Status effects are a good idea. You might want to take a look at some material about different types of wounds. An extremity fleshwound with a 9mm FMJ isn''t particularly debilitating, but depending on overall health and fitness, mindset, training, adrenaline levels, etc., the victim may go into shock. If a major blood vessel is severed/ruptured, gradual degredation of combat effectiveness will arise, along with symptoms like modified metabolic rates, impaired senses, dementia, etc. It''s very complex. If you want realism, go for actual wound simulation. Give people limps, and cripplingly intense pain, and broken bones. Make it possible to knock the breath out of your opponent, inflicting panic and loss of motor skills. All of this would require volumes of ballistic physics and extremely precise hit detection.

I''m wondering, do you want this to apply to the hero character, or to the enemies, or both? Of course, you can always fudge it. In the Urban Terror mod for Quake 3, the location of your hit was reported. Sometimes you''d hit them in the "head" or in the "chest" or in the "leg", but every once in a while you''d see that you shot somebody in the "lung", or the "liver". There was a bleeding/limping/bandaging system, a la Action Quake, and an injury effected overal stamina (for sprinting and jumping), running speed (if appropriate) and steadiness of weapon (reflected by random innacuracy - no view swim). Pefect Dark features a tranquilizer gun that totally screws you up if it hits you: View swim, color distortion, "tracers" from lights and weapon innaccuracy are all symptoms. I believe that Auake 3 Team fortress employed some good gas/tranquilizer/smokescreen effects, but I didn''t play much.

Please note, these are all FPS games. If you want to simulate these effects in an RPG, just do like Fallout did, but on a more precise scale. If you''re going for a more real-time look, take a look at Rune. It''s a lousy game, but hit detection was innovative, and localized blood splatters and lost limbs were always fun. Especially when you neatly decapitate a guy whom''s been taking hit after hit with your sissy little sword. I''m fairly sure that was random.

What about simulating this in a MMORPG/FPS situation?

How would one implement an acceptable level of realism, and RPG''ness in that type of enviroment?

quote: Original post by Iron Chef Carnage
Status effects are a good idea. You might want to take a look at some material about different types of wounds. An extremity fleshwound with a 9mm FMJ isn''t particularly debilitating, but depending on overall health and fitness, mindset, training, adrenaline levels, etc., the victim may go into shock. If a major blood vessel is severed/ruptured, gradual degredation of combat effectiveness will arise, along with symptoms like modified metabolic rates, impaired senses, dementia, etc. It''s very complex. If you want realism, go for actual wound simulation. Give people limps, and cripplingly intense pain, and broken bones. Make it possible to knock the breath out of your opponent, inflicting panic and loss of motor skills. All of this would require volumes of ballistic physics and extremely precise hit detection.

that would be neat, even though it would require A LOT of work. I like the idea of lots of damage effects, but I wantthe player to know what theyall mean. Not that he shouldknow evetry number behiundit, but still understand the meaning of for instance getting an "Adrenaline Rush".


I''m wondering, do you want this to apply to the hero character, or to the enemies, or both?
Both.
The player should win, not because he has 1000 more hp than his enemies, or because they suck.He should win because he is smarter than them... This means my maps are going to take a lot of time designing, but in the end I think it''ll be a lot more fun

"Of course, you can always fudge it. In the Urban Terror mod for Quake 3, the location of your hit was reported. Sometimes you''d hit them in the "head" or in the "chest" or in the "leg", but every once in a while you''d see that you shot somebody in the "lung", or the "liver". There was a bleeding/limping/bandaging system, a la Action Quake, and an injury effected overal stamina (for sprinting and jumping), running speed (if appropriate) and steadiness of weapon (reflected by random innacuracy - no view swim). "

That''s pretty cool, and it''s likely I''ll try to implement something like that.


"Pefect Dark features a tranquilizer gun that totally screws you up if it hits you: View swim, color distortion, "tracers" from lights and weapon innaccuracy are all symptoms. I believe that Auake 3 Team fortress employed some good gas/tranquilizer/smokescreen effects, but I didn''t play much."

I''mll try to design the game so that sneaking can be a vital part of the game- if that''s how the player wanna play it.. so yeah, quite crossbows or blowpipes with some kind of quick poison is definitely going to be in it..


"Please note, these are all FPS games. If you want to simulate these effects in an RPG, just do like Fallout did, but on a more precise scale. If you''re going for a more real-time look, take a look at Rune. It''s a lousy game, but hit detection was innovative, and localized blood splatters and lost limbs were always fun. Especially when you neatly decapitate a guy whom''s been taking hit after hit with your sissy little sword. I''m fairly sure that was random. "

Fallout is my master :D I''ll do whatever it wants....hehe, yeah Fallout 1 & 2 are to my knowledge the best and fun RPGs out there. Those, and Avernum


"What about simulating this in a MMORPG/FPS situation?

