HL2 physics inspired by JP: Trespasser

haha i remember... ti took half an hour to pick up a gun, and you droped it every time you walked into something
 
The biggest problem with Trespasser was that they created this neat, physically simulated virtual world but didn't do anything interesting with it. Once the novelty of the in-game physics engine wore off, you were pretty much done with the game.

Valve seems to be taking a different approach, where the physics is integrated into the gameplay and isn't the focus.
 
Every other game has physics now a days, it's become standard. It's how it's used that'll make the difference. I hope it's used subtly and not by constant inyourface physics puzzles...
 
after HL2 and DIII you can bet your life it'll be over used.. in the FX industry it happens everytime, lens flares back in the Babylon 5 days, then there was the fur and hair fads, we've been through the rigid and soft body dynamics. It'll be done to death but then by the end of it those still making use of it will be worth watching, the kids and those doing it for a laugh will have moved on and it'll just be normal stuff then, without a second thought.. The next big thing is likely to be the new method of modeling realtime objects using images similar to how normal maps work to generate the 3D model shape itself
 
Originally posted by Mountain Man
The biggest problem with Trespasser was that they created this neat, physically simulated virtual world but didn't do anything interesting with it. Once the novelty of the in-game physics engine wore off, you were pretty much done with the game.

Valve seems to be taking a different approach, where the physics is integrated into the gameplay and isn't the focus.
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It was a tad basic gameplay wise.. But it did manage to make you feel you were really there. And the T-Rex was very well done, seeing that running toward me reminded me of the first time I played HL (uplink demo) and a headcrab appeared from the shadows scarying me half to death, that was neat hehe
 
Most under rated game ever.

Pushing a car off a cliff so it crushes some raptors... sweet. I still play it.
 
Trespasser was easily the most disappointing game I ever eagerly awaited.

Originally there was a very good game in there somehwere...no doubt buried under several thousand crates you had to clumsily move in order to find.

What could have been a great game became a an example of how to greatly **** up a movie licence. Stupid world design...this game had so many ****ing invisible barriers it made me want to scream....and given the physics engine....every time you hit an invisible barrier it would KNOCK YOUR DAMN GUN OUT OF YOUR HAND! Cute. Much like your planet sized breasts, it seems physics applied to everything in this game BUT your tits.

The T-Rexes were pretty scary...until I realised that if you crouched on flat ground the retarded thing couldn't bite you. Ooh I also loved getting my hand stuck in a door...then watching it stretch clear across the ****ing level when I walked off. Inspector Gadget had nothing on this chick.

When I got my new 9800 Pro I tried to load up Trespasser to see how it played now.....yee gods....yeah that game really doesn't like my catalysts...all the distance sprites have a blue glow.

The physics engine + moveable arm was kinda amusing though....I remember getting bored at one point in the game and spending a good 5 minutes manipulating my gun arm against a wall until I could shoot myself. It seemed much more poetic that simply exiting the game normally.
 
Originally posted by Jaiph
Trespasser was easily the most disappointing game I ever eagerly awaited.

Originally there was a very good game in there somehwere...no doubt buried under several thousand crates you had to clumsily move in order to find.

What could have been a great game became a an example of how to greatly **** up a movie licence. Stupid world design...this game had so many ****ing invisible barriers it made me want to scream....and given the physics engine....every time you hit an invisible barrier it would KNOCK YOUR DAMN GUN OUT OF YOUR HAND! Cute. Much like your planet sized breasts, it seems physics applied to everything in this game BUT your tits.

The T-Rexes were pretty scary...until I realised that if you crouched on flat ground the retarded thing couldn't bite you. Ooh I also loved getting my hand stuck in a door...then watching it stretch clear across the ****ing level when I walked off. Inspector Gadget had nothing on this chick.

When I got my new 9800 Pro I tried to load up Trespasser to see how it played now.....yee gods....yeah that game really doesn't like my catalysts...all the distance sprites have a blue glow.

The physics engine + moveable arm was kinda amusing though....I remember getting bored at one point in the game and spending a good 5 minutes manipulating my gun arm against a wall until I could shoot myself. It seemed much more poetic that simply exiting the game normally.
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Now thats some funny shit..
 
One more thing I recall about Trespasser.....the game had tons of buildings, even a whole town, yet despite the fact even the screenshot on the back of the box showed a raptor indoors you never ever saw a dinosaur in a building in Trespasser. Not once.

