This is NOT a mod announcement

dscowboy

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Let me first say, I think the opportunities Half-Life 2 will provide to mod makers is tremendous, and I'm glad to see lots of people with initiative announcing their mods on this forum.

However, all the mod ideas seem to revolve around a somewhat limited, overused gameplay mechanism: shooting people/stuff. Just like every First Person perspective game on the market, all the mod ideas I've seen can be categorized into either shooting nazis, shooting communists, shooting aliens, or shooting nazi communist aliens who have teamed up with scruffy-looking arabs.

Personally, I'm more interested in new forms of gameplay. I've been shooting virtual terrorists/counter-terrorists/pedestrians for over 5 years now and it's starting to get a little monotonous. This is by no means meant to discourage those who are already persuing their gun-centric mod ideas. But when people talk about the game industry, they always complain about how similar games are, and how there's no innovation, it's over commercialized, and there's no room for independent developers to create new genres and new forms of gameplay. Well we ARE independent developers, and we're being given an (apparently) awesome set of tools with which to develop. I want this forum to be a place where we can discuss truely new, original ideas, and how those ideas might be implemented with the Source engine.

I'm going to list a few of my own thoughts here, please comment!

- The only game I've played involving good swordplay / melee action was Die By The Sword, and I found the controls very difficult to get used to. Surely there must be some interest in this kind of game. Imagine a multiplayer team game that plays like a scene from one of those old muskateer movies. Two teams battling in a tavern, people jumping off balconies, swining from chandeliers, barmaids running about, etc. Could the Source engine accurately portray sword vs sword interaction? Parries, dodges, overhand swings, weapons breaking, disarm moves, etc. There's a couple possible obstacles I've thought of: In the e3 movie, it's obvious that the crowbar's viewmodel animation plays the same way every time you use the crowbar. The crowbar doesn't stop if you hit a wall with it. Which means that if two players came at each other swinging crowbars, the crowbars would just pass right through each other (or at least they would look that way). For this type of game, we would need a way to turn off the viewmodel and display the physically simulated melee weapon swinging through the air and being affected by the things it struck (I know ericJ said the crowbar is simulated as a bar swining through the air, but the viewmodel definitely doesn't reflect this, at least in the pre-release movies). The other obstacle I thought of is that if players were allowed to swing their swords however they liked with their mouse, that could generate a lot of data that would have to be transmitted to all the other clients through the server. Not sure if this would be a problem or not.

- Another idea: why not a multiplayer team pirate game? People work together to load the cannons with gunpowder and ammunition, then aim and fire them while someone mans the rudder and others work the sails. The cannon operators would need to work together to coordinate broadsides, and to determine where to fire (at the water point to sink the ship, at the deck level to kill enemy crew, at the sails or masts to disable the ship, etc), and what kind of ammunition to use. Ships can ram each other, and eventually try to get close enough to extend a boarding plank, which comes back to melee combat again.

- As long as i'm on a hundreds-of-years ago theme, how about a castle siege game? Teams have to build siege engines out of wood beams and miscellaneous parts (if you can blow things apart with the Source engine in-game, can you connect different objects together?), then roll them aross the plain dividing the castle through a storm of arrows to try to knock each others walls down (modeled by the physics engine, of course), or climb over the walls, or break the doors, etc. Teams could build counter-siege equiptment too, meant to knock over siege towers and kill catapult operators.

There are endless possibilities. If I spend a lot of time working on a mod, I want it to be something truely unique. What are your thoughts?
 
Yepp, im with you here but one thing... unique ideas aint allways good ideas.
 
Originally posted by Majestic XII
Yepp, im with you here but one thing... unique ideas aint allways good ideas.

Well neither are non-unique ideas.
But it's a good point, we need to evaluate each idea on two different criteria
- Is it fun
- Is it possible with Source (based on our limited knowledge so far)
 
You know that the crowbar in HL2 will be "physiclized" so you can have "crowbar fights" with it.

Thats one of the things i will use in one of my designs.
 
i didn't read all what you wrote but i got the jist of what you mean, i can't stand the Super Power vs Super Power mods and other clones of other games *shudders* heard tooooo many of them.

Rivals: Organised Crime Redefined, is a unique idea with unique gameplay it will set the standards IMO (it is why i joined).
 
Originally posted by Majestic XII
You know that the crowbar in HL2 will be "physiclized" so you can have "crowbar fights" with it.

Thats one of the things i will use in one of my designs.