How would one implement an acceptable level of realism, and RPG''ness in that type of enviroment? "

I think that would be very hard.... if you implemented this kinda realism in an MMORPG...you''d have to make sure there were some way that newbies could sneak up on a 104 level warrior and simply kill him by shooting him in the neck...

My project, Pentaverse, uses random status ailments to simulate real injury.

For every 5% of HP damage taken below 50%, your character gets a random penalty (usually a -10% penalty to one physical attribute or slightly slower movement). One random penalty is removed for every 10% of HP healed by spells or effects. If a spell heals the character for 37% of his max HP, then he gets to choose and remove up to three penalties. Unless the character is healed up to 100% health all at once, there will probably be a few remaining penalties attached to even a character with full health. These disappear 24 hours after the injury that caused them was taken or canbe removed with special "Remove Injury" spells.

Stregnth decreases, etc. ARE cumulative from multiple penalties to the same ability score and can conceivably result in a character with 0 Stregnth who is completely paralyzed due to damage taken.

0 HP means that a character is unconscious and -50% HP means that a character is dead. For example, a character with 100 HP will be unconscious at 0 HP, die at -50 HP, and be unresurrectable if she is reduced to -100 HP. Characters can be attacked after they are dead.

The ONLY way to die in Pentaverse is by having 0 Constitution, but every 5% of max HP damage below 0 results in a -10% penalty to Constitution that is unremovable until the character has 1 or more HP. Thus, a character with -50% HP will have 0% Constitution resulting in death. The practical upshot of all of this is that characters who are brought back from the brink of death have something to show for it: a severe Constitution penalty (and thus less HP!) that can only be removed by a high-level healer.

Neat, eh?

Yeah that''s a pretty cool system

Duran, what''s the status of Pentaverse? Is there a web page or something? It sounds cool, and I''d like to see a more thorough description, but I don''t want to booger up a whole thread to hear about it.

Srekel, remember that if you make the player character just as easy to kill as the enemies, players will spend a lot of their time cursing your name. Unless you''ve totally memorized all the maps, you need a certain amount of room for error. You''re bound to be surprised at least once, and if you can be killed by anyone who gets the drop on you (not unrealistic, but not particularly fun) then you''re going to spend a lot of time dead.

It would be like playing Rainbow Six with only one guy on the team; you''d get ganked every ten seconds. The only reason Rainbow Six was possible even with big fire teams was the fact that the enemies were dumb as bricks and always started out in the same positions. The heartbeat sensor helps out, too, but it hurts my pride to use it. I''ve been formally trained in clearing buildings and neutralizing armed threats, but I have about a 78% success rate with Rogue Spear, and my guys get shot on a fairly regular basis, although I attribute that to the AI for the team members being about as good as the terrorist AI. In all honesty, though, I got shot a few times in real-life training. You''d be amazed at the little places a 6''3", 280-lb bodybuilder can hide himself when he wants to teach his students a valuable lesson.

Another random anecdote regarding perfect realism in video games: In the police academy, we were learning defensive tactics against an attacker armed with a gun. We were discussion responses to having a gun pressed against the back of your skull. The choices are fairly limited, and most end in death, so we focused on the two or three that didn''t. One of the cadets asked our instructor (the 6''3" bodybuilder mentioned above) what happens if the bad guy is familiar with our methods and anticipates them. The instructor addressed the whole class and said, "There''s no way that you can win every fight. Sometimes, you die."

In a video game, when you are in an unsurvivable situation, you "take a hit", or you lose some HP, or whatever. If you emulate life to the extent that you drop dead on these occasions, the game had better have a wicked gentle learning curve. Either that, or else implement a "luck" system, by which you get by on your James Bond-style good fortune. Some people refer to this as the ''Stormtrooper Principle" Even the best-trained enemy troops miss the hero the first five times. In multiplayer, one-hit kills are okay, because there''s no shame in being blasted by your friend, but when you get plugged by a conventional AI enemy, people make fun of you.

quote:
Srekel, remember that if you make the player character just as easy to kill as the enemies, players will spend a lot of their time cursing your name. Unless you've totally memorized all the maps, you need a certain amount of room for error. You're bound to be surprised at least once, and if you can be killed by anyone who gets the drop on you (not unrealistic, but not particularly fun) then you're going to spend a lot of time dead.

Heh, yeah you're right.. but since my RPG is in the future, I'm guessing the player character will have access to infrared goggles and stuff like that. Remember that guards generally don't have that sort of equipment, unless you're facing like the King's Elite Guards, or something.

