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The Details of Dead Bodies in Gaming
Via Stephen Totilo's Second Player blog, his most recent post at MTV concerns dead bodies in videogames. This rather morbid topic may seem like a small concern, but it's a big deal for the people making the games. From the article: "Dead bodies have been vanishing in games for decades because of technical difficulties. Old 2-D games -- like just about anything on the original Atari, Sega and Nintendo systems -- could only display a limited number of character graphics, or sprites, on a TV screen at one time. Letting a zapped enemy lie prone on the playing field caused problems, limiting the amount of new things, like new on-rushing enemies, that could be drawn onto the screen. 'You would end up sacrificing one of your precious moving objects to display an essentially useless dead body,' [game designer Ralph] Barbagallo said." With the advent of the newest generation of consoles, Totilo explains, we now have the luxury of corpses as far as the eye can see.
Ah, that makes it all worthwhile...
The NSA: The only part of the US government that actually listens.
Anything that adds just a bit more realism is usually a good thing (in video games). There are cases where there can be too much realism, but this isn't one of those things. There is defiently a point where you will want to dispose the dead body - otherwise the environment can be completly littered and could possibly pose framerate issues. But either way, with the increase of horsepower these new consoles have, it will be extremely interesting to see what type of objects they place in our virtual world that used to not be possible.
I'm pretty sure dead/unconcious bodies were a game element in Thief; didnt' you have to hide them to avoid alerting any guards who stumbled across them? (I've never actually played Thief, but I remember my roommate dragging the bodies into closets all the time.)
Because an episode called "Knee-Deep in the Dead" kind of lacks impact when the dead don't lie around, let alone stack up to your kneecaps.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
This reminds me of one of my buddy's D&D stories. The DM would track the corpses on the map and would force players to make a skill roll (I forget which one) if they wanted to step over a body. My buddy asked if he could carry a kobold corpse around with him to lay in front of enemy combatants to force them to make a roll. The request was denied, of course.
"The unicode stuff in the latest version is working fabulously well. My russian mafia friends are ecstatic."
Who wrote that? Idi Amin?
More music, fewer hits
AFAIK, the Total War sequence of games has no problem tracking dead bodies, and there may be thousands of them!
Certainly Rome:Total War leaves the dead on the battlefield, even if they are simplified. Even missiles, such as arrows are tracked into the ground and only disappear after a while.
I fail to see the problem with letting the dead pile up, they're just objects like everything else.....
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Karma: Chameleon
Now you can stack up corpses and use them as cover while you fire. Just like in a real war! I can see Leningrad and Stalingrad scenarios where you could build barricades with frozen corpses.
Too bad we don't have smell-a-vision, the smell of burnt and decaying human flesh would lend that extra realism to the game.
Though if that's what you want, you could just volunteer for Iraq or Afghanistan.
All-in-all I find the topic rather morbid.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
These technical limitations led to one of my favorite video game effects, where enemies explode and disappear in a puff of smoke after being 'dealt with' by the player. Certainly doesn't work for say, HL2/GoW style games, but effective and very cool when it does. The Windwaker is by far my favorite implementation of this, followed by Super Mario, where the baddies just fall off the screen, down into some unseen pit of doom.
-Buddy of DoQ
I could have sworn in Doom II that monster corpses didn't vanish. I have memories of some of those balls-to-the-wall firefests that ended with me low on health and frazzled looking out over a field dead brown imps.
Or am I misremembering?
Wood Shavings!
- Godai
By extension, wouldn't you have to mop up the blood stains as well?
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
I think it was Quake where I'd keep killing until performance died, then used a clear garbage console command to remove the corpses. I'd like a similar command IRL but to remove jerks in the town centre.
Todd: I hope it proves as delicious as the farmers that grew them
Disappearing bodies is not much of a problem anymore, because fewer games (especially those that emphasize realism) have infinite enemies. If a game does have infinite enemies it must have disappearing bodies or someone is going to spend ten hours killing enemies to make it crash, just because they can. More powerful hardware can certainly increase the number of bodies the game is capable of displaying, but can't ever eliminate the limits.
try playing the level 30 of doom with monster respawn in god IDDQD mode.... in about 10-20 minutes it will crash.. too much information..
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
With the advent of the newest generation of consoles, Totilo explains, we now have the luxury of corpses as far as the eye can see.
Any one remember playing the original doom and getting to that one map where it was you and a massive room full of demons? I cheated to get through it. Now we can have hills of demon corpses. O.K. They most likely mean human corpses, but that's the least interesting to me. Unless they are thinking about decomposing corpses and how long it takes which could be very interesting game play in where a massive battle field that isn't cleaned up spreads disease and what ever troops are around that battle field end up dead.
