Making Action RPG more interactive

I think the idea of a footpad/eye toy combo for an RPG is interesting but I have doubts about its practicality for a couple of reasons:

1) Console RPG tend to be sedentary pursuits due to the long hours involved in most playing sessions and you'd need to structure the gameplay very differently for this control system.

2) Unless you bundle a pad & eyetoy with the game (thus raising production costs) you alienate the majority of console owners and minimise your market.

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Original post by lightblade Tieing the feet movement in RPGs with a dance pad, and hand movements with eye toy. This can be a new genre that's a mix of RPG and Rythm.

It's not practical. First, due to the nature of most RPGs - length and repetition - it'd be extremely fatiguing to play that way. Second, there's no intuitive mapping/correlation between the input devices you're suggesting and the gameplay in RPGs.

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I don't see people using light guns anymore. I just think FPS games are better played with a light gun than a mouse.

The mouse doesn't merely aim the targeting reticule within a fixed view frustrum, it also reorients the view. The light gun is a neutral orientation device; do you really want the whole view jerking all over the place every time your arm moves? (Keep in mind that, even when "still," our bodies continuously move.) You can let go of the mouse and keep your view steady. Put down the light gun and your view is on your feet.

The alternative is to treat the light gun like a joypad, in that there is a central "dead zone" in which moving the gun will not move the view, and placing the gun outside of that area will move the view correspondingly. That is thoroughly unintuitive, however.

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Casting spells in medival fantasy setting can be done with a wand like thing. (I'm thinking the new controller for Nintendo Revolution)

Dude. Just go outside and play. Instead of using light guns for FPSes, go play paintball. Instead of all this wand and eye-toy and dance pad nonsense, go LARP or something. You haven't provided a rationale for any of your suggestions other than "making RPGs more 'interactive'" and you don't even discuss how it would work, what the complications would be, how you would solve obvious problems...

An idea, undeveloped, is worthless. You have to describe it, develop it, defend it, advocate it. Back to the drawing board.

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Original post by Oluseyi Dude. Just go outside and play. Instead of using light guns for FPSes, go play paintball.

You know what, I just remembered that light guns for FPS has been done already.

I remembered seeing it on a TV commercial, I think it's called "Mission Paintball". It's a game you play paint ball using a lightgun

Maybe a lightgun with two analog sticks that functions like traditional console FPS, and the lightgun itself is used for aiming and shooting. I mean seperating the head movement controls from the aiming controls.


The problem in combining lightguns in FPS games - and I don't mean games like house of the dead and silent scope - is related to the lightgun technology. When you press the trigger on your lightgun, the screen flashes in white, and the tragets flashes in other colors. The lightgun has a sensor that can detect the color the lightgun is pointed on, and if it is a target color, it is counted as a hit.

The problem with this is that a lightgun can only detect if a certain area on the screen in targeted or not, not the excat pixel. Theoretically, if you make a sensitive enough lightgun you can assign different color for each pixel, but at such high levels of sensitivity, every tiny dust spot on the screen will change the color and confuse the results, not to mention different screens and the current amount of light in the room - people will have to make a long reconfiguration every hour!!!


If the Revolution controller implements a new technology that can detect the targeted pixel - or a small square on the screen - than it will be possible. Ofcourse, since it is a new technology it should no longer be called "lightgun"

I think it is only a matter of time before the hardware catches up with this idea. Seems to me there was an example a couple of years ago of a real-time motion capture stage where you could get in a kung-fu fight with someone being projected on a screen in front of you. Don't remember the source; think it was mentioned at SIGGRAPH a couple of years ago.

Creating games with this level of analog interactivity would be a great way of training people for different skills, a la Ender's Game and The Diamond Age. And they would be in shape, too!

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Original post by Tesseract ...Seems to me there was an example a couple of years ago of a real-time motion capture stage where you could get in a kung-fu fight with someone being projected on a screen in front of you....

Whoa! Hold on there, a set of motion capture stage cost over 50k. What makes you think people going to buy mo-cap stage while they can use that money to buy 10 cars.

That really depends on how sophisticaetd you need your motion capture to be. I think a fairly rudimentary one that was meant to merely identify a fixed set of pre-programmed movements could be done much cheaper than $50K, maybe as little as $50.

It would be neat to be able to play MMO games on a treadmill, just for the irony.

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Original post by wildhalcyon That really depends on how sophisticaetd you need your motion capture to be. I think a fairly rudimentary one that was meant to merely identify a fixed set of pre-programmed movements could be done much cheaper than $50K, maybe as little as $50.

Good point. You don't really need to catch as many body joints as in a motion capture designed for animations

In a simple motion capture system for game input you might only need to capture 4 points. These would be: Head position (if this is nessesary), Left hand position, Right Hand position and Torso position. With these you can use them as input for camera rotation (head), motion (torso) and weapon position (left and right hands).

This still might be too complex and expensive for a home system (though if you had colour coded gloves and markers to aid in it, it might be easier).

I did some work with an artist a few years ago that made a virtual 3D maze, using just a few digital video cameras and a computer. Each camera could be assigned several polygons that if it registered a difference in a prerecored background image within the polygon it would signal the system that a user might be intersecting a virtual wall. You could link polygons on different cameras to produce a 3D area that contituted a wall. If all linked polygons registered that a person was inside the linked shapes then it sounded a tone to indicate that the person had entered a wall (it was quite amusing to wach people move around the maze waving their hands around to find the "walls"). Part of it was also for sientific purposes and we hade to collect some biometric infomation from the person (in the form of breathing and heart rates).

I have though of recreating this system with off the shelf web cameras, however I can't do the programming for it.

This system could be used to make a new form of controler for a video game as you could have virtual "buttons" where the user must move their hand into a certain area in space to use the button (like touching somthing infront of them). You could also track a coloured object in 3D (using the cameras to calculate it stereoscopicaly). This could be used as an input into a game too.

And for feedback for enemies hitting you, etc., you could wear a suit with taser-type electrodes at various points which zap you if you aren't fast enough.