I disagree completely that voice recognition is the optimal form of interface. Voice recognition software is error prone and slow in my experience. My cousin spent days training his to recognise his voice properly, even then it still fucked up every other word and it took him twice as long to write a doc as it would have done if he has typed it with his toes. Sure it may a lot better these days, but then what about LAN parties? Two people playing the game in the same room? What if you are playing late at night and you dont want complaints from the neighbours?

quote:
And about the costs of such technology. First of all, which one of you, who speak against it consider developing a game in the next months? So you don't have to worry! When someone, anyone reaches the point of implementing the voice recognition it'll be even better, faster and cheaper to do it, mark my words.

By that logic we may as well design our games to use mind control devices.

Edited by - Sandman on July 3, 2001 1:09:14 PM

You could always combine a few of the ideas. For instance, instead of having a mage cast a spell out of mind, make mages have to scribe the spell onto a scroll before casting. And, you can then combine the runic magic stuff, except the player has to choose which runes from an onscreen box, or whatever. So, now you have a whole bunch of runes that the player can choose from to compose his spell. He has to remember what rune does what, so he can say, click and drag the correct rune to the correct spot. Then, you can hide certain runes in books, tomes, scrolls, etc in the game, and make the player find them. Let them start with a generic "Magic" rune, and a rune that allows targeting of "Self" and "Other". This allows a starting mage to have the Spells "Magic Missile" and "Magic Shield". They can go find other runes, AOE runes, fire runes, etc. Perhaps there is a rune in this book, but it is written in some odd language, so you have to find someone who can speak that language to tell you what it does. Maybe that person tells you the wrong thing... You could base entire storylines off of it =).

Z.

There are good points and bad points to all system, and ways to work around the bad points.

Gesture system: It removes a level between you and the game, adding to suppension of belife. However, it dose need to be acurate, and if you want easy to draw, unique gestures, you will be limiting yourself. A RV Glove would be a great benifit here.

elemnts/runs: You could have a possible infinate amount of spells, and can also allow ''casting on the fly'' However, no one wants to memorize the human genome. One possible way around this is to impliment alias system were you could type /fireball instead of /fffffffffffffffffffffffffffireball. Think MUD.

Voice Cast: This one also adds to suppension of belife. Problems with this is the actual recognition (which is getting better all the time) and bandwidth. This is very much a problem if you want to send the voices of the sourounding 20-25 people to a 56k dial up. A possible sollution is to do the recognition on the client then send the command to the server. You would have to come up with some other way to warn people they are going to get hit with a fireball.

It would be interesting to see if there is a way to combine all of these systems into one.... That would take a bit of work though....

Streich

LAEUCHLI:

That IS a good point. The input device for the sound better be perfect, or background noise might just cause that virtual spellcaster to incinerate himself.

SANDMAN:

Problems with voice recognition software doesn''t mean it wouldn''t be the perfect tool for spellcasting. It just means that we''re not ready yet. The voice recognition would have to be able to distinguish between actual player command and any other noise. Like you mentioned, it would have to be able to distinguish between two players sitting right next to eachother.
Maybe it''s too early to implement it now, but I think that maybe in the next 10 years...

And by the way... one day we WILL have mind devices. I already saw a piece where scientists inserted sensors into a part of the mind where information is stored a split second before a person actually acts upon that information (just before you move your arm up, the info required to do that will pass through that part of the mind). Scientists are already discovering patterns within this part of the mind. The reason for this research is to give completely paralyzed people a tool to communicate with. Basically, it would be like a remote control directly implanted into your mind.

Well, maybe in 10 years time voice recognition software would be great, but it is pointless to try and design games for 10 years into the future. And if you want to find the "ultimate" interface, then its going to be the mind reading device. As game designers though, we should be a bit more realistic. Submitting a design doc to a publisher for a game based around mind reading devices is going to get you laughed out of the building even quicker than usual.

OK, to end this tread.
It obvious there are 2 opinions on the voice recognition.
One, the Sandman fraction: NO voice, NO VR, NO advanced tech, YES be as real as can be. Won''t use any of the above in their games, stick to the discussed type-a-lot-to-cast method.

Two, me and other fans of alternative tech: YES voice, YES VR, YES tech, YES advanced tech, YES be real. Willing to use the above methods in future projects.

And yes, voice recognition is real . I saw a demo on an Apple expo and the software made 2 mistakes in 20 mins of dictation, including punctuation and everything. I get to test it in my office on G3 on 366mhz. It run smooth and nice. Due to my bad enlish there were more mistakes, but that''s not the point.

Sorry guys, you have to live with it.

Boby Dimitrov
boby@shararagames.com
Sharara Games Team

BOBY:

No need to end this thread The voice recognition made us move of course, but we can still debate what kind of magic system each of us prefers or what our ideal system would be.

