I hope you guys don't mind me posting more pictures. This is my next try. One cool thing about this method is that I can still let the user rotate the camera, but just limit the amount. The bad thing is that I'm not sure how well this will work with more complex rooms. I might have to program some kind of automatic swaping system, but I would really hate to do that.



Ignore the redundant textures. I'm just playing around for now.

First I tried lowering the entire front row, including the corners, but quickly changed it to what you see above. Any opinions? Oh, and the room is quite a bit bigger long-ways because I had modeled it incorrectly before.

To be honest, I keep trying to think of some way to stick to the full walls. I'm wondering if something could be done with the camera to perhaps make it automatically roll to look straight down when the player walks close to the front walls. Rotating in this manner would not change input directions. But at the same time, the player would have to be able to walk all the way to the wall for the camera to tilt all the way down. This means if something was sitting next to the wall, the camera may not be capable of turning to look all the way. As long as it's impossible for the player to rotate the camera to scan every corner of the room, they wouldn't feel compelled to do so (nothing to miss). So wouldn't this fix all of the problems? Or are there more that I'm not considering?

Anyway, thanks for opinions.

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Original post by Jiia It's not that important. It's just really cool. I didn't say it's not an action game. It's extremely action-oriented. Real-time combat. Running presents an entirely new arsenal of combat attacks and maneuvers. I have to ask what you mean about memorizing a shift key, though. I don't follow. You obviously have something against running :P

So its action oriented with real time combat? Then why did you write this in the very first post of the thread:

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edit: I Forgot to mention there will be very little if any real-time combat in these invironnments.

Now you yourself are saying that variable speed movement from sneaking to running is not important, its just really cool...obviously that is not a good sign. I really don't think you have thought this through...I don't have rage against this sort of thing, its the principal of implamenting a largely unimportant "uber cool" feature and forceing players to bend to your poor design choices.

Besides if players are going to be running much more then walking or sneaking about in your game (and this will be a definate)...then WTF make them use an additional key to move about in a timely fashion?...it makes so much more sense to have them run by defualt and then have them hold the shift or some other key to walk.

But then in the end this is all you can come up with as a reason for includeing such a multiple speed movement feature:

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They have many uses. Walking is important for staying inconspicuous. Sneaking is obviously useful. And running gets you there faster. It also uses up stamina while in battle.

Obviously all of that is entirely focused on realtime combat...which you already made clear wasn't going to happen much in these enviroments...so the net gain of haveing such a self described unimportant (but "cool") gameplay feature is next to null. As such to include such a feature is not the wisest design decision one could make IMHO.

But hey, you can do what you want, its your game afterall...Just be prepared for some player fallout over such issues.

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Original post by MSW So its action oriented with real time combat? Then why did you write this in the very first post of the thread: Quote: edit: I Forgot to mention there will be very little if any real-time combat in these invironnments.

Because combat will most likely never take place in small houses. The key phrases are "very little if any" and "these invironnments".

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Now you yourself are saying that variable speed movement from sneaking to running is not important, its just really cool...obviously that is not a good sign. I really don't think you have thought this through...I don't have rage against this sort of thing, its the principal of implamenting a largely unimportant "uber cool" feature and forceing players to bend to your poor design choices.

You're not even making sense. You're just running around in circles. The movement speed changes smoothly along with analog magnitude. The user doesn't have to bend to anything. They press an analog stick and the guy moves at whatever speed they push it. Without a stick, there are no controlled variations other than the preset 3. But the movement speed still smoothly changes from normal to fast and so on. As a side effect, the user could actually keep tapping run as they move to remain at a speed between walk and run, but it's completely useless to do so other than to see the effect. You could compare this feature to animation frames or unimportant sound effects. Go ahead and remove them if you want. No one is going to agree that the result is better.

[bragging] Not only have I thought it through, my character engine is done. I'm not going to try to convince you that it kicks until I have space to throw up a demo, so I'll just say I'm estatically happy with it, even after playing the newest Prince of Persia games. I don't think I can improve it any further. It's the single best aspect of my engine, or my hobby as a developer so far. [/bragging]

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Besides if players are going to be running much more then walking or sneaking about in your game (and this will be a definate)...then WTF make them use an additional key to move about in a timely fashion?...it makes so much more sense to have them run by defualt and then have them hold the shift or some other key to walk.

There is already such an option that exists to let them do just that, and believe it or not, it's on by default. There is no information that would lead you to believe I would exclude such a needed feature. You're just running in circles again.