I hope that since the player knows that his character can die quite easily, he won't take too big risks. If he thinks a room is full of guards he can't handle, he won't enter. He'll wait until he's more skilled and has better equipment. Or, he might try to simply sneak past the room, or go a completely different way. Or he could wait for each one of them to go to the bathroom, and silently kill them in the hall..

When they start to wonder where the hell their friends went, they'll probably go out in a group. At this point, the character better have some sort of grenade, or a full-automatic rifle.


I play airsoft in real life, it's a kind of paintball, but with a more realistic tune (?) to it. Sneaking around in the forest, looking for someone to "kill", pumps up the adrenaline a lot.. And there is NO way you can survive a game by running through the woods shooting where-ever you see someone from the other team. You need to wait and be seriously quiet until you're able to hit someone.

quote:
In all honesty, though, I got shot a few times in real-life training. You'd be amazed at the little places a 6'3", 280-lb bodybuilder can hide himself when he wants to teach his students a valuable lesson.

Off topic, and just out of curiousity, what kind of weapons did you use during these trainings? I assume you used paintball, or possibly airsoft...? I have a hard time beliveing you used real guns

quote:
"There's no way that you can win every fight. Sometimes, you die."

That's true, that's why there's a Save/Load feature in RPGs heheh

quote:
In a video game, when you are in an unsurvivable situation, you "take a hit", or you lose some HP, or whatever. If you emulate life to the extent that you drop dead on these occasions, the game had better have a wicked gentle learning curve. Either that, or else implement a "luck" system, by which you get by on your James Bond-style good fortune. Some people refer to this as the 'Stormtrooper Principle" Even the best-trained enemy troops miss the hero the first five times. In multiplayer, one-hit kills are okay, because there's no shame in being blasted by your friend, but when you get plugged by a conventional AI enemy, people make fun of you.

Luck is interesting... But since I don't have any stats (such as strength or intelligence), just skills, I don't know how I would implement it. It's not impossible to implement in a logical way, just... hmm..

I do have a skill called Dodge, which I suppose are going to have that meaning; not so easily getting hit by a bullet. Hmm.. I have to make sure that there are always enough quests so that the player can choose one, in which the opposition the character will meet always will be slightly worse than he is.



[edited by - Srekel on December 11, 2002 7:16:30 PM]

"That''s true, that''s why there''s a Save/Load feature in RPGs"

Not good forcing players to abuse the interrupt feature in a game. If you''re counting on players reloading rather than avoiding getting killed in the first place, then you lose most of the realism you gained from having an easy-death combat system...

We used Airsoft in search training, yes. I''m sure you''ve taken one in the back when you least expected it. Not pleasant, but an effective reminder to check inside the cabinets and to keep your light off when you aren''t using it.

I agree about the save/load feature being abused, but if you can get through a game without needing it, the game was too easy. You need to strike a balance between waltzing through the game and getting sacked every time you open a door.

If your objective is realism, lose the "dodge" skill. Nobody dodges bullets in real life. The time from the gun going off to the bullet hitting the target is negligible. If someone shoots at you and you don''t get shot, it''s for one of two reasons: Either it wasn''t aimed at you properly or else something stopped or deflected the round in flight. Replace dodging with zones of cover and enemy error, and you''ll do okay. Remember to take into account that hitting moving targets is hard, firing accurately while you yourself are moving is harder still, and shooting at a moving target while moving is nigh impossible.

If this game is going to be based on a realistic portrayal of death, then you''ll need to make sure that the player isn''t the only one with instincts for self-preservation. Try to build the AI such that things like cover fire work properly, so you can shoot at a bunch of guys and they''ll scatter to cover rather than standing their ground and blasting at you Terminator-style. Nothing sucks more than trying to stay alive while fighting against guys who don''t care if they die. Mutally Assured Destruction arises easily, especially if there are grenades around. You might actually want to capitalize on this, and include psychopathic enemies who will gladly fill their shorts with C4 and rush you, but don''t make every enemy capable of this.

Current battles:
- Visual vs Gameplay
- Realism vs Fun

Looks like this thread is about the second.
Save/Load, that''s boring, why should I DIE when I loose a battle, I could become prisonner, or whatever, there''s no NEED to kill the player.

Is it fun to reload a game ? not at all.

What''s no fun shouldn''t be in a game at all.
You need to save because you don''t play the game straight, and you need to load when you start the game again to go back where you were, that''s all.

Simply stop using the same games mechanics because they are popular, popular != fun, nice or smart.

Don''t imitate, innovate !


-* So many things to do, so little time to spend. *-