I discussed this briefly above. I know EricJ said the crowbar is physically modeled as a swinging bar, but if you watch the E3 videos it's obvious that the crowbar animation is identical everytime. If the crowbar were reacting to the things it hit, it would slow down / bounce off / be deflected by the stuff it hits, like the buzzsaw creatures. But it doesn't, the animation is identical each time. This means that if two players stood opposite each other and swung crowbars, the crowbars would never really collide, they would either pass right through each other or just push the players back, it would be like having a knife fight in CS.

Perhaps Valve will change this behavior before release, but it's pretty unlikely. I haven't seen anything to suggest that the viewmodel animation (the weapon you're holding) is at all affected by anything in the environment. If it were, when you ran into a wall your gun would get pressed up against your body by the wall.

There still might be ways to get around this. Valve has hinted that mod makers might be able to turn off the viewmodel animation and display the character's actual body instead. But even then, can a player's 'swing' animation be interrupted when the crowbar hits something? That would be pretty complicated. I have a feeling that crowbar fights in HL2 are not going to be any more interesting than crowbar fights in HL1.

Has anyone seen or heard anything that would help us figure out what EricJ meant by 'physically modeled', given that the crowbar animation in the movies does not portray any kind of interaction with the environment?
 
well, there is a sword fighting mod out there...

and Operation: Everlasting Shadow, will be utilising Narcissistic Gamings own custom, hand-to-hand Combat system, although really MrBadger, is the one to talk to about this system.

which should be interesting, and OES is not going to be a "shoot 'em up", altough if you wanted to you could play it as one...
 
we have illegal street racing in our mod, along with police chasing where getting out of a car might not be possible so shootimg anything up isn't possible :)
 
Has anyone in this forum worked on a half-life mod before? Or been involved with the development of a game?
 
I have (also i've pretty much played every video game from the very first c64 games, to atari,intellivision, All nintendo, All Sega,
All old PC style doom (to RPG Text based) games, Too many arcade Games to count, and all Console games cpretty much -

Does that count (for making good games?)
 
Originally posted by dscowboy
I discussed this briefly above. I know EricJ said the crowbar is physically modeled as a swinging bar, but if you watch the E3 videos it's obvious that the crowbar animation is identical everytime. If the crowbar were reacting to the things it hit, it would slow down / bounce off / be deflected by the stuff it hits, like the buzzsaw creatures. But it doesn't, the animation is identical each time. This means that if two players stood opposite each other and swung crowbars, the crowbars would never really collide, they would either pass right through each other or just push the players back, it would be like having a knife fight in CS.

Perhaps Valve will change this behavior before release, but it's pretty unlikely. I haven't seen anything to suggest that the viewmodel animation (the weapon you're holding) is at all affected by anything in the environment. If it were, when you ran into a wall your gun would get pressed up against your body by the wall.

There still might be ways to get around this. Valve has hinted that mod makers might be able to turn off the viewmodel animation and display the character's actual body instead. But even then, can a player's 'swing' animation be interrupted when the crowbar hits something? That would be pretty complicated. I have a feeling that crowbar fights in HL2 are not going to be any more interesting than crowbar fights in HL1.

Has anyone seen or heard anything that would help us figure out what EricJ meant by 'physically modeled', given that the crowbar animation in the movies does not portray any kind of interaction with the environment?

Both the crowbar and the animations where only there for E3 (even the bloodsplash when you hit someone)

Its already changed or will be in a close future.
 
Well... as HL2's physics are based upon Havoc 2(as far as I know) it will be able to interupt animations. It whoulb be a hard work but you might be able to do "real" swords fighting.

btw. It is true that most HL2 mods are going a well known way. Corporations (some of you might now it, yet ^^) isn't a exception. BUT! CS, DOD, TacticalOps. They set a mark you have to reach. I'm sure that most mods are going to make things better/nicer/cooler/harder/bla than in the older ones.

Really new ideas do have a hard way. I'm interested in your "Stronghold"-mod idea. And the other both could be fun, too. But will everybody play them? Nope... why? 'cause most players want just plain, exessive fun! Building stuff in first person was never successful, yet. So you should try and think of something the other atempts didn't have. Stuff like a "Player-player" who plays the game from the view of i.e. Warcraft or Command&Conquer. That'd might be an idea that kicked ass ^^

I've been working with a bunch of modteams in the past (*remembers its UT-times*) and I think I know how to make a mod that might become successful.

