81–90 of 188 posts
I always thought it was silly to have games where you'd get shot 20 times and keep fighting exactly the same, just lose some of your energy meter, then suddenly flop over and die when it reached zero.
As someone who just finished reading Snow Crash today (great stuff btw, can't wait for another Stephenson's book) I'd be thrilled to see this and try it in action. As someone who's been into martial arts for some time I'm very sceptic about this. There's a lot more to realistic fighting than just swinging and clashing swords: footwork, body movement, weight transfer... Nevertheles, even if it won't turn out to be per…
I agree. I'm pretty sure he's not aiming at making something totally immersive and realistic, but just a good game that has better sword play than anything else.
Many games do one thing pretty well, and are good enough for everything else. Black had nice gun play; Burnout had nice crashing. Hopefully this will have sword play that is better than just button mashing.
> Nevertheles, even if it won't turn out to be perfect it could stil be a lots of fun. I'll be watching their progress.
Yes, I'd settle for lots of fun.
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I 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.
This only helps with angular momentum, not with linear momentum.
As far as entertaining Kickstarter videos go, this one is certainly off to an auspicious start.
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Swords 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…
Using a stick won't work because a typical living room doesn't have enough space to swing it around withoud damaging the furniture.
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> 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.
Consider the draw weight of the longbow - "Although the draw weight of a typical English longbow is disputed, it was at least 360 newtons (81 pounds-force) and possibly more than 600 N (130 lbf), with some estimates as high as 900 N (200 lbf)". And they would loose approximately 6 arrows per minute in combat. And this was a weapon for the yeomanry, not the guys whose entire lives were devoted to maintaining military…
I don't mind putting a bit of cash towards projects where those involved really don't have the resources to pull it off otherwise, but does Neal Stephenson really not have enough cash to bootstrap this himself?
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Fencing raises another good point: realistic swordfighting is actually pretty boring compared to movie swordfighting. (If it weren't, then movie swordfighting wouldn't need to be so unrealistic). If I'm gonna play a swordfighting video game I wanna be Errol Flynn, not Benjamin Kleibrink. [Who? 2008 Olympic foil champion. Yes, I had to look that up, that's the point.]
Competitive fencing is also a far cry from realistic swordfighting. (There's a whole bit in Snow Crash about that, actually.)
Admittedly it was katanas in Snow Crash.
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Yep, 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…
Swords 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…