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Biggest problem with these games (I've found, anyway) is that your sword controller cannot magically stop in mid air when your virtual sword hits another sword
by antipax 14y ago
Biggest problem with these games (I've found, anyway) is that your sword controller cannot magically stop in mid air when your virtual sword hits another sword or a wall or whatever. It really ruins the immersion.
- yummyfajitas 14y agoIt will also have to drastically downplay the importance of footwork. In a real swordfight, where to put your feet is nearly as important as where to put the sword.
- jQueryIsAwesome 14y agoOr you can use Kinect or Wii controllers on each limb like this guys do: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=erMi8kxYFIE http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=erMi8kxYFIE
- zdw 14y agoThis. I took a not-for-credit intramural fencing and kendo classes back in college, and 3/4's of both classes was about learning footwork and movement. Sword fighting also generally comes down to a few seconds of motion and whoever judged their opponents movements better. Neither of these would be present in a game that wasn't full motion capture.
- TrevorJ 14y agoThis is really true. There are a lot of great stage combat clubs and groups around the country, after a certain point, it seems like it might just be more fun to go spar for real, or go learn some real choreography if you want the added 6 layers of safety (a must if you are using steel, IMO).
- eblume 14y agoThat was my thought as well. If I need to buy some fancy hardware and swing it around to play a game... I'll probably just go buy a practice foil and sign up for a class instead!
- lionhearted 14y ago> In a real swordfight, where to put your feet is nearly as important as where to put the sword. Arguably more important. I fenced epee in university, and our coach was a little bit old school -- we went weeks just doing footwork before getting a weapon put in hand.
- jamesjyu 14y agoThis is also true for a plethora of sports games as well, specifically racquet based games. Swinging the racquet is less than half the battle -- footwork, in most physical types of activities, is much more important. Omnidirectional treadmill? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omnidirectional_treadmill http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omnidirectional_treadmill
- msutherl 14y agoThese things are ridiculous. Researcher: "We need an omnidirectional treadmill, but how?" Engineer: "Oh, that's easy. We'll just make a gigantic TREADMILL OF TREADMILLS."
- eru 14y agoThat engineer would make a good Haskell programmer.
- warmwaffles 14y agoor lisp, take your pick
- SideburnsOfDoom 14y ago> Omnidirectional treadmill? About 3:50 into the video entitled "The weeds" Mr. Stepehnson says "We're going to start with an off-the-shelf controller that anyone can buy today. This eliminates the risk that we'll blow this by failing on some ambitious custom hardware project. From there we'll iterate based partly on your feedback. " So no treadmills at first.
- twelvechairs 14y agoThis is why I don't like games talking about how 'realistic' they will be. Firstly, because anything that runs on a standard computer will be far from reality anyway, and secondly because often users don't actually want reality (eg. most FPSs have far from realistic walking speeds - for good reason. Also stylised graphics etc.). That said, the concept of different styles of swordplay is great - and having more 'realism' in that is something I think is pretty admirable.
- Mvandenbergh 14y agoSurely any game where you can respawn even once is already extremely realistic. Would anyone want to play a war simulator FPS that starts with a cutscene of the Normandy landings and has a 50% chance of immediately being cut down by a machine gun whereupon the game quits and deletes itself off your hard drive?
- vacri 14y agoDon't get bogged down in the pedantry of realism. When 'realism' is mentioned in gaming, it really means 'realism that assists immersion'. You'll occasionally see articles about balancing realism versus gameplay - if something is real enough to turn you off the game (like boredom from slow movement speed), then it's reducing your immersion.
- eupharis 14y agoJohan Andersson, the designer of historical strategy games (Europa Universalis), put it best: "When realism gets in the way of fun, fun wins."
- alinajaf 14y agoAnd intimately related, distance. In Kendo at least you win or lose by knowing where the cutting part (the forward 1/4 - 1/3) of your sword is going to be at the moment you make contact. This means thinking strategically about distance (e.g. I can feint a forearm strike and still have enough space to cut across the abdomen if she raises her sword to block.)
