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Oblivion's Missing Physics Acceleration
An anonymous reader writes "An article on GamesFirst discusses how much better Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion would be if it supported true physics acceleration. From the article: 'Oblivion lacks Casual Physics, and the result is a splendidly beautiful world that still requires a blind eye in order to buy into the environment...' How would Oblivion be different if there were more than just Rag-Doll physics, if bad guys reacted to the swing of your sword, or if mist realistically moved around you as you walked."
I don't know how you can possibly call the physics in Oblivion anything but "comic". It has nothing to do with 'Casual' or 'Targeted' physics. The fact of the matter is that well done targeted physics are more than good enough if your goal is a good game. We're not doing nuclear simulations here, and 'casual physics' with hardware acceleration is only required to check a box on the marketing list. The reason Oblivion's physics stand out as lacking is that they're so rediculous. Crumpled up wads of paper interact with other objects as if they weighed hundreds of pounds... as does every other type of object. Enemies that die are seemingly uneffected by anything you hit them with... except for the killing blow, where your .1lb arrow sends even the biggest, heaviest enemies flying so far that it makes a Kung Fu movie seem realistic. When you jump... Oh let's not even get into it.
Casual physics can actually subtract from a game, because it prevents you from making the obligitory tradeoffs between realism and fun. You don't wany full realism in a fantasy setting, quite honestly. If you're not going to use them though, please, pay attention to balance and details. It's that lack of attention to detail that makes the physics stand out in Oblivion. Stand out in a bad way, that is.
As an aside, this guy says that Oblivion is close to perfect in visual presentation. I'd disagree. It's great, and shaders are nifty and all, but... Well, let's just say that more notes being played doesn't mean it's a better symphony. Use discression with the shaders, guys. Just because you can is no reason for you to make every single thing shiny.
Also, all the Oblivion fanboys out there can hold off on flaming me. I'm totally addicted to the game, and I think it's great. It's OK to see negatives in something. Just because you spent $60 doesn't mean you'll be less of a man if let somebody give honest criticism.
Right, and then the game would probably only run on the top 20 supercomputers in the world :)
What if Oblivion was projected in 3d holograms....and online....in space! Forget swords....more lasers! And Cheese Graters!
But would it make the game better, worse or no change at all.
I've played through Half-Life 2, with its (in)famous physics engine, and I've also put a couple of days into Oblivion. One of these two games has a lot of content to go with its eye candy, and is a game I'll likely replay again. The other is Half-Life.
Except for some of the silly physics (like being able to run the horse along a steep cliff without falling), I don't think Oblivion would gain much from being super-real-istic. I don't play Oblivion because I'm interested in real-world physics.
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Physics realism in the game is nothing compared to the lack of social realism especially with regard to crime. If you steal something anywhere in the game, everyone in the game knows that it wasn't yours and may take steps to punish you for it.
You can steal a horse in one town and ride it to the furthest town away that you can get to, and everyone will know that it's not your horse. You can pick up an alchemy book to read it with no one in the room and put it back down when finished only to be accosted as soon as you open the door. If you kill a guard in an alleyway, every single guard in town will come straight for you to kill you.
Until the game gets social realism down, a few odd-looking collisions means nothing for my immersion.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
If you want all this mist-swirling and stuff interacting with you as you brush past it, just wait for Crysis. The engine looks very impressive. Let's just hope there's a solid game behind it!
"Apparently so, but suppose you throw a coin enough times. Suppose one day, it lands on its edge."
Jesus christ, the physics are fucking impressive for an RPG. They can only put so much effort and manhours into Oblivion, and with the ENORMOUS AMOUNTS OF GAME CONTENT I'm surprised they even got a physics engine that is as fun as it is. True physics would have been nice, OK, but not worth the time. I mean, developers will release a game solely on the merits of its physics engine (see: Black) so it's not something that's trivial to add...
The /. article title and summary cover the least important topics about the title. It really has nothing to do with Oblivion except that they talk about how cool Oblivion would be if more physics were added and these physics were processed by a PPU (physics proccessing unit). I think this is a very interesting idea. Having a physics accelerator card that is completely dedicated to the physics of the game would add huge amounts of realism without performance drops. I think this could be cool. It might even change the way games are made. However, I'm not sure how many gamers will be willing to add another expense when they upgrade their system. But I think retailers would love to have another periphiral to sell that will increase a computer's performance.