Another thought would be revisiting the same areas/maps where previous battles were fought and the dead piling up over the generations the map has been used. Think of the dead becoming just part of the background or that they you have to bury them or burn them to prevent disease and end up making a new map if played several times.
I'm waiting for the simulated typhus and bulbonic plague epidemics now.
My favorite part of doom 2 was whenever I turned around, the corpses always had their feet facing me. Moving behind my back, sneaky undead....
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
Tom Hall, Commander Keen's designer, made it a priority that kids see the consequences of their actions. Killing those evil little robots left their corpses rusting on the platform.
How we know is more important than what we know.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darfur_conflict
Estimated number of deaths in the conflict have ranged from 50,000 (World Health Organization, September 2004) to 450,000 (Dr. Eric Reeves, 28 April 2006). Most NGOs use 400,000, a figure from the Coalition for International Justice that has since been cited by the United Nations.
i'd rather they didn't lay around. it's nice to see the payoff for good play but this is supposed to be a game not an experiment in psychology (i'm guessing here, maybe it is :-)
--iggy_mon - www.ananonymouskiller.com - Die Trying -
And you will know us by the trail of dead
I always loved that quote.
There are many tongues to talk, and but few heads to think. -Victor Hugo
We've had this capability for a while. And I don't even mean "I've seen it in other games"... I really mean that we could have been doing this for a while.
The problem is that even as consoles improve by a factor of 10, game designers/programmers/whoever decides the features try to improve the graphics by a factor of 11. Witness the PS3 games that have framerate troubles... forget console fanboyism, forget everything like that, that is nothing more and nothing less than bad judgment by the game developer and biting off more than they could chew.
Forget about the extra power to display corpses... despite our gaming rigs having more power than I would ever have dreamed of in my childhood, we still have games that can't keep up 30fps. I'd rather see more attention payed to that than corpse retention.
I'm all for stacking the dead up chest high in the game but if you're going to do it then you should also make the in-game characters react with horror or whatever's in-character for them.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
in the game of 'Real Life' the corpses only stay around for a limited time, just as in the article discussed. It can take a while, depending on the climate, and on other player characters, but corpses are generally removed one way or another.
The Splinter Cell series also had this requirement.
"I can't really see any way of ussing persistand corpses as anything more then a gimick."
In Painkiller you could get a special gold coin if you kept a body in the air long enough.
Idi makes great ice cream!
On second thought, you'd want the bodies to be semisolid, where a player could sink into them. The more embedded you are in a corpse (or stack of corpses), the slower you'd move. (Or the more likely you would be to trip.)
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It's been done before - the old school game Centipede used corpses as key game elements. So much so in fact, that a large part of the game was corpse management.
The first game I noticed this in was BG DA. I remember being impressed at the time... Even when you save the game, and return, your enemies lie slain where you left them.
...survive at sea by making a raft of bloated bodies like in Rome or Watchmen.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
When you can carry, wield, throw, sacrifice, eat, partly eat and refrigerate corpses, when you can turn them to statues or feed them to your pets or put them in tin cans and lob those at your enemies as well, and when it matters whether or not you're wearing gloves, and when rotting corpses can give you food poisoning or turn you to slime (among more beneficial effects), and when mold and fungi grow on them and you can observe vampires drink their blood...
...then the present will finally catch up with roguelikes in one area.
:}
PS: Yes, I know there's Vulture's, and all those tile modes. But really, how can you tell what anything is that way?
I wish corpses remained solid. It would add a whole new element to gameplay, making it a priority to get your butt through a hallway before the corpses pile up to the ceiling.
Tried it once in a Quake mod. Sucked balls. Perhaps it's just because Quake wasn't designed for it, or that the games interpretation of the real world (WRT Physics etc) was so off, but having loads of extra obstacles where nobody planned for them made getting around an awkward pain in the ass and added nothing but frustration.
Leia's ship in SW: Battlefront 2 is where I most wish bodies came into play.
I'm responsible for some of this. Here's the first ragdoll falling downstairs, from 1997. Yes, that's how that cliche started. I'd written the first ragdoll system that really worked right, so it was time to make demos. The first try had six-legged bugs dropping through a funnel, which is tough technically but not very interesting. Then there was the big mecha toss, to show that we did heavy objects right. (Most game physics systems still get that wrong. The physically animated objects all move like they're very light. We call this the "boink problem". There's a cube/square law in contact handling that's not captured by the impulse/constraint systems.) So I was looking for a hard case that exercised the system and was way beyond what anybody else could do back then. The fall down a circular staircase was it. It's a tough multiple-collisions problem with friction against multiple surfaces, and contact computed against the polygonal geometry, not some oversimplified model. Every step and every stair railing is an individual object; the feet can slip through the space between the railings.
