Quote:Original post by Madster

Quote:from Nathan Baum:
Since it's a game, the enjoyment of the people playing it is the only acceptable reason for making a decision about any feature.

And obviously the only real reason for hiding numbers is that some people don't like them.

Since enjoyment is the reason for deciding about features, and some people don't like numbers in there, it can be deduced that it they don't like it, it detracts from their enjoyment, therefore making it a reason to decide removing them.

You're missing the point. You said that the only real reason for not hiding numbers is that some people like them. My point is that the only real reason for hiding numbers is that some people don't like them.

If nobody liked numbers, then it would be reason to conclude that numbers should be removed from CRPGs. If you're making an RPG which is specifically targetted at people who don't like numbers, then it's obviously okay to hide numbers.

On the other hand, if you're making an RPG which you want to appeal to the widest possible audience, some of them will like numbers and some of them will not. Some of the people who do not like numbers may well come to find that they need numbers later on.

The logical approach is to offer a configurable interface where players can choose whether to see numbers or not.

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Quote:from Nathan Baum:
Color is not well suited for this task, in an international context. The usual conception of the emotional effect that colors have just doesn't apply to all people.

So i guess semaphores are a really bad idea.

Semaphores don't even communicate information by color. Even if they did, that wouldn't support your argument: if I'm standing with my arms wide open and a semaphore flag in each hand, do you intuitively know what letter I'm signalling? Not unless you've already learnt the semaphore alphabet. Similarly, somebody for whom 'red' usually represents positive concepts would have to learn that you were using it to represent negative concepts (such as being low in health).

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Colors have a single dimension (despite what the RGB model may lead you to believe. Check the "out of gamut" expression, and photon vibration frequencies)

Let's suppose that's true. Supposing rgb(0,0,0) is at 0 and rgb(255,255,255) is at 1 in this dimension, where is rgb(120,117,32) and rgb(34, 89, 203)?

Color hue is one-dimension, but that's only one aspect of color: the light's wavelength. The amplitude is also significant: would you typically describe the sun as 'light brown'?

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Plus as you stated yourself, there are problems with the sign.

The sign? You mean there are problems with the meaning of the colors? There are more problems than just that. Approximately 10% of people are color-blind, and most of them can't tell the difference between red and green.

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Quote:from Nathan Baum:
You've hit the nail exactly on the head, here. It's a design thing. In some games, character progression leads to superhuman powers. In some other games, it doesn't. All you need to do is not play the former games, if you don't like them.

Again you're thinking in global terms. Tell me, if you climb 3 meters each day, measuring it with a 3-meter string: how high will you reach after 5 years? is it way out of the range of your measuring string?
it's about the same gameplay with a different representation, NOT about changing the gameplay (at least, not overhauling it).

But you weren't talking about that. You were replying to tolaris's notion of replacing lone superheros with mobs. That's not even remotely the same gameplay. Which obviously makes it a design issue.

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Quote:from Nathan Baum:
But you can't gauge in general how much damage you have inflicted upon somebody without a detailed medical examination. Perhaps that number would be based upon how long it would take to heal the wounds, or conversely how long it would take one to die from the wounds: not all wounds can heal.

But you can gauge the sharpness of a sword in a global numerical scale at a glance? that's highly inconsistent.

At a glance? Who says you can do that? You can certainly gauge the sharpness of a sword that you just sharpened. But you don't do that with a glance at the end of your work. You are constantly checking the sharpness of your sword as you sharpen it. If you weren't, how would you know when to stop?

But then there are of course some things you might do to yourself and your equipment which you won't immediately know if they were successful. In pen-and-paper RPGs, the GM is recommended to not tell players about the outcome of applications of skills or feats until their characters would know.

For example, if your gun is jamming every 100 rounds, you could perform maintainance to try to fix it. You'd need to fire off 100 rounds to find out whether or not it was jamming every 100 rounds, but you'd never actually know if it was completely fixed.