Abaddon: An Xbox 360 Indie game
This is so true, and has been so overlooked in this game. The physics are fine. The Social AI is what needs work. And I stopped playing oblivion out of frustration for the same reasons the original poster pointed out.
The only thing that really annoys me is that fires don't die out. It's such a huge cause of disbeleif for me that I have serious trouble getting back 'into' the game each time after I've visited the city.
All rites reversed 2010
So they claim that Oblivion would be much better with AGIA brand physics acceleration hardware support. And if they had just supported AGIA, then so much more realism and immersion would be possible.
'smells like a press release to me. Nobody has an AGIA physics accelerator card yet. That's like saying the game would be better on a blue-ray disk. I wholeheartedly hope that physics acceleration will become a more standard piece of gaming kit at some time in the future, but nobody has one yet.
The success of Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion makes it the perfect example of what's missing from our current conception of next generation games... Oblivion lacks Casual Physics, and the result is a splendidly beautiful world that still requires a blind eye in order to buy into the environment.
Or maybe the success of Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion shows that Casual Physics are not necessary for a great game.
The ______ Agenda
Here is one among many: http://www.oblivionsource.com/
If you can't find a mod for it, mod it yourself and let everyone else enjoy it!
They should really do a little more research on other aspects of reality, such as how difficult it actually is to cast fire directly from your hands. Just what kind of world do these guys live in?
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
They have to save a few good tricks for Elder Scrolls V.
Current video hardware isn't particularly well suited to physics simulations with large #s of interacting objects. If Ageis PhysX chip takes off (for example) we'll see a whole lot more 'good' physics in games. There is still a world of difference between genuine physics simulations (which can be arbitrarily accurate) and the level of accuracy dictated by real-time interactivity but shifting the burden onto hardware is a big step.
Even ignoring hardware requirements, implimenting decent physics requires a deep level of physics support in the very core of the game engine (esp. things like gradually destructable objects and malleable environment). If such features were not on the origional spec for the engine they sure wouldn't want to tack them in after the fact.
Last but probably most important, good physics doesn't directly translate into good gameplay any more than good graphics or good sound. Given a finite amount of developer time they have to predict the right balance that will produce a fun product.
Everybody writes their name on *everything*. ;)
I could live without the physics engine that people are talking about if my game would just run smoothly! I purchased the game for my 360 and everything ran fine...until I updated my firmware and now the game locks up like every 5 minutes for about a minute and it really kills the gameplay for me. I haven't tried another game yet to see if it is my 360 or just obilivion that is having the problem but it has become so difficult to play! But when it does lock up, my entire 360 stops responding to me.
99 out of 100 of those mods have unexpected and undesireable side-effects.
There will be great mods for Oblivion. Almost none of them are ready yet though.
Having played Morrowind, I understand why they made this game behave the way they did, but I can't say that I agree with it. In Morrowind, it was very simple to amass large quantities of wealth by stealing everything in houses and going off to the nearest trader, who would give you money in exchange. This was certainly much easier than killing the overpowering monsters that attacked you (especially as a thief) and then getting 5 gold for their pelts. I think, however, that they thought this was _too_ easy and too tempting for ordinary classes. I'd argue that while it is pretty easy, it is necessary. It's unrealistic to have people steal things and get caught by the simple fact that the item is "stolen." It's an invisible flag that doesn't make any sense. I think that the creators of Oblivion were bothered by how easily you could get away with stealing in the first game and decided that this was the way to curtail that. I believe that they should've just made the shops more strictly guarded. They should've made stealing harder, the penalties for getting caught maybe more severe. A lot of the ability to steal in Morrowind stemed from the fact that most shops had other rooms with no guards, no locks, or a petty lock and stuff sitting out everywhere with nobody looking after it. But yes, the stolen flag does indeed cut down on realism quite a bit, and I totally disagree with that decision. Part of what made Morrowind so fun was the ability to steal without getting caught in a realistic way.
Judges and senates have been bought for gold; Esteem and love were never to be sold.
Just insisting that swords actually hit a vulnerable point with enough force to cause damage makes play too hard. Guns, yes; we can do guns. (Basic problem of video games: players can shoot well and move adequately; little else can be done well through a game pad or keyboard.)