After we did that, everybody did ragdolls falling downstairs. It got to be a cliche, like caustics on shiny logos. One vendor in the early 2000s had a waterfall of bodies falling downstairs as a GDC demo.
Our original plan was that this was a step to physically-based character animation, where the chararacters really balanced and moved because their feet had friction with the ground. My eventual goal was real martial arts moves, where the throws really were throws. But the industry went off in a different direction - motion capture with interpolation. This provides a reasonably good look without having to solve all the control problems of robotics. The companies trying to solve the hard problem went bust, even after some systems that worked, so that didn't seem to be a direction worth pursuing.
So what did we get from game physics engines? Dead bodies. As CPUs got faster and the algorithms improved, lots of dead bodies. Then, "infinitely destructible environments". Disappointing.
Why, when I played videogames, all the enemies I killed either got smashed flat and disappeared, or flipped upside down and fell off the bottom of the screen. Young whippersnappers making things complicated...
-Rob
Biblical fiscal responsibility
Reminds me of a funny story a friend told me (though it may not have been original). A group of them were running in a dungeon and ran into a locked room, and peeking under the door revealed that it was full of gold statues and jewels, and it was obvious that the key was going to be at the bottom of the dungeon. The DM had given them a teleport pad for running back to town for supplies and R&R, and they had left the other one back in their room in the inn. So one member teleported back to the room, then hoofed it back to the dungeon with the teleport pad. They slid one under the door and set the other one up on the wall in another room, and proceeded to toss fireballs at it while avoiding the gushing gouts of molten gold coming back at them. Waited till it cooled, then the fighters chopped it into pieces and loaded it into their packs, and everybody headed home. Halfway home they were all knocked unconscious by a passing level 18 wizard on a flying carpet who then stole their gold, because the one thing a good DM can't stand is being a Monty Hall.
The DM decided to "fix" the previous problem by enforcing PE=KE so you couldn't use the teleport pad until you were near the bottom of the dungeon so the potential energy between the two was very low. Unfortunately the next trip while crossing a lake high up in the mountains the guy carrying the teleport pad got killed and fell in. The (walled) town promptly filled up with boiling water from the lake, turning it into a very large bowl of halfling stew.
Fun stuff. Computer RPGs just don't quite compare.
I remember a couple of hacks in Unreal Tournament that allowed you to keep bodies (and body parts) around as long as you wanted, as well as to keep blood stains, bullet holes, and powder burns on the walls and objects as long as you liked. Friends and I would crank them all the way up and play a small-room deathmatch. It actually made me queasy at points. By the end of the round the place looked like a slaughterhouse in hell. It was pretty damn disturbing.
:)
And, uh, I loved it
There was still a technical limitation though, if you set it to keep them permanently and played a long round, your performance would degrade considerably over time.
Cheers.
All I can say is that watching the dead in Stormwind and Ironforge last weekend as Krull rained hell and bodies was by FAR the most hard-core thing I've seen in a long time....
"Chinese Amazons, power armor, laser swords.... things just meant to be." - Shampoo, A Very Scary Bet
Yeah, even worse, Quake wasn't released for Mac until 1997 or 1998 or something.
:)
Before its official release for Mac (after being ported by MacSoft), all we had was an illegal source port compiled by some guy[s] who supposedly stole the source code (from Crackdotcom if I recall correctly) for the game and tweaked & recompiled for Mac OS (I can't verify the accuracy of this story unfortunately, but I vividly remember discussing it with various people on Hotline, THE way to get warez for Mac OS in the late 90s)...
Anyway, it was unstable as hell, and the particle/light effects were REALLY laggy. I had to get modified rocket/grenade models that removed the particle effects so the game wouldn't slow to a crawl whenever someone fired a rocket.
For historical purposes, the illegal source port was generally referred to as "HackQuake" and was basically a direct port from the DOS/Win95 version, with no Mac OS specific user settings at all, other than any under-the-hood stuff that allowed the engine to run properly on Mac OS. There was no support for 3d acceleration either, of course. Either way, it was the only way for Mac users to get their Quake on. Fortunately it connected to all the Windows dedicated servers with no problem (other than some crashes of course), and I can tell you the Mac underground kicked some Windows-user ass well before we even had a commerical release of the game.
Man, I didn't mean to write such a long post but I thought some people might find it interesting.
