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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."
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
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.
Ignoring the fact that what you've just described doesn't actually talk about the physics engine in a game, but damage engines, there are still reasons that arbitrary physics can be a mess.
The most common example is "stacking stuff" and breaking the 'freaking scripting. You've got a bad guy, you've got a castle. You are to go into this castle after the bad guy has revealed himself to have a climactic battle with his accountant. So instead of playing along with the game, the player stacks up a bunch of random crap outside of the castle, and climbs in. Or maybe they're accidentally blown in by a combination of a misplaced grenade, a feet of flight, and an enemy's lightning bolt. Either way, they've managed to completely break the scripting of the game and very possibly make it impossible to continue. They probably won't realize that either until after they've saved their progress.
Or the player is in a heated battle with a group of enemies, and they're all firing Tim-the-Enchanter-esque rockets at eachother. Once the player wins the battle, he discovers that the cave he was supposed to go into is now blocked by the rubble of the building that was just nuked around it, preventing progress.
Or the physics engine correctly asserts that objects should not pass through eachother, and so every time you swing a weapon it pushes the opponent out of your range. Or your body mass manages to push aside a character that is moving in a scripted fashion, thereby preventing them from reaching their objective. Or one of a million other things that can go wrong.
All of the "casual physics" would need to be programmed into the game in some form or another. Sure, you could have tree leaves that brush away from the player. But in addition to the calculation overhead, you need to define the occupied regions, joints, anchor points, and other physical properties of that object. If you want a building to break, you've got to define the stress thresholds of all of the polygonal objects, the collision volume, the breaking patterns, and draw all of the internal portions of the object. If you want the player to be able to dig a post hole, you have to define a ton of parameters for that as well. It may look like a tree, but it doesn't have the slightest clue what it is and what it is supposed to do.
Physics aren't free. They are, in fact, incredibly messy and touchy, and need to be coded on a case-by-case basis. I think Oblivion did a really fun job in this respect, as the two things I've seen people do with the game are A: jump their horse off a cliff to watch it twist up as it dies and B: blast the hell out of enemies trying to launch them over trees. Those must have taken reasonable amounts of coding resources, but added tremendously to the gameplay. The ability to arbitrarily deform buildings, on the other hand, would not be particularly helpful for this type of game.
I'm not saying that better integrated physics isn't a good goal going ahead. The physics in Oblivion as they stand now would have been considered hyper realistic as of 8 years ago. But it shouldn't be the primary concern of developers. Experience should always come first, and if physics support that in proportion to their development cost, they should go in. If they add undue burden to the coders, artists, or QA, they should be ignored for more important things.
Games are all smoke and mirrors, an illusion no thicker than the smoke eminating from a pool hall. Don't be confused into thinking that they are the real thing being held back by a lack of power. They are just an intricate floating illusion pushed forward by the remarkable power that we already have.
The ______ Agenda
This is what saddens me about the tech demos I'm seeing lately: "Look, the car falls apart realistically!" While that gets me to geek out for a few minutes I wonder if so much effort will be put into gameplay.
I think all 'graphics vs. gameplay' arguments are typically wrong in their assumptions about how games are made and sold.
The fallacy of the 'lets do less of x and more of y' is that x is typically very well defined and achievable with a limited budget and schedule with the proper people and tools, substance y is vague and intangible and unmanageable.
Everybody with eyes and a brain knows what good graphics are, there are lots of good artists and graphics programmers out there so it's only a matter of time and money to get good graphics. A huge part of our brain is devoted to processing visuals, so I think it's well and good that that part of the brain is targeted. Another good bit of mental processing is devoted to physics- recognizing where things are falling intuitively, how to move muscles to achieve desired effect and so on- and we understand physics. Visuals are a subset of physics in reality, and that's pretty well understood too.
I have no idea what 'good gameplay' is, or what 'fun' is. I'm sure there are a lot of people out there with theories that work sometimes when the stars are aligned and so forth. There may be some really brilliant people out there who really understand how to make some specific kind of 'good gameplay' and 'fun' and can consistently create games with those qualities, but for the most part since those people are few and far between the easiest way to make a fun game with good gameplay is to copy another game that just happened to hit upon those qualities. Another thing is that in the development process, the point at which a game becomes fun may come really late- you won't know you screwed up until its too late to make fundamental changes to how the game is played without breaking budget and schedule.
That just covers the developer end though- consumers, although they want to have fun and have good gameplay, have no real method of determining if a game embodies that by looking at the box, or watching the video. They know it when they experience it. And sometimes it takes a while to learn a new style of gameplay, so maybe a demo isn't enough- so again it's easier for consumers to stick with what they know, and have past experience with a genre of game they'll know much sooner when first playing a game whether it will be fun and so on. But the first thing the consumer sees is going to be the graphics, and the second thing they'll experience is the way entities in the game move and interact- the physics and animation. Those two things make the first impression even if gameplay is more important to making them enjoy the entire game- if those two things are done poorly then the gamer will most likely never get to the gameplay part of the game. I don't think there's any way around that.
I'll just say you're flat-out wrong on this one, at least regarding the hardware acceleration. In 5-10 years, people will be laughing at you at least as much as they were at the people who said "You can't fill 512k of RAM with meaningful code!"
History is on my side. Problems frequently move back and forth between hardware and software as complexity of processors and processes increase in a cyclic pattern, but after time the processes end up staying put based on simple clasification. Processes with low IO rates end up on the general purpose CPU in the long run, while processes requiring heavy IO or stream processing stay as a specialized 'accelerator' function. Any benefit you would gain from a hardware physics engine will soon be negated by multi-core CPUs, and if necessary, MMX style instruction set extensions. If I knew how to find you in ten years, I'd make a bet with you.
whereas with Causal, you just tweak the properties of the objects/world, the physics will Just Work(TM).
Spoken like somebody who learned all he knows about the subject from a press release.
I hate the control system too. While the UI that controls maps, inventory, quests, character is an exercise in minimalism, it sure is a pain in the arse to use.
You should download BTMod, it makes life much more pleasant for PC players of Oblivion. It gives you larger maps and inventory/spell screens, works great.
I haven't had any problem with the voices (maybe because I'm not a native speaker), but one thing that ruins immersion for me is the way opponents level. I understand why, it makes balancing much easier and keeps the game challenging and fun througout. But it takes some of the tension out of exploring - you know you will always be able to take out anything you bump into when you enter a cave, you will never accidentally stumble into the dread lair of the dead God while you are at level one. So neither do you get the sense of accomplishment of levelling your character and coming back later for some "who is the tough guy NOW, eh?".
It also constantly makes me wonder at later levels, if a group of bandits all have legendary elven weapons and magical armor, why don't they sell it and buy a luxury house with servants to take care of them the rest of their lives, instead of lurking in a cold and dank sewer all day waiting for a passerby to rob for scraps?? I'm considering downloading the mod that makes high level weapons and armor much more rare.
Still, amazing game though. The radiant AI is a bit wonky sometimes, but you occassionally get some really jaw-dropping stuff. For instance, when I killed one bandit his magic sword fell clattering down a mine, and another bandit dropped her lousy iron knife, picked up his sword and ran at me!
And all the great books...
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