We know how to do much better game physics. What we're actually getting, though, is mediocre physics for everything in the environment. Which is all Ageia delivers; it's not better, you can just use it on more objects at the same time.
Question: If we had a first-person combat game that took two real joysticks to play, and considerable practice to learn, but let you do real martial arts, would you play it?
If one see Oblivion's current hardware requirements, one should understand why things are like they are.
Sure, new solutions are appearing to more accurately reflect "accurate" physics, but the developers still have to cater for the large masses, not design for today's cutting edge graphics cards only. This game is bad enough as it is already. I have no doubt that if Betheshda could've made assumptions that most of the gamer community would have graphics cards supporting the real-time near physics acceleration, they could've designed for those.
Remember that Oblivion isn't supposed to be a tech preview, but a playable game that's supposed to be fun for a lot of people.
This complaint is maybe better left until 2010 or so, as I have no doubt we'll get much closer to this performane in the average PC in a quite short time.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
You can steal a horse in one town and ride it to the furthest town away that you can get to, and everyone will know that it's not your horse.
Of course they know. They check the license plate and the bumper sticker - it's pretty obvious.
Coming soon - pyrogyra
Is it a good game if you have to hunt down and install countless mods, all with unknown side-effects, just to make the game enjoyable?
If you can't find a mod for it, mod it yourself and let everyone else enjoy it!
What if I want to play a game, rather than write and exchange mods?
You sound strangely like a Microsoft marketing employee trying to sell me Windows Vista actually.
Oblivion uses the Havok engine which doesn't have support for hardware acceleration yet. Havok FX will support GPU-assisted physics acceleration, but that costs extra $$$ in licensing fees, so the chances of Bethesda adding that support in a patch are nil. The only engine that supports Ageia's PPU is their own PhysX API; I haven't used Havok's engine so I don't know how different they are, but Ageia's is pretty easy to use (and more importantly, costs nothing), so putting that in a future Oblivion expansion is in the realm of possibility, especially if they plan on having PPU support in Fallout 3 (it will use the same engine, so porting changes should be easier). So yes, you do sound a bit cynical.
That's not the OSS way! All must write code! This is is
1. Pour gasoline on hands.
2. Ignite said hands.
3. ????
4. Profit!
Obviously there's an underground oil well which will burn for the next 500 years. Expect much sidequesty goodness in TES 7.
That's subject to a patent.
I'd just like to point out that they did take a big step that may have been enough (on its own) to make stealing hard enough that you wouldn't end up with the kind of situation that you had in Morrowind. They made it so that if you wander out of the "show room" area of a store, or into any area you aren't supposed to be (some of the guard barracks, pretty much any private home during the night, restricted parts of a castle, ect) and the AI sees you then there is nothing you can do short of leaving the area (or killing you .. but I thought the point here was to not get caught doing something illegal) to get them to stop following you. My character has a sneak of 100 and speed/agi to match and I've tried running into a seperate room and closing the door while in sneak mode, they still know where you are. You can try it by going up the stairs in one of the shops in the Imperial City and standing next to the door to the store owners private room. The owner will walk over and look at you, then follow you around the store until you leave.
GPL for those who don't know is a very though historic formule 1 game that focusses on realism. It was so realistic that it took fans a lot of time to realise that all the setups of the cars had been done wrong. Modern F1 games are made to ride as low to the ground because of airodynamics BUT the F1 cars in the era simulated do not even have wings.
So while all the players tried to get the cars as low as possible they were in fact making the cars impossible to handle. The cars instead needed lots of clearance in able to fully use their shocks to get around corners.
GPL is harder then most driving games as you need to special controls of being able to break and accelerate at the same time. So the usual joystick setup of only one axis for both just isn't good enough.
GPL is also a game in wich you shouldn't mind loosing. You probably just won't be good enough to beat the AI drivers. Then again the thrill of coming 10th in that game is infinitly greater then coming first in lesser race sims.
So I would like to play a game with more realistic combat, not to realistic offcourse (just as I can pause GPL for a bathroom break and don't actually have to fit enough to handle a high performance car) but giving me a real challenge in actually having to do some fighting and not just push a button.
I liked Oni. While not realistic you could at least use all your different moves to great effect. Far better then the regular hit or block. Still love that move where you ran to the side of badguy then swung around his neck kicking his companions in the face before snapping his neck.