I can remember being unable to move out of a corner after a particularly busy gunfight because the bodies were piled so high around me.
Having the bodies last forever would easily use memory and other system resources.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Nemesis the Warlock (at least the Commodore 64 version) left the dead bodies of slain enemies on the screen until you completed the level. They were even integrated into the gameplay because some levels had you make a bridge out of bodies to reach the other side of some platforms...
Nemesis the Warlock on the C64 used to leave all the dead bodies on the screen. You could stand on them all and "build" piles to avoid the attacking baddies.
I've been playing Eve and it leaves your frozen bloody corpose laying around for quite a while after you die.
If you haven't played it, you should. It's a truly great game. Imagine playing a cheesy 60's spy movie. It's also one of the funniest games I've ever played. Sneaking through the evil organization's warehouse and overhearing minions talk about the last mad scientist overlord they worked for, or planning a jam session after the shift. Truly classic.
Redundancy is good And also good.
The condition/availability/vulnerability of dead bodies is supposedly a major factor in how the ESRB rates a game - Teen, Mature, &c. Otherwise realistic games will tone down simulation on dead bodies in order to avoid a Mature rating, which can seriously effect sales.
Medieval 2: Total War leaves bodies on screen, and some impressive images can be achieved. After a hole is knocked in a castle wall, the attacker tries to surge through it, while the defender rushes bodies in to block the gap. After each side has lost 3 or 4 units in the battle, the hole literally looks as plugged up with corpses as it did in the movie Kingdom of Heaven.
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
So.. this isn't farfetched at all or novel. Now, screaming "like a woman" OTOH, I imagine many martial artists would say they kiai in a rather manly fashion. heh heh
http://www.bitworksmusic.com/
BitWorksMusic.com -- odd tunes for odd times
fully destructible bodies. They've recently been adding destructible environments, i.e. environments where pieces of buildings blow off, solid volumes can be shot apart in chunks, etc.
What I haven't seen is any effort to make people die realistically. The most that is usually visible is a spot of red where the bullet hit, and some red painted on scenes behind. When someone is shot by a machine gun... or a tank for that matter, this is not what happens. A realistic portrayal of this would be a good deal more gruesome than any existing game, and I'd be interested if people could actually stand to play such a game. I suspect that one of the reasons for not making such a game, aside from the fact that walmart would never carry it, is that most game produces suspect the answer to that question is no. Still, I'm curious about what would happen.
Sure, when you go as far back as old NES and SNES games, you notice that bodies had to be removed in order for new enemies to make their way onto the screen. But in the last 12 or so years, it's been entirely the other way around. Games like Wold 3D and Doom could display dead bodies forever--they simply weren't removed at all. That trend continued with practically every game up until 2003/2004. It's only the extremely graphically intensive games such as Doom 3 and everything released afterward that remove dead bodies in the interest of increasing framerates. If anything, with new technology we seem to be moving AWAY from being able to keep dead bodies lying around forever, not towards it. And you can bet that the new next-gen consoles won't try to revive the old days of Doom, where your fallen enemies remain where they died until you leave the level. Developers are trying to squeeze EVERY last bit of grunt from the platform, and in order to have more polygons in the LIVING characters and weapons, they have to be diligent about removing things that no longer affect the gameplay, such as enemies you've already neutralized. I'd love to be proven wrong, because I tend to think bodies help you to work out where you've been when you're a little lost... but it don't see it happening.
I spent some time on it around 1994, at 20 MIPS, and it took hours to simulate a few seconds. It was just too early. Today, though, the hardware is here.
Are today's processors really that fast? You're talking about on the order of 1000:1 speedup to get real-time ragdoll physics in 3d if it took hours to get seconds a decade ago.
Keep in mind that this is a game with kung-fu bunnies and wolves. Generally, you are an anthro-bunny, fighting other anthro-bunnies or anthro-wolves. So, it's like human combat, except wolves can run insanely fast (and are viciously strong), and bunnies can jump incredibly far (think like Superman before he could fly).
Corpses in Lugaru do stay around, until you win -- and it's very realistic in a few other respects, too. For instance, if an enemy died from blunt trauma, there might be a bit of blood from where you kicked his teeth out, but it's not really a pool of blood unless you've stabbed or slashed him to death with a sword or knife.
Once you've got a corpse on the ground, you can move it either by kicking it, or by doing a "finishing punch" -- lifting it with your knee and punching it, sending it flying.