Once you came to this realisation that the devs obviously couldn't get the already buggy dinos (even the small ones) to work indoors it completely removed the scare factor you SHOULD have gotten exploring all the abandoned buildings. Ooh what's behind the door in that dark corridor ahead?! That's right, a big scaly long fanged NOTHING.
 
Originally posted by scribblehead
Hey man what can i say, i digged JP back in the day....:D
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Back in the day when you were a drunken fool? ;-)
 
Call me crazy, but the physics in some instances were BETTER in Trespasser than HL2!! Way ahead of its time, but unfortunately the release of Trespasser was too ; )

:edit:
Too, I must say, the last game before HL2 that drove me crazy trying to get upgraded before release was Trespasser. I wanted the ultimate, best possible experience. I had a 200MHZ Pentium but hey, I also had 80 MB of RAM and a Pure 3D Voodoo card :)
 
Jaiph, I trapped a raptor inside a couple times... I also got good at exploiting clipping, i.e. I'd lure a raptor next to a wall of a building, get him to rush me, and he'd hit and WHAM CLIP.... So I'd run inside with me baseball bat and play with his head. Good times!
 
I bought that game BECAUSE of the physics. Did anyone play the demo that was released? It was fantastic. You started on a high platform in the jungle at the base of an hill. At the top was a trailer supported by a couple of wooden stilts. On the platform were a variety of guns. I finally figured out that you had to shoot the stilts and cause the trailer to roll down the hill so you could jump down onto it and reach the ground safely. It was pure brilliance! My jaw dropped as I realised how advanced those physics were, and how little they had been used in games to good effect. You could even whack a Raptor to death with a plank! I'll admit that the control method was crap, but the fact that you could physically swing the arm around and cause damage was amazing.
 
Originally posted by Jaiph
When I got my new 9800 Pro I tried to load up Trespasser to see how it played now.....yee gods....yeah that game really doesn't like my catalysts...all the distance sprites have a blue glow.
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That's either caused by FSAA or AF, not sure which.. I had the same problem, disable it, and it works fine. NO MORE BLUE GLOW, YAY! lol

Also, it's a pain in the butt, but the game by default runs in software mode, it actually runs really well if you switch it to the Primary Display Mode option (the options menu is horribly dodgey as well, I coulda sworn I had told it before to run that way, but apparently I had to manually do it ingame)
 
Originally posted by iamironsam
I thought HL2's physics were based on, you know, reality?
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nah.. they're based on the moon's gravity/physics :) It's really whacky, launching a barrel with the manipulator makes it fly for miles :) :)

kidding, of course.. they just got used to the idea seeing how it could be applied to a game, and that game happened to be Trespasser
 
Originally posted by iamironsam
I thought HL2's physics were based on, you know, reality?
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Reality? whats that, is that an xbox game, thats crazy talk man ;)


Seriously though: I think people just compare its physics to Trespasser's cause that was kinda like things are now with HL2. With all the physics and stuff in it. It was a good game, it was probably just ahead of its time perhaps. It's physics may not have been perfect, but they were good. And the bit in the demo where you shoot out the legs of a metal cabin on a hillside so it falls down the side of the hill for you to jump on safely, i think people see that as similar to the bit in the traptown vid with the similar sort of scene. Was a good game, I think though I'm one of the few who didn't mind the weird control method once I got used to it



oh and LOL @ Jaiph's comment on turning the gun around onto himself and shooting haha I never tried that, very funny :)
 
Originally posted by Shuzer
nah.. they're based on the moon's gravity/physics :) It's really whacky, launching a barrel with the manipulator makes it fly for miles :) :)

kidding, of course.. they just got used to the idea seeing how it could be applied to a game, and that game happened to be Trespasser
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Actually, earth's physics and the moons physics are the same. Some smart dude name of Einstien figured that out in his really cool theory of general relativity.

I was just under the impression that a lot of companies were striving towards realistic physics in computer games.
 
Originally posted by iamironsam
Actually, earth's physics and the moons physics are the same. Some smart dude name of Einstien figured that out in his really cool theory of general relativity.

I was just under the impression that a lot of companies were striving towards realistic physics in computer games.
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Well, what I meant was that gravity would effect physics (in a manner of speaking), so if you shot a barrel off the manipulator, it'd go flying further than on earth (obviously), I know physics are the same there.. it's just I phrased it poorly, my bad :x
 
Lol, Jaiph, you brought back all the bad memories of that game. I had only remembered all the good stuff :) In particular you brought back one very distinct memory of a somewhat hilly wooded area where I kept bumping into invisible barriers left and right and how intensely disappointing it was. And the chest.. how could have I forgotten about the chest?