But why can't we have both? GPL has lots of helper functions wich if all turned on make the game a lot easier. No fun, but a lot easier.
In fact all the really though sims do this.
Morrowind in fact had three different attack moves. Probably considered to complex for console players but there is no reason it couldn't have been an option in Oblivion.
So yes, I would buy such a game and I think I am not alone. True for every Operation FlashPoint fan there are plenty of gamers who could not handle the fact that bullets arc BUT that can be a selling point as well.
To me Oblivion is a nice game, just as soon as I got the instant kill mod because the current fighting get to bloody boring. Especially those damn gates. Endless non roleplaying level with boring enemies dropped around the place. Yawn.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
If you're getting caught stealing in Oblivion, you're doing something wrong. Use sneak mode and make sure nobody sees you taking stuff. If nobody sees it happen, you get no bounty. If you have no bounty, guards won't try to arrest you. Sure, you still can't sell stuff to normal shops, but it's easy to join the Thieves' Guild to get access to fences (you have to advance in the guild to get access to better fences).
In all, I like Oblivion's theft implementation a little bit better. Sure, I have to seek out a fence to sell my stuff, but at least I know exactly what stuff is stolen and I don't have to keep track of who I stole it from. In Morrowind, the same "Stolen Property" flag was there, but hidden. If you didn't keep good track of what you stole and kept, you could find yourself weaponless or armorless if you ever got caught by a guard (because they took all of your stolen merchandise, just like in Oblivion). More importantly, if you stole an item from a shopkeeper, you could never sell that type of item to them again (whether it was the same item you stole from them or not). Even worse than that, some NPCs would even refuse you service if you ever stole from them (most notably enchanters, where they would refuse to enchant items for you if you stole from them -- whether you were caught or not).
Is it realistic that guards know exactly what you've stolen at all times, even if it was something you stole many game-months before? No. Does it hurt gameplay? Not really. Not nearly as much as it did in Morrowind.
I agree thief is really quite hopeless. Then again, the other way I've seen it done (just go into every room where there's noone and loot) isn't very realistic either. I mean people will start to notice things missing, investigations, who has been in that room or seen people go into it, you'll have rumors flying around in the town about plundering etc. Like the merchant quest if you've done that, people will start to ask questions about where things come from. If you killed a guard, the guard would probably be strengthened. Maybe the guards have some sort of shout range, alarm horn or wharever. I can't really say that I care much personally since I'm out killing necros and closing oblivion gates, but each to his own. What I'm saying is that a proper social response is not "business as usual", and there's a damn lot of other game features that are important too. Quite frankly there's other things I'd like to see rather that trying to implement the intricacies of real social realism, particularly since I suspect people would quite quickly learn to work around them.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
The stolen flag seems to be a cheap way out of a hard problem. A better way would have been a proper scale of value. Ever had a garage sale? If you completely cleaned out Joe Peasant's house, you shouldn't be getting more than a pittance. Maybe you'd get more by cleaning out some sultan's castle, but then you've got the guards, magical traps, locks, etc. that all that fortune brings.
As for the "stolen" flag itself, a merchant should be able to recognize his own goods, and then figure out the rest. How many house's worth of stuff do you think you could pawn at a single shop in the real world before the clerk gets suspicious? So, at some point, the merchant should get suspicious of you, and that merchant should react accordingly (and not by using psychic powers to alert all his merchant guild buddies). As for a related criminal flag, if you're not seen, it didn't happen (heck, if you stole a fork, it wouldn't even be missed). Unless what you took was pretty darn valuable, which in the game world would probably be worth hiring a diviner to look into the issue.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
If you want a real physics model, go outside, pick up a rock, and throw it. For bonus points, you can throw it at your own window. You'll get a physics model, a destructible environment, and full stereo sound, all at once. Soon to be followed by an all-to-realistic economics model based on a goods and services, skilled labor market.
Meanwhile, um, Oblivion is a magical fantasy-based role playing game. I can't speak for anyone else, but I play games like that because they're NOT perfect models of reality. When I want reality, I turn off the computer and take a walk with my dog.
Coffee is my drug of choice.
I see everyone talking about casual physics but isn't this supposed to be causal? Because, frankly, physics that are more comic would also seem more casual rather than formal to me.