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But hey, you can do what you want, its your game afterall...Just be prepared for some player fallout over such issues.

Unfortunately, I can't mold my game to meet the demands of every crazy fetish I come across.

Fetish?

*sigh

Sorry, but you posted here wanting opinions, I gave you mine.

If you just wanted graphics opinions, then don't volunteer other gameplay aspects that you don't consider open for disscussion.

And for the record I never once questiond how smooth the transistions were between the different movement rates. My whole point was that, from the info you provided, the variable movement rate feature, in my opinion, seemed largely useless.

I'll have to assume you are MSW. No way of knowing, but since the post and opinion is consistent, I guess it doesn't matter [wink]

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Original post by Anonymous Poster Sorry, but you posted here wanting opinions, I gave you mine.

First you seemed to be arguing that I should completely discard different movement speeds, but now you're saying that I shouldn't give characters the ability to move at any speed between the three main speeds. So which is your opinion?

Now perhaps you can try to clearly explain why having thousands of degrees of movement speeds is such a bad feature? The reasons I've heard so far were "cool is not enough of a reason", and "users have to bend to your design". First of all, this is a video game, cool is always enough. If you disagree, you're obviously not cut out for this type of work. The second reason doesn't even make sense. The user doesn't have to even twitch to get the smooth transitions to work. They're just there to be pretty if you're using a keyboard, and there to give you complete control when you're using an analog stick. Mario 64, Doom, Prince of Persia, GTA, Half Life, Unreal Tournament, and countless other games all impliment the feature (to some degree) which you consider worthless and claim that will cause player fallout.

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If you just wanted graphics opinions, then don't volunteer other gameplay aspects that you don't consider open for disscussion.

I think it all started with me giving a reason that placing a cursor over an object wouldn't work. But that's beside the point. I don't mind opinions or suggestions on any aspect of my game. I just can't make sense of yours, and it doesn't look like I'll be doing so any time soon.

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And for the record I never once questiond how smooth the transistions were between the different movement rates.

Maybe it's just my pure dumbess, but I had no idea you did either. Did I say something that sounded like I was thinking this? And actually, it doesn't really have smoothness. Or rather the smoothness is infinite to a degree. It's like increasing a number from 1 to 2 to 3. There are any number of additions you can make between those digits. You can get from 1 to 2 in one step (+1), or billions (+0.00inf1). The smoothness is only limited by the analog stick and floating point math. So I wasn't trying to defend the smoothness of the transitions, just defending the point of having the transitions at all.

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My whole point was that, from the info you provided, the variable movement rate feature, in my opinion, seemed largely useless.

You would probably hate the fact that my characters can walk backwards and sideways, and have the same infinite blend between any directions. Walking in this manner doesn't really serve any use other than to make the character seem incredibly real as he turns and moves. It's also really handy when holding a shield while defending. The character can retreat while facing his enemy.

This game looks really wicked, will you be posting a demo soon?

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Original post by Dancin_Fool This game looks really wicked, will you be posting a demo soon?

I really hope so :)
I don't have any web space. I could probably get the file size down to less than five or ten megs for a small demo, but I don't even have half of a meg. If you know of any free webspace without horrible bandwidth restrictions, let me know.

Thanks a bunch for the complement. I needed it.

hasweb.com.

Go. Get it. Get it now. It is awesome.
(Webhosting, not the demo. I'm not advertising for hasweb. Just go get it now.)

Another really wicked free web hosting is www.atgig.com up to 15 meg files. I think they offer a gig of space and 100 gigs of bandwidth.

Hey, thanks for the links. I'm checking hasweb.com out now. I'm considering buying a domain as well :D

Sorry for the bump. I just wanted to say thanks.

Here are a couple small-progress images to make the post seem less useless:




I'm not completely happy with the door's appearance (textures) yet. It seems to stand out too much (I think maybe it needs to be darker). I also changed the wall-inside textures, but I'm not sure I'm happy with that either. I'm not much of an artist :P - Anyway, the camera can be rotated around about 45 degrees in each direction. I'm pretty sure I'm sticking with this setup.

To make extremely complex rooms, I plan to split the area up by it's doorways or halls. Basically, both areas would be in the same map, but offset by a decent position from each other. When the character walks through the doorway or hatch, he instantly teleports (hopefully I can hide him vanishing or appearing) to the other position on the map, and the camera smoothly scrolls over to that location. It should end up looking like a transition effect, but in reality, it's doing exactly what it looks like it's doing - just scrolling over to it.

Feel free to yell at me if you think I'm doing something stupid.