I wish you luck with your ideas and hope to play one of 'em in the future :D
 
OK for the last time you bums the crowbar and melee weapons are simulated and do stop when they contact things!!!! they said it was a bug with the demo recording and they honestly didn't think anyone would look that closley at it, it is simulated, you can have sword fights with a mod, maces, arrows etc. Secondly building things per-se such as siege engines wouldn't be that fun, perhaps having some sort of mechanism of getting axes running off and hitting trees to collect resources for your team or hitting rocks/mining to buy certain weapons/siege engines etc, then attack but i don't know how good that would be online... Next on the pirates mods, u'mm once again it would be fine singleplayer in my opinion but online i just wouldn't be too entertained with it.. personally i was thinking of a mod based purely on psycho-kinetic things, as in not mind-reading/teleportation but purely moving physical objects/manipulation with your mind, would kinda be fun just throwing a ton of crap across the room at a enemy and picking them up and slamming them into walls, once again a single-player thing cuz multiplayer mods need to much balance lol, sorta like akira except drop the sucking. they kinda took out the novelty of this idea tho with the manipulator gun but at least it makes it a much easier mod
 
Originally posted by Aethaecyn
OK for the last time you bums the crowbar and melee weapons are simulated and do stop when they contact things!!!! they said it was a bug with the demo recording and they honestly didn't think anyone would look that closley at it

I'll try to explain this again. The bug Valve referred to was a demo playback timing bug. The boards broke before the crowbar hit them, and the combine soldiers fell down before the swinging log smacked them. That was the bug. The thing I'm talking about has nothing to do with the timing bug. I'm referring to the obvious fact that the crowbar swing is a pre-determined animation; the crowbar swing is not dynamic. It does not react to anything in the environment. When you hit a key, the same animation plays each time.

Valve might change this before release, but I don't think it's very likely. Those of you who have modeled before know that when you create a weapon, you have to create two different models of it, the external view (when it's on the ground or someone else is holding it), and the viewmodel/player view (when the player is holding it). The viewmodel does not really exist in the game world, it's just rendered in the player's view. Some tricks are used to shade it according to the environment, but the viewmodel itself does not really exist in the game world outside a player's view. Changing this so the viewmodel crowbar was dynamic and could physically interact with the game world would be pretty difficult. In fact, they probably don't even want to change it. Making it dynamic would introduce all kinds of problems, like how would you use your crowbar while crawling through a vent, where there's not enough room to swing it? Or what happens if, in the propeller scene, Gordon raises his crowbar up to swing but it gets stuck in the blades?

If you wanted to make a truely dynamic melee weapon, I think this is what you'd have to do (If it's possible with source to apply forces to different parts of the player character's body): Get rid of the viewmodel and render the character's actual gameworld polygons. When the 'swing crowbar' button is pressed, play a pre-determined animation of forces on the character's arm: push back on the upper arm and the forearm to raise the arm, then down on the upper arm and lower arm to swing it. This would produce a dynamic swing that would physically interact with the environment, assuming Source would allow this. But again, this would bring up all the problems I listed above with confined areas, etc.

If you guys are expecting the crowbar animation to be dynamic, I think you're going to be surprised.
 
Originally posted by Aethaecyn
personally i was thinking of a mod based purely on psycho-kinetic things, as in not mind-reading/teleportation but purely moving physical objects/manipulation with your mind, would kinda be fun just throwing a ton of crap across the room at a enemy

I like that, kind of like Darth tossing boxes and pipes at Luke in Empire Stirkes Back
 
Just make a manipulator arena map :)

Anyway, they have said that the crowbar is physically simulated. Meaning, it exists in 3d space and WILL react with things it hit then! In theory you could swing two crowbars against each other to make them cling off each other.
Plus the player is also physically simulated, so dont be so sure about that player view :)
 
Originally posted by dawdler
Anyway, they have said that the crowbar is physically simulated. Meaning, it exists in 3d space and WILL react with things it hit then!

But it doesn't, clearly. You can see that in the videos (if anyone brings up the demo playback bug again, I give up. See my above posts). 'Physically simulated' could mean a lot of things, I think it's a lot more limited than you realize. 'Physically simulated' could mean that there's a bar swinging through space that can affect other objects, but the bar cannot be affected itself. Please go look at this if you don't understand what I mean:

http://developer.nvidia.com/view.asp?IO=Rigid_Body_Demo

The 'cue ball' (the one you can move) affects other items in the world, but cannot be affected itself. This is the same behavior the crowbar is displaying in the videos.
 