My ideal system:
Any system that makes it hard on the player. To me, the future of game design should focus more and more on the capabilities of the net. Right now, those capabilities are not too great (with people like me still using 56k modems), but in the future, I bet gaming on the web will grow and keep growing until it''s big enough to eat me alive. As magic should always be a part of a world (otherwise it''s no fun to me), not completely overpowering, there have to be game devices in place to somewhat keep players from all becoming mages. I think the number one device could be to just make spellcasting hard. Let them jump up and down all they want, we''re not making it easy on them just because they all want to play powerwizard.

The next important thing for my ideal system, would be that it somewhat simulates the way the ''established'' spellcasting techniques are (with ''established'' I mean, the way spellcasting takes place in our favorites novels). No need for realism, but I just want more elements involved.

As mentioned above, placing candles on a pentagram, holding certain ingredients in hand, singing incantations, making intricate gestures, focusing the mind etc, could all be made part of spells.

Offhand remark 1: This is the longest-running thread I''ve ever spawned.
Offhand remark 2: Boby, no good reason to end this thread. This wasn''t intended as a discussion of voice/vr vs. none, and it hasn''t degenerated into that either (yet, at least).

And now, for the relevant replies...

quote:
silvermyst
Why would it have to be turn based?
Why not force players to type fast or die?

We''re playing an RPG, not Quake. IMHO, players of RPGs are *at least* a little more interested in thinking than straight-forward, "kill ''em all"-esque speed combat. Even in the action-RPG realm (Diablo, Nox, et al.), typing speed should not come into play. (Typing tutors, perhaps... )

quote:
streich
Ok, lets start at the beginning, the basic fire spell, ''f''. You cast it. Your hand lights on fire. Hrm... Did it hurt? No, probably not, your a fire mage after all. But you really didn''t want your hand to burst into flame did you (well, mabey), you wanted fire to fly across at that other guy over there (he is a water make, they make funny noises when hit with fire), so you add some air. Now your spell is ''fa''. You cast it, it flies over and hits the water mage. He gose ''s''. He starts shouting at you. You deside to hit him harder, so you add some more heat and cast ''ffa''. It hits him and he gose ''sssss''. Now he is scared. *EG* He starts to run. You need your spell to go farther/faster, you add more air. Now you have ''ffaa''. Unfortunatly you miss this time. He is quick.... Ok, lets make it expload by adding earth. Now we have ''ffeeaa'', which is a fire ball that will expload on impact and flies across the screen. Now you have use for other elements!.

Wonderful! This is kind of what I was getting at in one of my last posts--this is *truly* casting spells by components, rather than the Nox system where A-G cast a spell, and QWER change pages. RRA--that has no relevance to the spell. But, your ffa does (although couldn''t the air blow the fire out? )

quote:
MatrixCubed
You mention FF and Diablo in the list of RPGs... since these games are more combat- than story-oriented, I don''t think including them in the group of ''magic as an art'' list of RPGs is acceptable.

Well...I don''t really count FF as combat-based, although you may grab that from the murder-based XP system. (That, of course, is a completely different discussion.) Would it have made you feel better had I mentioned Daggerfall in there? "Historically," magic has always been an art, regardless of the alignment of the game (combat-oriented vs. story-driven, which could be interesting to discuss here too.) But naturally, think what you want. On that note, I have to completely disagree with your praise of the gesture system--the mouse is entirely to finicky for it to work well, especially in a frenetic environment. I''m straying to the combat-oriented side again, but as those seem to be the more popular RPGs (offbase assumption), it''s relevant. Have you played Nox, where half of the spells have to be targeted by the mouse pointer? But wait: the mouse pointer also controls your direction. And there aren''t any places for the thinking wizard to take cover, even for a second in most cases, to properly target his spell. Now, mix this with the concept of gestures--it''s not going to work, unless the spell release is time-delayed, and even then, you''ll still have two conflicting uses of the mouse at any given time.

At least I''m getting intelligent opposition, though...

DRAQZA:

I still don''t think it would need to be turn based. Most rpg real time games I''ve played have casting spells take a certain amount of time. Some spells take about 8 seconds to complete for example in Everquest.

I think 8 seconds should be more than enough to type even a 10 letter combination and hit enter.

To prevent ''speedtypers'' from dominating just insert a set time delay.

Don''t get me wrong, I don''t want spellcasting to become like Quake, I want to keep the strategy. I just want to make casting a spell more of a game by itself. Somewhat of an arcade game if you want.

Well, I love a good topic about Magic Systems, but I have to say that if Voice Recog was available, why not allow players to create their own "hotkeys" of spells? Wouldn''t it be hilarious if you hotkeyed "Shit" and "****" and other expletives to do weird tasks for you. How funny would it be when you had a mental block and you needed to cast a shield and you say "shit! What is that spell again" and ''shit'' is linked with the spell for blowing vapourous gas from your anus?

Fun times for all I think. Or maybe I should stop sniffing glue