Or you can buy the house in Skingrad, enter the house, walk out onto the balcony, walk back in through the balcony door, run to the other side of the world, and get arrested for breaking in.
"No, you play Oblivion because you want to adventure in a cool fantasy world! The more realistic the fantasy world, the more clever and interesting your adventures would be."
:)
Maybe this is true of you, but in my fantasy worlds, magic is cool, mushrooms make you bigger, and flowers give you the ability to shoot fire. Making these worlds more realistic might help a particular genre, but it'd be of limited benefit to the games I play where things like magic, jumping over buildings, etc, apply.
I think the immersion I'm thinking about is different from the immersion you're thinking about. I think the folks who wrote Oblivion would better spend their time by making it so that having more than 2 human characters on screen doesn't grind an Athlon64 with a gig of RAM and a Geforce 6800 to 7-9 fps, or make the NPCs walk into each other before moving to go around. That would help my immersion a lot more than watching me fall off a cliff.
World of Warcraft has unrealistic physics on par with Oblivion. It hasn't seemed to hurt its popularity
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Aside from making the game prettier, how much would physics actually help the game? All those calculations are expensive (be it in CPU power, or in actual dollers in the case of a dedicated physics unit) for the fact that they don't do much for the game itself. Sure it'd help with the sense of immersion, but we just had a story ealier today about how much better HL was than HL2 despite its lack of gee whiz physics or the latest in graphics technology. You have to think in terms of how much bang you get for your buck.
If you want a clear cut example of technology over substance, take a look at Deus Ex versus its sequel. I loved Deus Ex, but I'll be the first to admit that it's one hell of an ugly game. But that's made up for in spades by huge environments, innovative gameplay, and fantastic level design. By comparison, Deus Ex 2 was a veritable tour de force of technology- realtime shadows and physics made the game quite nice to look at (provided you had the horsepower to run it at higher than 800x600). The game, though, was a pale shadow of its predecessor- the levels were tiny, the gameplay had been oversimplified, and the level design was nowhere near as good. The basiscs made the first game great, not the extras.
Oblivion is by all accounts (I haven't played it myself) a great game. I've seen it played, and it doesn't look like physics would actually change the gameplay all that much, just add extra eye candy. Would all kinds of real time physics make the game better? Maybe. Would the difference be enough to account for the extra cost in both hardware and development time? Probably not.
There are 2 issues being argued here and the line is being blurred. A PPU will spawn new kinds of physics based games, yes, but it will also assist "ordinary" games in looking more realistic. Gameplay is an important aspect of games, but so is suspension of disbelief.
All you naysayers would have sung the same song in the pre-3DFX days, trust me. How many modern console games would be fundamentally different without 3D acceleration? Does Viewtiful Joe's camera ever rotate? Wouldn't Tekken be just as playable with simulated 3D dodging? Does a hockey game that scrolls up and down need 3D modelled characters? In general, don't hand-drawn 2D sprites look way more detailed than hardware-accelerated meshes? And yet we all own 3D cards to crunch the hell out of polys.
If and when this technology takes off, whether it's onboard or in a GPU or in a standoff PCI card, you'll love this technology when you finally adopt it. It will even make His noodly appendage more noodly!!
...you sit down at tables and everything flies off of them.
In other news: If a frog had wings it wouldn't bump it wouldn't bump its ass when it hopped. Film at 11.
Yeah there are a million things that could make any given game better. The physics of Oblivion hasn't made the game unplayable, or even unpleasant for me.
More potshots from the peanut gallery.
by Mike Buddha -- Someday the mountain might get him, but the law never will.
" I mean...if I'm in a house with a close door...and I loot EVERYTHING there, even if its a generic item, how in the HELL is some shop keeper going to know it was stolen?"
See, just one more reason why RFID tags are evil
I assure you, I'm not. Believable fantasy worlds are not helped by the physics engine of Half-life 2, at least not in my mind, because part of the acceptance of magic is the realization that the gravitational constant may be different in that world, or that alchemy is alive and well, etc.
I'm just saying that there are a lot of other good things they could take the time to write for the game that would help a lot more, such as that AI I talked about. I've watched guards walking into walls for 20 minutes at a time in Oblivion. I've also seen mounted guards walk their horses straight into each other, then rotated on the spot, and moved around each other in perfect symmetry. That affects my suspension of belief a lot more than the fact that I can walk on cliffs in tricky ways.