Poor game, if it had succeeded it would have changed the PC gaming industry and most FPS adventure types games up to now would have been extremely different. I still think it was underrated and that the reviewers of the time didn't nearly give it enough credit for what it had attempted and as a result what innovations there were there that were good, or nearly good, got totally ditched for years.

The other great game that nobody knows about that I think could have changed a lot of stuff at its time, but it simply received zero marketting. Stunt Island. If you know of that game I'd be surprised. Pre-3d-accelerated game that had a very sprawling, dense, creative and diverse 3-d environment, first game with gourad shading (woah it was hawt), a challenging flight model that felt very realistic, a huge built in system for creating your own scripted sets with triggerable or timed events, and there were all sorts of cool props. You could create movies, package them with your own sounds, and there was a freely available player that was relatively small you could get and play them. There was a -huge- variety of stuff you could fly. It, and many of its concepts, disappeared forever. It was especially ironic that such a technologically advanced game came out of nowhere from Disney interactive and then just disappeared into total obscurity.
 
Originally posted by Jaiph
One more thing I recall about Trespasser.....the game had tons of buildings, even a whole town, yet despite the fact even the screenshot on the back of the box showed a raptor indoors you never ever saw a dinosaur in a building in Trespasser. Not once.

Once you came to this realisation that the devs obviously couldn't get the already buggy dinos (even the small ones) to work indoors it completely removed the scare factor you SHOULD have gotten exploring all the abandoned buildings. Ooh what's behind the door in that dark corridor ahead?! That's right, a big scaly long fanged NOTHING.
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sorry to say this but i remember seeing rapters in buildings multiple times
 
Originally posted by frances_farmer
sorry to say this but i remember seeing rapters in buildings multiple times
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Dont think so, last I remember, dinos never followed you into buildings, and they were never placed in buildings.
 
Originally posted by ThePDW
Trespasser still remains as one of my fav games, it wasn't without bugs but it was the most innovative game of its time and I'm not sure anything else has come close to it yet in the physics department.
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You think so? I thought the physics were really terrible. The stacking boxes puzzles and the try-to-time-the-bad-physics are the main reasons why I haven't played it since the first go through. Definitely didn't live up to the hype.
 
Trespasser was a kick ass game, physics were uncomparable to any other game back then. It had it's glitches but still very very good. Me and my friends spend hours trying to find a co-op or multiplayer mod for it. Just becuase it's Jurrasic Park doesn't mean squat. It was a fun game.
 
and all of you have to realize when this game came out!!, this did look great, the physics were the best in any game, but like i said it had it's errors. like if you stand on a raptor and keep hitting it with a metal bar sometimes it will stab it and get stuck and sometimes fly out impaling you.....which was always fun
 
Originally posted by rndhotdog
and all of you have to realize when this game came out!!
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I was also following this game through it's development. I was at the store the day it was released. It wasn't even close to what the developers talked about.

Almost immediately at the start of the game you come to that bridge that rocks back and forth. I remember one of the developers talking about how you could stack rocks on one side of the bridge and the weight would slow down the rate that the bridge rocked. I spent nearly 3 hours trying to get across that blasted bridge. Piled every rock I could find on the thing and it made no difference what-so-ever.

There were things like that all through the game. Remember the devs saying you could run a rifle out of ammo, turn it around and beat the dinosaurs to death with it? All that ever got me was dead. That strange arm would drop the gun as soon as I swung it and then the dinosaur would eat me.

They tried to make the game with excellent physics, and probably could have gotten it working. But in the end, the publishers forced them to ship the game before it was done. The AI was not complete and the physics were wrong. If they had kept it for another 6 months I'm betting the game would've been one of the best ever.
 
I spent 15 minutes at that bridge and gave up, it got me wayyy too frustrated, and haven't played it since :) lol, this was about a month ago.. I still have it installed, but haven't played it since that

Also, what really annoyed me was the baseball bat, you'd think you'd be able to use it to whack things, but she just drops it when you smack a dinosaur/whatever, made me sad =(
 
Trespasser was absolutely terrible.