CRPGs I've played don't do this, but again it's not an issue of "should numbers be shown to the player". It's an issue of "should the player see numbers that he can't possibly know about"? Obviously not. But neither should the player see text or color-coded representations of numbers that he can't possibly know about.

It appears obvious to me that the correct solution is to let the player decide how stats are to be shown. At the very least, the game should show stats via various means.

For example, it would be fine if the game showed one's health via a colored guage which was full and green when you were at maximum health, and became empty and red when you were at minimum health. (For best results, let the player choose the gradient: the standard guage is still be meaningful to people with red-green blindness, but would be maximally useful if they could actually see the color change) It would also be fine if the character model reflected its physical state, and if the character portrait, if one was visible, also reflected the physical state. The model changes don't have to be particularly comprehensive: it's just that the player is usually looking at the model. If it starts to look injured, then the player knows to look at the health meter for a more detailed reply.

What's important is that I want to be able to open my character sheet and see my exact hit points. In the case of health, two character's at 100% health are not necessarily equally healthy. If one has 30 hit points and the other has 80 hit points, it's clear which I'd rather expose to threats.

Quote:Original post by tolaris
Wouldn't it be easier to do by simply altering the scale (height) of normal/bump map which ideally already should be there on the character, as part of their basic looks? Not all games will use these, but low-end alternative would be using a secondary, greyscale texture in multiply mode to add details like shading to base colouring of the character... by altering how much this secondary texture affects the base texture you have direct control of how well pronounced the 'muscle layer' is on the character.

Yeah, I suppose it would. My camera view is just a bit too far from characters to consider bump maps, or for them to have much effect. They are pretty high poly (around 2000), which is nice, because they look like rendered sprites, but very smoothly animated.

Anyway, I was thinking of a much bigger effect, like as in the range going from 120 lbs to 400 lbs. :P - If I'm going to allow characters to grow in muscles, I want the maximum to be extreme. Wielding barbarian swords with a freakshow 300 pound monster just seems like a fun thing to try. It is true that morph targets can be scaled in the same way as bumps, though. Plus the effect can be permanently applied in software, which might be the way to go if only the player character, who has a unique mesh, is the only character who changes this way. Still, all of that clothing. It's too much work for my game. Maybe the sequel, when I can pay someone else to do it for me :)

Quote:Original post by Jiia
First of all, if your game is detailed enough to show muscle, it's going to have to be detailed enough to show clothing and armor that's being worn. My game does the latter. You can see the problem? It's easy to create morph targets (or sprites if you're going 2D) to change the body shape, but you would also have to create compatible morphs for all of the clothing that character can wear. Match this with the fact that you might have around 10 human body shapes in your game (I have 6 so far). That becomes [ number of clothing articles * number of body shapes * number of morph shapes ] morphs or sprites (I would especially feel sorry for anyone attempting to do this in 2D).

Surely you can do this with skinned meshes?

If all armor is built upon a standard skeleton, then all you'd need to do is relate the armor's skeleton to the body's skeleton.

If body shapes are really just scale transforms, you don't even need that: you would probably get away with just scaling the armor. I'm pretty sure that's what Neverwinter Nights does, and I've never noticed the armor being particularly ugly.

As for muscles, I'd undoubtably go with tolaris's suggestion of fading in a normal map. Combine that with scaling selected bones to make muscled limbs look larger. With that, you could even apply muscles to seperate parts of the body: mainly to the upper body when your combat strength increases; mainly to the lower body when your running speed increases.

Quote:Original post by Nathan Baum
If all armor is built upon a standard skeleton, then all you'd need to do is relate the armor's skeleton to the body's skeleton.

Not sure I follow you exactly. The armor already uses the same skeleton, or they wouldn't animate together properly.

Quote:If body shapes are really just scale transforms, you don't even need that: you would probably get away with just scaling the armor. I'm pretty sure that's what Neverwinter Nights does, and I've never noticed the armor being particularly ugly.