Freak out about 386s just shows you're not reading my posts.
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In a game where magic is common, we can just assume that there is an inexpensive spell cast on all shopkeepers that tells them if something is stolen or not. Same with guards.
It is foolish for us to insist that Oblivion be a real-world thievery simulation when it has much more blatant differences from the real-world (existence of magic, existence of monster races).
Having said that, I admit that I would prefer for the thievery to be more like real life. I am just not going to get angry and blame a fantasy video game for being 'unrealistic'.
The article's author I believe is describing systems beyond the capability of even the physics cards. Take his description of the falling snow. From his description, the current system is basically an visual overlay rendered snowflakes. What he wants is for each snowflakes movement to be calculated using the physics accelerator. To do this we need to store each flakes x,y,z location and a vector. At 1 flake per cubic foot, a 100ftx100ftx100ft area would have 1,000,000 flakes. That also assumes we don't store any info on flakes that have hit the ground. Since we no longer have a predictable snow pattern that can be a texture or a simple particle effect, every frame we have send the video card unique locations for a 1,000,000 diferent particles. Depending on the system, we are already sub 60 FPS video. It might be argued that you could just model the flakes around the players and npcs, to reduce load. In other words make concessions until you get acceptable performance. Which is the likely process used by the designers to come up with the current simplified model.
Who is this guy? What does he know about physics? I thought I was updated on the news of in-game physics but I must have missed the boat on learning about "targeted" and "casual" physics. .... physics acceleration support (including ..."
It seems like this guy has completely made these terms up!
I think that the Ageia PHYSX chip is going to rock balls but this article seems almost like a bad advertisement:
"...with a PPU, there's no reason that snowfall couldn't realistically build up on the ground, allowing you to leave footprints...", "...Agia currently sells a physics accelerator called PhysX. Their website lists games that currently have
How much is Ageia paying this guy? Because I'll do a way better job, and make up way cooler terms, like:
Goldbergian physics - Every in-game physics interaction has a wacky chain reaction to follow.
The game's thievery is fine, apart from the lack of good loot. (Silverware and such are underpriced, but it's a quick fix in the construction set, or with any of a handful mods around.)
I never understood all the moaning about 'OMG teh guards psycichally know what u stoled and they take it aways!' -- there's a spell in the game called "Command person" for cryin' out loud! They catch you for stealing, all they have to do is read one of those and say "Alright, which of these things did you steal, and who did you take it from?" (I imagine there would be limits on what they can ask, and probably some sort of advocate for the accused present, so as to prevent "I command you to sign this confession, you scaly Argonian bastard!" which would be a big problem in Southern Cyrodiil.)
Oh, and the guards aren't psychic. When someone spots you committing a crime, the game models a shout (that carries farther than the regular dialogue can be heard) and any guards within the radius of the sound, even if they're on patrol outside, will respond. Before you break in and steal anything, make sure there are no guards AROUND the building. It helps if it an isolated spot, on a corner with no streets outside the wall.
Tip: To lose a pursuit, get out of eyesight and begin sneaking. You need a decent sneak skill, and it helps to go completely still and get a bit of chameleon going. When the music changes after a few seconds, you've lost them. At higher levels of sneak this ability becomes ridiculously overpowered, but non-stealth classes may want to know this if you are being chased through the wilderness by a train of nasties.
There are mods to increase ability to do this ("Attack and Hide" comes to mind) but they're insanely overpowering on stealth chars.
They had to make theivery 'bad' somehow, make it special. That's why they did all that stuff.
Is it realistic? Not at all. But something was needed, and that's what they put in.
Would you kindly mod me +1 insightful?
One could argue that a horse is branded and therefore easily identifiable. Possibly the same could be argued for any item which you make visible by wearing or wielding it. Arguably, merchants should also purchase certain unidentifiable items. What annoys me is that if you steal something with no one around, your next interaction with a guard sees you arrested even though no one witnessed the arrest. Even interacting with on a door can see you arrested if it turned out to be locked when a guard was passing.
According to Something Awful, it's asshole physics engine is also lacking. i.e. you can be a total asshole in the game and no one cares.
I think, however, that they thought this was _too_ easy and too tempting for ordinary classes.
