Sounds interesting. I''m really not sure exactly what you would do though. Would you have a city with randomly generated events (not all response calls are crimes; after all the police have to go to accident and rescue scenes too)? There''d be other cops too, I''m sure. You''d have a record and a reputation as well? Shoot too many bad guys and they start an investigation on you. Let too many go and you get fired.

Definitely has potential. Doing it dynamically would be kind of tricky, but shouldn''t be impossible. You''d basically have scripts for the events with some randomly altertable parameters. Top-down 3D view like in GTA 2, or full 3D?

Time to start watching NYPD Blue, Third Watch and Law & Order (all three variants - the original, Criminal Intent and Special Victims Unit). Should give you a ton of scenario ideas.

quote:Time to start watching NYPD Blue, Third Watch and Law & Order (all three variants - the original, Criminal Intent and Special Victims Unit). Should give you a ton of scenario ideas.

yes, but having some police officer friends, they will tell you that 90% of the job is deskwork, and that police tv shows overglamourize the job too much. So being a police officer in a game with a semblance of realism would be entirely boring, not like if you were playing a mercenary or drug dealer, where your life really is in danger most of the time.

Yeah the problem that I have with GTA is that the game is great fun, but the whole game/ story is so Negative in purpose. Ie become the top criminal, it isn''t exactly heroic stuff. You aren''t building a better community for everybody, but making life worse.

part of the fun comes from the license for (fictional) destruction that comes with being a thug.

I''d like to see something like Thunderbirds, where you are trying to save lives.. but using cool machines to do so.

90% of criminal work isn''t what its like in GTA either. Realism anywhere is boring. Games are designed to be fun, not realistic. Personally i allways thought that splinter cell was stupid for that reason. Far to realistic to be fun.

This discussion makes me think of True Crime: Streets of LA. It''s basically GTA3, but you''re a cop instead. So as you drive around you''ll get calls about random crimes in progress, and you can also continue on to your real destination to advance the story. If you kill to many people civil unrest goes up and the cops come after YOU.

True Crime is probably exactly what you''re talking about. It''s a very good video game, although i never figured out why everyone in town knows kung-fu. I especially like frisking suspicious individual on the street. It''s okay, Terry vs. Ohio makes it okay with "reasonable suspicion that criminal activity is afoot". (Spoiler: If they don''t make eye contact with you, and aren''t on a cell phone, they''re hiding something.)

However, that''s all fistfights, gunfights, or car/foot chases. You never have to actually respond to a domestic violence call and talk to people. Really, that would do two things. First, it would make for a boring video game. You''d have to drive responsibly, patrol the area you were assigned, and put up with the chain of command. Second, it would require such a sophisticated level of interaction with NPCs that you''d either be unable to keep up or you''d have scripted encounters.

True Crime is probably as close as we''re likely to get to a police simulator in the "patrol and respond" category. I have police training, and we had a neat system called F.A.T.S. (FireArm Tactics Simulator or something like that). you stood in front of a projection screen with a modified pistol that shot laser beams, and responded to an incident that was presented. I did it three times.

The first time, I was back-up on a drug sting, and I just ran in and shouted, and never had to fire my gun. Second time, I was doing a traffic stop, the guy had a gun, but he threw it out on the ground and ran away, so I couldn''t in good conscience shoot him. The third time, a van full of gunmen shot my partner and swarmed out (four of them). Two tried to kill me, and I dove behind my car''s engine block and smoked them, and the other two ran a ways and started shooting, so I picked them off. 26 lethal hits, 6 non-lethal hits, 2 misses. I was a good shot, although the Glock I was using would have only had 18 rounds. I would have had to reload.

But that system was totally dynamic, based on the operator. If I didn''t assert myself properly at the first traffic stop, the instructor could have chosen a different branch of the game tree and had that guy shoot at me instead of running. My partner might have written a ticket and let the guys go, or one of the dope peddlers might have been strapped. That had a human running it, and I was actually standing there, not using a control pad or mouse. I don''t think you can really simulate that kind of thing without a really good interface. Verbal commands were a huge amount of the program, and I''ve yet to see a software implementation that can understand the difference between "Step away from the vehicle," and "STEP AWAY FROM THE VEHICLE!", and understand both the semantics and timbre of the command.