Which is a shame, really, as the concept was there. It was ahead of it's time, design wise. They just didn't deliver.

As for the arm.. well.. the fact that the arm as it was got into the finished game was a testament to hard drug usage by the dev team.
 
Starsiege had physics, too. Of course these were giant robots, but the physics were there. Unlike MechWarriors's sterilized falling over of the mechs.

-Ghost.
 
Originally posted by JimboC
I was also following this game through it's development. I was at the store the day it was released. It wasn't even close to what the developers talked about.

Almost immediately at the start of the game you come to that bridge that rocks back and forth. I remember one of the developers talking about how you could stack rocks on one side of the bridge and the weight would slow down the rate that the bridge rocked. I spent nearly 3 hours trying to get across that blasted bridge. Piled every rock I could find on the thing and it made no difference what-so-ever.

There were things like that all through the game. Remember the devs saying you could run a rifle out of ammo, turn it around and beat the dinosaurs to death with it? All that ever got me was dead. That strange arm would drop the gun as soon as I swung it and then the dinosaur would eat me.
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one there was no swinging bridge, two i've successfully killed a raptor with my hand, only a couple occasions i did drop my weapon, it seems like when you hit them it doesn't affect them, but a couple hits and they're down for the count. also if someone likes this game i have a really really funnny save i'd like to show someone
 
one there was no swinging bridge, two i've successfully killed a raptor with my hand, only a couple occasions i did drop my weapon, it seems like when you hit them it doesn't affect them, but a couple hits and they're down for the count. also if someone likes this game i have a really really funnny save i'd like to show someone
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You've never come to the bridge that acts like a see-saw? Did you actually play this game? Even people who've posted after me know that bridge. And even the devs said you couldn't kill the dinosaurs with your hand, sometime after the release.

But it's an 8 year old game that you can't even buy anywhere anymore. What are you getting so excited about?
 
Originally posted by JimboC
You've never come to the bridge that acts like a see-saw? Did you actually play this game? Even people who've posted after me know that bridge. And even the devs said you couldn't kill the dinosaurs with your hand, sometime after the release.

But it's an 8 year old game that you can't even buy anywhere anymore. What are you getting so excited about?
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Originally posted by Trespasser's readme.txt
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Appendix B: Legal Notice
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

©1998 DreamWorks Interactive L.L.C. All rights reserved. DreamWorks Interactive is a trademark of DreamWorks L.L.C. The Lost World: Jurassic Park™ & © 1998 Universal City Studios, Inc. and Amblin Entertainment, Inc. Trespasser is a trademark of Universal City Studios, Inc. and Amblin Entertainment, Inc. Licensed by Universal Studios Licensing, Inc. All rights reserved. .Electronic Arts and the Electronic Arts logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Electronic Arts in the U.S. and/or other countries. All other trademarks are properties of their respective owners. All rights reserved.
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So, it's 5 years old, not 8.. it came about after HL, but anyhow..

I can vouch for the bridge sea-saw, like I said, it was the devil.
 
I convinced myself that I should complete it but I eventually wore myself down. I've still got it somewhere... my old 600AMD holds a save game that I'm pretty sure was close to the game's end- just got the toxin rifle and was partway through the T-Rex enclosure, I think...

It was an original and clever game! Well, the concept was. The arm is alongside Daikatana's opening levels and its uh... everything else in the Big Book of Game mistakes. I shouldn't drop my damn AK when my bloody arm gets caught on a tree, throwing a rare weapon down into the depths of an overly pixelated ravine...

Thinking of physics, I take it a lot of people have tried Max Payne 2. Although it utilises Havok, I'm hoping HL2 will take the system to the next level with its materials coding, as MP2 vaguely annoyed me with frequent inconsistencies in destructables. Ruins the immersive feel when you can shoot the crap out of a particular wall or desk but are incapble of blasting open a cupboard or smashing a light :x
 
Originally posted by Edcrab
It was an original and clever game! Well, the concept was. The arm is alongside Daikatana's opening levels and its uh... everything else in the Big Book of Game mistakes. I shouldn't drop my damn AK when my bloody arm gets caught on a tree, throwing a rare weapon down into the depths of an overly pixelated ravine...
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That was one bit of realism I liked, it made me _think_ about jumping before I did as I knew I could lose grip on a weapon if I wasn't careful, just like someone would in real life.. Strangely I become a better player in other FPS games after spending ages messing in the Trespasser demo, heh :)
 
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