I am really liking Oblivion, but the things I miss from Morrowind are all along those lines - the Mark/Recall and Levitation spells especially. I also was annoyed that there is apparently no Mudcrab or Scamp merchants who have a lot of gold available, so I got a mod to add one because otherwise there was no one to buy higher-level items for what they're really worth.
I'm not sure why Bethesda was so concerned about minor "exploits" in a single-player game like this. It's not like you're ruining the fun for other people by using them, and being able to use Mark/Recall/Intervention to rapidly loot dungeons really appealed to my collect-everything instinct.
As far as physics are concerned, I think they're mostly fine. I could do with a bit less slip-and-slide action making me chase corpses down hills, and I don't like accidentally kicking things all over the floor in my house-of-hoarding, but those are minor nits to pick.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
Oblivion has several attack moves, depending on your level of skill with a particular weapon.
Doesn't mean the physics don't bug me-- we had far better object behavior two years ago in HL2 on much slower hardware, but in Oblivion you have to watch your step or you might accidentally kick a 40-lb. warhammer 30 ft. away and off the edge of a cliff while you're trying to pick it up.
That's my only gripe. It *has* a rudimentary physics engine, but it treats everything like it weighs the same. Wads of paper can send suits of armor flying. An inadvertant step can fling the heaviest of objects well out of your reach.
It's a great game, but the physics needs a touchup. The worst wonkiness seems like it ought to be easily fixable.
Check out the most downloaded mod for Oblivion
DISCLAIMER - I haven't played the game, perhaps teh boobies are that impressive.-- taking over the world, we are.
I've wondered if a cool mythical/medieval kind of game could be based on making the speed of light much much lower than it really is (except for the actual light beams).
Make it so that it just takes an incredible amount of energy to accelerate anything past say 100mph. So make the speed of light say 200mph for Lorentz transformation purposes, but other than that make the physics semi-realistic. Would that make swords axes and arrows the state of the art as far as combat technology goes?
or does anyone else suspect the actual term the poster should have used was "causal" and not "casual"?
Casual sex or casual Friday not casual physics.
I have to express my opinion.
Gameplay and realism are two different concepts. The whole point of playing games is to get away from reality: whenever I get tired of dealing with real-life stuff, I turn on my favourite game and relax. If that game happens to have the same limitations that I am trying to avoid, then I will pick up a different game instead.
That's why I love Oni. It's simple; it requires minimal number of commands, and it's ridiculously fun.
That's why I love FarCry. It's unrealistic in that the first bullet of almost every gun is insanely accurate, but it makes the game that much more fun.
But realism? I stopped playing Soldier of Fortune as quickly as I started, because I didn't want to see each person die 20 different ways. I get annoyed with Half Life 2 every time I get hurt when I jump off a 6-foot ledge and lose health, because it substracts fun from the game, instead of adding to it.
When you think of a game, only its most memorable moments come to mind; the bland details are forgotten. Consider Half Life 2. What is more memorable: Ravenholm, or the trajectory of the crossbow as it curves down over time? The latter - an accomplishment of physics - is but a trivial detail, whereas the former leaves you with vivid images that you'll remember for quite a long time.
Now, Oblivion: for reasons described above, physics should be the last of its worries. It's definitely a great game for its time, but to be honest, it's not that much different from Morrowind: both have immense worlds; both have really neat graphics (for its time); both have absurd little annoying quests that you want to finish for the sake of completeness, but that tire you out over time? Even the fact that NPCs are talking doesn't really do much, because I get bored of the same voice actors, and read the subtitles to speed up the gameplay. No - what I'll remember are the Oblivion gates, the animation of casting magic, and the "feel" of each city.
Physics? I've seen plenty of ads for a PCI physics card; I don't need yet another article telling me that.
Och... I wish a lot of games would do that. Anyone remember seeing hordes of demons coming after them in Doom? And remember how Unreal had about two enemies per level? Doom used lowtech graphics and dumb intelligence, so they could have hordes. Unreal had beautful graphics and AI good enough to have the enemies strafing as they approached you (hey, it was high stuff back then) to avoid your fire. But that sophistication had a cost, the fact that the two highly-skilled opponents were the only creatures on the level. Unfortunately, games seem to have decided that the second method is the better one. The only FPS I can think of offhand that spurned that was the Serious Sam series. Both methods can work if not taken to extremes, but sometimes I really miss those clusterhordes...