- crag 14y agoIf it were a real [sword] fight most couldn't play. It's a game. Certain allowances have to made for ease of use. I mean, do you really think COD is "real combat"?
- stefs 14y agoi almost quit the cod4 single player campaign because it was a bit too ... maybe not realistic, but stressful. i thought to myself: war is hell, so why do i want to play a game that tries to capture a soldiers misery? "most couldn't play" - but they could learn to play (as long as losing isn't fatal for the player). some games strive to be realistic above all else (some car racing games), because they are tailored for the ultra-enthusiasts.
- lloeki 14y agoCombine Kinect with the controller. I'm more concerned with haptic feedback.
- justin66 14y agoI had a kendo instructor who said that footwork was 80% of the physical side of it. A fencing instructor said something similar. Boxers and boxing coaches also understand this.
- acgourley 14y agoYep, that and the controller has no weight. To make a realistic game you would then need to make the character have a max swing agility (slow than the player) and also give the character a stamina bar. Anyway that's not to say you can't have fun sword fighting motion games. It just means you can't approximate reality 1:1 in all dimensions. But you can still approximate reality if you just accept the control dimension will be abstract! Consider that Sim City uses an abstract interface to simulate city planning. Surely thats not the interface real city planners use (meetings, proposals) but it's still approximating a reality of city planning much more closely than other games.
- saulrh 14y agoSwords are a lot lighter than people think, even the heaviest armor in use (completely different from the ceremonial stuff) was much less restrictive than usually believed, and the average video gamer is significantly less fit than the average medieval soldier. I suspect that if you used a wiimote or a kinect-tracked stick things would all balance out. It would still require some abstraction, true, but not quite that much. [1] European longswords weigh 1.5 kg on average: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longsword http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longsword [2] Guy doing gymnastics in armor: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xm11yAXeegg http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xm11yAXeegg
- dfc 14y ago> the average video gamer is significantly less fit than the average medieval soldier. I am curious if this is just speculation or if you have evidence for this statement? At first it seems reasonable but I am not so confident after you factor in modern medicine and advances in nutrition/diet and discount for stereotyping.
- 1123581321 14y agoLook into the physical fitness of Amish and the less developed world in general. You will also find the answer in any researched history of medieval life. The short answer is that a typical modern person (gamer or no) is much less fit than anybody from the age of melee weapons, let alone knights.
- 6ren 14y agoI wonder if it is possible in some way with gyroscopes. Not going all the time, but spun up quickly, to provide counter resistance for a specific direction of rotation. You could spin up two, in opposite directions, to counter the torque from acceleration. Difficult to spin them up fast enough, but perhaps just the sensation of some resistance would be enough feedback.
- jedbrown 14y agoThis only helps with angular momentum, not with linear momentum.
- MasterScrat 14y agoIs that really a problem? If something hits your sword it's going to make you rotate your wrist, not stop your hand, because it will be blocking the blade and not the handle.
- stan_rogers 14y agoNot if you're using a sword intended for cutting strokes and strike correctly. Distal to the "sweet spot", your hand will continue while the blade is rotated; proximal, and the distal end of the sword will tend to continue while your hand is levered backwards. Just as when using a tennis racket or a baseball bat, though, the moment is balanced around the point of contact when you strike correctly (the proximal part of the blade has more mass but less velocity; the distal has more velocity but less mass) and the blade, as a unit, stops (or is at least slowed by a uniform scale when the target can be cut through). Transitioning from a "chop" to a "slice" requires additional input from the swordsman.
- msutherl 14y agoI bet you could come up with something passable between 2 off-axis gyroscopes, 2 large induction motors (magnet suspended in a coil that vibrates back and forth – can achieve below 1hz - ~300hz vibration) and some more standard vibrators.