Originally posted by dscowboy
But it doesn't, clearly. You can see that in the videos (if anyone brings up the demo playback bug again, I give up. See my above posts). 'Physically simulated' could mean a lot of things, I think it's a lot more limited than you realize. 'Physically simulated' could mean that there's a bar swinging through space that can affect other objects, but the bar cannot be affected itself. Please go look at this if you don't understand what I mean:

http://developer.nvidia.com/view.asp?IO=Rigid_Body_Demo

The 'cue ball' (the one you can move) affects other items in the world, but cannot be affected itself. This is the same behavior the crowbar is displaying in the videos.

Its only a place holder just for E3!

Gabe said in a email that it is physilized and you can have crowbar wars a realistic way.

Sorry, but i trust Gabe more then i trust you ATM...
 
I trust Gabe more than me too. Where does he say you can have crowbar wars in a realistic way? Here's the only pertinent e-mail that I've seen:

http://www.halflife2.net/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=1621&highlight=crowbar+gabe

Q: The crowbar. is it just like.. damage straight
ahead, or does it sort of swing, like a bat, and it
depends at what angle you hit something?

A: it's physically simulated - it's a bar swinging through air

A 'bar swinging through air' does not necessarily mean the bar can be affected by the environment, or by things it hits.
This is an important distinction. Here's a thought experiment: Lets say you're standing next to the big metal log we saw swinging around in the video. You swing your crowbar at the right moment to have the log impact it sideways. What happens?

A) The crowbar is thrown out of your hand (realistic, but unlikely)
B) Gordon maintains his grip on the crowbar, but his arm is thrown to the side (again realistic, but unlikely)
C) Gordon's arm is rigid, so the force of the impact spins Gordon's whole body to the side. The 'crowbar swing' animation is unaltered (likely)
D) Gordon and the crowbar are completley unaffected by the impact. The metal log bounces off it. (also likely)
 
Listen. Ofcourse the animation will start off the same each time, and once again the model was a placeholder.

I think what will be happening is a variation of animations, since there is a difference between the model you see in YOUR HUD and the model people see you holding in multiplayer.

A variation of animations maybe 10 ie

1. Crowbar Idle
2. Swing
3. Stop halfway bounce back a little
4. Full swing and miss
Etc etc etc

And people would see it reacting like a physical object in game (if they were watching you do this) because the model that other people would see WOULD BE AFFECTED BY PHYSICS and that's the bottom line. Period.
 
Ok, I give up. Apparently nobody on this forum understands the difference between pre-determined animation and real-time kinematics, and how difficult it is to marry the two in a human character's body. If the crowbar swing can somehow be affected by the environment, that will be great. But it doesn't look like there's any evidence to support this so far.
 
A variation of animations maybe 10 ie

1. Crowbar Idle
2. Swing
3. Stop halfway bounce back a little
4. Full swing and miss
Etc etc etc



Yes that was not in the demo of what you saw. However he said several times that it is just temporary so i guess you'll just have to wait.
 
Well... We know its physically simulated, we have evidence for it (if we trust the developers word). Then try the Havok physics demos on their homepage. Leads me to beleive it wont just be a normal animation, cause in theory, you could do it without a set animation, just move the crowbar realtime in the engine, it will interact with everything on contact.
It shouldnt be that hard to do, not with that physics system.

Well, in theory :D
 
Traditional animation doesn't work that way. When you animate something, you define where the model will be at different points along the animation timeline. When you simluate physics, movement of an object is defined by the forces acting upon it, not a set of keyframes. Combining the two together has been a major problem in games for years now. For instance, in games today, if you see an enemy running along (playing a running animation), and you shoot him in the left foot, is the force of the bullet going to push his foot to the side and trip him up while he's still running? No, not unless there's a specific "character has been shot in the left foot while running" animation already made. And even then, the hit animation would most likely start on a different frame than the running animation left off (ie, hit animation starts with left foot in the air, but character was hit when their right foot was in the air. Looks jerky and stupid). No, either the enemy will just play their generic "I got shot" animation and then resume running, or they will die and instantly go into ragdoll mode. There is no merging of animation with physical forces.

People have been working on this problem for a long time now without any results (at least I haven't seen it fixed in any games I've played). I don't think assuming that this kind of technology is in HL2 based off Gabe saying "it's physically simulated - it's a bar swinging through air" is a good idea. There are a number of much more likely explanations for Gabe's words. Like monte said, we'll have to wait and see, but unless somebody has some evidence I haven't seen, it's probably not a good idea for mod makers to base their ideas off the assumption that HL2 will allow realistic sword vs sword interaction.
 
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