My only real beef with the physics in Oblivion is how often running into a desk will send the items on its surface flying around the room as if an explosion had occurred. *wry grin* That and the tendency for odd physics chain reactions by picking up an item off the table... I probably have such a low CPU count that it's convinced the objects are sharing space and therefore it explodes in the fine manner of anyone who teleports into a solid object.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
"This is done for a simply reason: the amount of processing power required to calculate the physics of each individual snowflake is too great for a system without a dedicated PPU (Physics Processing Unit) to handle. All the system's processing power would be claimed by physics calculations instead of texture rendering, A.I., and game functions."
The author is jumping to conclusions that are incorrect. The reason isn't that the system is incapable of calculating the physics, but the graphics card bandwidth is incapable of handling a huge particle system update without negatively impacting frame rate. Oblivion already is graphically demanding, the developers chose to model snow in a simple way to avoid killing frame rate in snowy areas.
SFXGFXPHYSICSGame MechanicsGameplay
So, you can do a skill check between the perception of those present and the theft success value (basically skill of the thief versus value of the item stolen). A successful check would mean that the thief gets away with the item on the spot.
Then you check the value of the stolen item versus the average value of the items in the owner's domain, and check that against the owner's carefulness rating. This determines whether the owner knows it's been stolen. To determine whether the thief's identified, you could check whether anyone had seen him recently and how many people were in the area to get a probability.
This means a little bit of math done every time you steal something and a few more integers to assign/remember for each NPC. It's an amortized cost of O(1). Why not do it?
Well, this is just one small thing. You have to add editor options or automatic tools for assigning domains to NPCs, establishing ownership, determining carefulness of an NPC, and so forth. If you want other interactions to be realistic, that's even more, with finite developers and resources.
At any rate, I would likely prefer it with a reasonably balanced but not terribly sophisticated system. It's almost as rewarding and also quite funny, for instance when someone ignores you as you cut their tapestries off the wall.
The stolen flag seems to be a cheap way out of a hard problem. A better way would have been a proper scale of value. Ever had a garage sale? If you completely cleaned out Joe Peasant's house, you shouldn't be getting more than a pittance. Maybe you'd get more by cleaning out some sultan's castle, but then you've got the guards, magical traps, locks, etc. that all that fortune brings.
They kind of do that, moreso in Oblivion. Low-quality items that are mass-produced tend to be low value compared to their weight. In Oblivion, it was so low that they sold as 0. Morrowind, they tried, but they were foiled by that their weight system didn't allow weights below 0.01 and the lowest gold value was 1. So, unless the forks and parchment weighed a tenth of a pound, You could still steal large amounts and sell it.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
But the thing is, i think most people DO want something that's closer to reality.
They want a fantasy that's as real as possible only without hassles like having to deal with the consequences of your actions for the rest of your life or needing to earn money for a living.
I think that's partly responsible for the way the game industry looks nowadays.
When back in the day you had the platformers and the adventure-quests and the RPGs all on their own, now i see alot of convergence.
Everything is going 3D, RTS games have RPG-type leveling, PRG games have first person perspective.
Oblivion itself is much more realistic than some top-down RPG where you and some monster stand facing each other and take turns at rolling attacks.
So that's where i think you're wrong, people want a fantasy, but they want one that feels as real as possible.
make the ice so insanely COLD that if we...
anyway, you got the point, I hope
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Is it a good game if you have to hunt down and install countless mods, all with unknown side-effects, just to make the game enjoyable?
Hey, look at the average FireFox advocate. "FireFox is the best, just install these 5 extensions to get the functionality that Mozilla and/or Opera include with the base install."
If it works right out of the box, it doesn't qualify for the Slashdot Seal of Approval.
This article reads like a plant from Ageia to position their PPU card.
Neither, for example, Carmageddon or Bubble Bobble have realistic physics. So? That doesn't make them less funny. Nowadays realistic physics are taken for granted as realistic graphic is... what makes me sorry is that nobody cares about gameplay.
Well, there goes GamesFirst on my list of unreliable publications.
This really is not about Oblivion; it's about a PCI physics card maker having paid a company to write them add-copy. It's so transparent that it makes me feel contempt for the whole bunch of people behind it.
-- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?