- 14y ago
- bithive123 14y agoNon-physics geek here. Would it be possible to embed some gyroscopes on servos or something so that the game engine can deflect the controller? It wouldn't be ideal but it could provide some directional feedback.
- rapind 14y agoMost shooters don't bother making you deal with recoil either though, or the weight of the gun.
- baddox 14y agoBut in shooters, opposing weapons don't regularly make physical contact with each other. In sword fighting, that's a necessity.
- JesseAldridge 14y agoI agree. Maybe the best way to approach a sword-fighting game would be to make a cheap sort of sword-fighting robot/dummy thing. Maybe like a mannequin on wheels that could quickly extend and retract one of several plastic rods and spin around and whack you with them or something... I googled "sword fighting robot" and found this: http://www.bit-tech.net/news/bits/2011/07/20/kinect-used-in-sword-fighting-robot/1 http://www.bit-tech.net/news/bits/2011/07/20/kinect-used-in-...
- brianobush 14y agomy approach to realistic fighting is: go to kendo keiko as often as possible. even the bruises seem real.
- JabavuAdams 14y agoKendo's pretty far from realistic fighting. The fact that it's a contact sport is cool, though.
- brianobush 14y agoI think it is more realistic than a game will ever be. You can block and have your strikes blocked. That seems pretty impossible to do with a controller.
- Lukeas14 14y agoNext biggest problem is that, in reality, Medieval duels rarely lasted more than a minute before one side was fatally injured. Not nearly long enough for a video game.
- robryan 14y agoDisagree, no harm in being short as you can have many duels.
- damncabbage 14y agoI'm curious; do you have a source for this?
- shriphani 14y agoI was one seeing an olympic fencing event on TV. The duels were incredibly short.
- reddit_clone 14y agoOgami Itto can slice up 15 people in 2.3 seconds. Does that count?
- chc 14y agoIt doesn't seem like many video game battles last more than a minute. If you're still fighting somebody after a minute, that's either a very slow game or one or both of you are playing very conservatively.
- vacri 14y agoA minute is a long time for a single fight in a video game.
- jere 14y agoAre you not familiar with rounds? A lot of fighting game rounds are over in under 10 seconds.
- prawn 14y agoGiven that the project is called "Clang!", they'll probably want to incorporate that!
- rd108 14y agowonder if you can use a gyroscope to add some of this effect....
- jvrossb 14y agoI'm surprised no one has mentioned haptics in this thread. Novint for example produces commercial haptic controllers. Haptics are what can get your controller to magically stop mid-air.
- jeffool 14y agoI agree. A robotic arm (even a weighted stand with a hard plastic arm and thin plastic sword) seems pretty much required to get realistic sword fighting in. A good camera on the base that keeps an eye of where the "sword" is could do a reasonable job of keeping it from hitting most things, yeah? And I think people wouldn't have a problem with it. They made room for the entire Rock Band ensemble. Just make it fold flat-ish to stow under a couch or in a closet.
- lloeki 14y agoIndeed, and Kinect requires enough clear space for a simulated duel to take place (especially for two players). (Time to ramp up my iaido skills)
- mark_l_watson 14y agoThis is why haptics is so important. About 15 years ago I did a virtual reality race car simulator at SAIC. The steering wheel was controlled to simulate the feel of hitting a curb, the smooth feeling during a spin out, etc. Good for suspension of disbelief. Two years later I did a ritual reality raft simulator for Disney. The paddles had no feedback mechanism and it hurt the experience (paddling with no feel for paddle going through the water). At the same time someone I worked with did a sword fighting simulation that was very cool, but also did not had force feedback effects.
- jere 14y agoThey addressed this in an update: >In general, if you drill down deep enough on the actual sword techniques, the tree of possible outcomes gets pruned way down. It turns out that you rarely have to solve the fully general problem of one sword stopping another sword traveling at top speed at an arbitrary location in space. Which is a hard problem! There's a longer explanation here: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/260688528/clang/posts/244014 http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/260688528/clang/posts/24...