inside your hat, or when the Stranger's walking animation would stall, and the blood you were tracking around on your shoes now painted a thick, straight line behind you you could write your name in cursive with. It totally added some (unwanted) humor, but took away the immersiveness which made the game so wonderful in the first place.

[Nikolas]

Thank god for 2d adventure games!

Yes I agree! Completely!

Just a small thing.

I believe that I'm creative. And while creating I tend to make my creations usefull. Now this word can have so many meaning and anybody can try to explain that. The thing is that sometimes, I just realised that music, is just...music.

And the better you make the music, the better it sounds, and the better job it does.

It's not all production or mastering or polishing.

But then again, unless we're talking about a genious like Mozart, Betthove, Prokofiev, Schnittke or whatever other name (all composers, well known), well the rest is crap in piano.

What I'm trying to say is that although the ideas behind a game, will always be a matter of thought, of deep thought and of experience (which makes a good 2d adventure game), for gods shake, I would love to see perfect graphics, with perfect music, with a physics card, taking care of a lot of things, leaving the CPU able to deal with a huge gameworld, or a really great gameplay.

Why great graphics, or movies, or whatever contradict good gameplay, or deep thougths, or anyway a good game.

My dreamm is an amzingin sight for ears, eyes, mind (and later in time, taste and smell)!
Really why not?

On the last point that Vince made: Yes I agree. But this is the nature of companies and of technology today. Things advance in such a pace that if we were to keep up with things we would need to buy a computer every 6 months. True! And everyobdy knows that!. Wel for me, I'm happy that I can get a hold on games, that 10-5 years ago I would only dream of playing. Cause I haven't bought qa game for like 15 years (I do believe the last one was Betrayal at Krondor). Now I can get this for free.

Well I don't care if I have to wait. After 10 years I'll get a really cheap physics card and buy every game that is out now.

Patience is a virtue... And costs nothing... hehe

[Ali]

I think Vince Twelve's 'Cool Factor' explains why physics cards sound so fun. I do doubt whether they would do a great deal to improve the 'Cool' of an adventure game, and I note that many of the games mentioned are at the FPS end of the spectrum.

My qualm would be with the word 'adventure' in the title of this thread. I think of all games, adventures would be the least able to make use of realistic physics.

On the other hand:

For some people adventure games are also about solving puzzles. For some it's more about solving puzzles.

I didn't mean to overlook puzzle solving, I just wasn't sure what realistic physics could add. Having thought about it, it would be a great deal of fun to be able to carve a hunk of rock into the shape of an idol (needless to say, I have no idea whether a physics card could facilitate that).

[InCreator]

Physics? Taking a load off from CPU might be a good idea, but I smell another big and noisy cooler in the case... And I already got 4 of them, thus making my machine sound like a jet.

Nah. I'm waiting for Geo-mod to come back. Nothing could be as fun as it was tunnelling in Red Faction!

[RickJ]

I just scanned tge PhysX page.  It seems to me this thing consists of both hardware and software.  Clearly it is meant to opeate on 3D models that likely contain additional information about the materials that comprise the models.   

So consequently, I don't see that this would have any effect or benefit for AGS or any other 2D game engine. 

I think realistic 3D game worlds would add to the enjoyment of an adventure game.  In such a world things happen in "real-time" so navigating such a world naturally requires "real-time" hand-eye interaction with the game.   The resut is something more like Tomb Raider than Fate of Atlantis.  I'm personally not bothered by this prospect but many AG pureists are.

[Risk]

But physics sschmysics; imagine when the AI card comes along, and the parser'll never be the same. Why smell corpses when you can interrogate people and make them tell where they hid the god dam thing instead.

Heh, that gives me a stupid idea: how about an Olfactory Card? lol.

But seriously, the AI technlogy we have today isn't quite good enough to make an entire card based soley on AI, so don't expect to see those for a while. However, realistic interaction would be an amazing feature. It would probably end up serving as a sort of psychotherapeutic device more than just an added feature for next-generation games.

[Paper Carnival]

The demos look cool, especially the water/lava/slime ones.

But how is it going to work? Will we have to own a physics card if we want to play a specific game? And are we going to be forced to upgrade it every once in a while like a graphics card? I suppose future consoles can easily support it, but what about the PC?

And I don't see how it could work well with adventure games, but I'm open minded.

[esper]

Battlecruiser Millenium had a sequel... I forget the name, but it involved war using every conceivable vehicle, from jeeps to subs to battlecruisers in orbit around the planet... I never got to play it, though, because it required a pixel shader and a vertex-somethingorother. Same thing with Myst and Caligari Truespace. Back in... ummm, I think 92 or 93, I couldn't play one or use the other because my graphics card didn't have a maths coprocessor. Therefore, this is nothing new. I believe the physics card will probably not be a card by itself, but will probably just be an enhanced graphics card. They would be stupid to make a lone card just for the sake of processing physics.

[Haddas]

Physics? Taking a load off from CPU might be a good idea, but I smell another big and noisy cooler in the case... And I already got 4 of them, thus making my machine sound like a jet.

Hah. Just wait til you've heard one of my 11 fans. The one with an outer powersupply and separate on/off. That, my friend is the jet. I call it Airforce 1.

http://www.tdrdesign.net/uploads/tschernobylfan.zip