I've been playing a bunch of FPS games with my new 3D glasses, and the characters kind of run like zombies in all the games, whereas actual soldiers are a bit more agile, like Olympic athletes that die if they finish in the bottom 65%. Anyways, I was thinking about how movement works in a more physical environment than common, the one that is frequently portrayed in video games.

My idea is to make a first person shooter game, like modern warfare 2. Movement is no longer handled through wasd, or those could be for slow movement and controls would be as normal. Pressing mouse2 or space or some other button would cause the character to spring forward with a burst of speed, while also honoring friction and physics to allow characters to jump towards the cursor hard into a wall or other object, then jump off it by spinning around and jumping in a new direction as they hit it, as per the rules of physics. In fact 3D human movement could potentially be modeled as a 3d sphere that is 'sticky' and can thrust hard in any direction by pushing off a touching/adjancet object that is grippable, so no smooth polished surfaces, but natural surfaces can be grabbed and flung with a % of maximum power based on how good the grip is, and this high speed throw based movement is the way to do proper gunfighting. Note that the gun requires two hands for the most part, although it can be slung or held with one hand for some grab manuvers, albeit with a penalty to aiming again, although it is possible to move like a cheetah and also line up the boomstick at the same time. It might also be good to play the game at a reduced time speed, since people tend to focus more when bullets are in the air, this would also apply to all other game types like mw2, where you could play the game at half speed or tenth speed or whatever the server setting/votesetting is.

Good grief have you ever been through basic training? Soldiers are tough dudes but they certainly aren't human pinballs. It would be an enormous tactical disadvantage for your battalion to be running into hostile territory at full speed with no way to navigate but by bouncing off walls. Play a bit of Counter-Strike; the animation might not be IK-enhanced and expressive, but it's a really very realistic tactical combat simulation. America's Army isn't bad either.

But realism aside, the concept still sounds like a lot of fun. It reminds me a bit of Vanquish, or the upcoming Brink. And I agree that for high-speed action, inertia is very poorly represented in most games. I never understood games that made your character get winded after running for thirty seconds but didn't bother go through the trouble of designing acceleration.

My biggest concern with your concept is that it won't be very playable in first person, which sounds like your plan. Especially actions like quickly turning around by kicking off a wall seem like they'd be thwarted by the lack of peripheral vision and other senses. Heck, the mechanics you have in mind resemble a lot more successful platformers than anything else.

That might work better in a single-player or turn-based game, allowing the action to be paused while you lined up your next movement. I'm thinking now of Laser Squad Nemesis, and several other games that I think would be a lot more interesting if the play was choreographed in a turn-by-turn way, then stitched together into a blazing replay of awesome moves, without a lot of the wall-bumping and accidental crouching that you get in real-time shooters.

I had an idea similar to this.

Im my idea each character had a "soft" collision boundary (either mesh, box or sphere) that extended outside the hard (or the type used now) collision boundary.

When this soft solision boundary was collided with then the game would look at the motion the player was attempting and animate the character accordingly. This soft boundary would not prevetn the character from moving, but it might slow it down (but not necesarily) or do some other action.

For example:

If you had two characters trying to move past each other in a tight coridor, then as they approached each other, their soft collision boundaries would hit, and the game would have the characters animate so that they appeared to walk sideways past each other.

Or, if you were trying to squeeze through a small gap, then the character might turn side on, slow down, or even duck (if the passage also had a low ceiling).

In the case of small protrusions in the ground (like a low wall). The character would be animated so as to either vault over it, or some other action.

In the case of a high wall. If the player pushes into the wall, the character would lean with their back against the wall and slide along it as the player moved (like they were trying to sneak up on someone). But if the player was just standing next to the wall without pushing into it, then the character would just stand there as normal. You could even have a character standing near a wall lean on it as part of the idel animation

This soft colision frame would allow a more natrual way for a character to interact with the environment because it would give the character some awareness of the geometry and objects around them without needing the character to completely collide with the object or geometry.