I tried very hard, and it only goes so far. If you don't mind your women looking manly or men looking girly, then it's fine, I guess. And scaling limbs ends up distorting the shape of the character more than redifining it. From my own practice, I can confidently say it's nearly impossible to use the same skeleton between a 50 year old male warrior and an 18 year old girl. The main issues are around the shoulders. But if you only plan to have males or only females in your game, then that's not as much of a problem.

Quote:As for muscles, I'd undoubtably go with tolaris's suggestion of fading in a normal map. Combine that with scaling selected bones to make muscled limbs look larger. With that, you could even apply muscles to seperate parts of the body: mainly to the upper body when your combat strength increases; mainly to the lower body when your running speed increases.

Like I said, my view is a bit too far back. Here's roughly the normal distance:

a href="http://img190.echo.cx/my.php?image=image12lx.jpg" target="_blank">

Just ignore the modern clothing. The game takes place in a medieval future, but modern clothing will be extremely rare :P As you can probably guess, bump maps will do very little for that scale.

I hate when that happens. Here's the snap shot that was supposed to be linked above:



- edit: I also missed a point. There are only two humanoid skeletons in my engine. Male and female. But there are three shapes of bodies that ride that skeleton for each gender.

Quote:Original post by Wavinator

Quote:Original post by tolaris
Then, how is saying "the dragon is 40 miles away and it will take 2 days to get there" different from saying "the army can travel 20 miles per day".

How would you be sure to calculate the path the player intends? Are you going to assume shortest path? What if this drags them through territories they don't want to go through?

That is a problem that exists with both proposed ways of doing so. If you ask me, you are either given a route by the player, or you take the shortest (= min traveltime). You may also take the longest route and say it won't take longer that that, but consigering how computers think this will result in traveling once arround the globe. It hasn't much to do with how you represent you results.

Quote:Original post by Madster
If no one likes it, well, it will tank. Does it mean one shouldn't try? well I know I would like it, so chances are someone else might. Gotta take risks sometimes after all. I cmon, who would have thought that a game that doesn't feature guns would stay for so long as a #1 top seller? (yes, i know the burglar has one. That doesn't count).

There's absolutely nothing wrong with experimenting with genres. What's wrong is implying, as some here are, that the way they want to do things is the one true way of doing things.

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Quote:Semaphores don't even communicate information by color.

Absolutely right. Language thing, I meant traffic lights. (spanish for traffic lights is semáforo)

Although traffic lights are a universal standard, that's not because the meaning of red and green is inherently obvious: people have had to learn what red and green traffic lights mean.

If your game features traffic lights, then using colors is fine. On the other hand, there's no standard gradient for representing somebody's health, the sharpness of a sword, or the difficulty of .

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Still, merely talking about this makes me feel childish. You could have easily assumed that one would use maximum saturation and a mid-range light, since in any other case it becomes hard to distinguish the colors from each other and the background.

That doesn't follow. I find it quite easy to tell bright blue from medium bluegray, and can distinguish both from a green background. There some combinations of color which are difficult to distinguish, but that's true even at maximum saturation and medium brightness.

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About colorblind people: there are also deaf people and epileptic people. Does that mean that you shouldn't use audio cues or light flashes?

Obviously not. I already settled that in my post, but perhaps you decided not to read that part. Because some people are color blind, the game should not rely upon color to communicate information. I said that it would be fine to use color in conjunction with other presentation techniques. Similarly, it would be fine to use sounds in conjunction with other presentation techniques.

Photosensitive epilespy is likely more difficult to deal with. I don't know much about it, but I think a post filter which smooths out flashing effects could be effective: the game would look worse, but only photosensitive people would need to turn the filter on, and their other option is not playing the game. Another option is to make sure that any flashing visual effects don't have a fixed frequency: strobe lighting would be out, but a randomly flickering light would probably be safe.