Now, you can be quite a ways away and still see an enemy, but the enemy will just walk past the corpse. Or, you can throw a corpse at them, but if you miss, they'll be completely oblivious to the corpse flying past. This probably has to do with the stealth element -- while you CAN beat enemies down with fists, swords, or staves, in some situations it's easier to sneak up behind them and slit their throat, or perform a similar "stealth" finishing move. You always have a split second between when they get the feeling something's wrong (maybe drawing a knife), but still don't know where you are, in which you can still do the one-hit stealth kill -- and in fact, since wolves will smell you from a short distance away, the only way I know of to stealth a wolf is to simply jump from out of range, land right behind them, and immediately slit their throat.
So, I'm assuming that it's because of this stealth-conscious AI -- that they might hear your footsteps or smell you if you're too close, but they'll completely ignore you at range -- that explains why if you're far enough away, they'll completely ignore their fallen comrades, whereas if you're close enough, they'll see a corpse and run to it, check it, then get panicky and start looking around for you (making it much more likely that they'll spot you). Unfortunately, this is kind of ruined by the fact that after looking for long enough, they'll forget about you and keep walking along their circular path -- eventually looping around to where they "discover" the same corpse again, panic again, still don't find you...
It does make for entertaining concepts, at least. Any body, living or not, can be used as a weapon. For instance, enemy A tries to punch you from the front as enemy B is approaching from behind... you grab enemy A's punch (in a counterattack), throwing him over your shoulder at enemy B in a bit of jujitsu, knocking enemy B over. Or, you run straight at enemy A, double-kicking him into an enemy B behind him. Or, divide and conquer -- kill enemy A, then bring his corpse with you and punch it towards enemy B. A corpse is easily the deadliest ranged weapon, because on earlier levels, it will generally knock them out, and in any case, they don't try to dodge it, whereas they can dodge or even catch a thrown knife, or if they survive it, they can pull it out of their chest (still dripping with blood) and use it against you.
My only complaint against Lugaru is that it's too short, but they are making a sequel, and I imagine that if the sequel is anywhere near as good as the original, the industry will start to take notice.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
The first time I played through Half-Life, it was like this. Pretty much every corpse or bullet hole, likely up to some predefined limit, stayed where you left it, even if you went forward a level and then back, or saved the game and reloaded. It was just part of the environment.
Same with Half-Life 2, by the way, although they do seem to get rid of corpses of things that spawn infinitely (like Antlions) -- although I don't remember actually seeing the corpses fading, and I imagine they try to do it when my back is turned.
Lugaru is a nice little game -- for $20, you get a game that can be beaten in a couple of hours, but aside from the length, it's the best fighting game I've ever played. And while there generally aren't many enemies, all bodies (including corpses) are solid enough that if they're moving (you throw, punch, kick, or bat them with a staff to get them to go where you want them to), they can smack into other enemies. So, two enemies running at you (one in front of the other), and you can knock the first one into the second, injuring both and knocking them to the ground.
Not to mention the sheer fun of some moves like "Death From Above" -- landing on an enemy's head, stomping them to the ground.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
We had a running gag in one campaign where the standard attempt to initiate a surprise check we to point and say "Look it's the Good Year Blimp", generally this only occured if we were already engaged with th epotential combative opponents. The DM would roll a d100 check to see if they looked for the Blimp (it being an anachronism and all). The one time it actually worked, I think the DM was more surprised than the mobs.
Same campaign we used to roll; 'check for traps', 'check for secret doors/hidden', 'check for stoats'. One time the DM got so sick of us checking for stoats that he said we found one. One of the party members did a successful charisma check to tame it and we used to send it in ahead to check for traps after that.
Sara
Designer, Gamer, Macgrrl in an XP World
let's not forget you can turn on persistent corpses in Dawn of War. Nothing like having a huge battle and leaving a trail of corpses. Of course, you needed a decent pc to show it
being vague is almost as cool as doing that other thing...
What is a DM?
People mention the bushes you can't destroy or ride over without flipping. Anyone else remember Red Faction?
:)
:>
;)
When I played it, a quick couple day game rental for the ps2, I remember the cool factor of being able to blow holes through walls. I would load up multiplayer and just sit there trying to dig a tunnel with various guns. (didn't take long to run into the limits though)
The best moment for me was when I was sneaking through some small tunnel and I came out on top of these pipes... below me was a couple guys but in front of them there was a long bridge. On the bridge there were tons of soldiers marching along with a big huge death machine vehicle riding along. I had a handy dandy rocket launcher I'd just picked up. What did I do? I blew out the sides of that bridge. What happened? the whole group just fell. Bye bye guys
Where was THAT sequence in halflife 2???
Every game needs to be like that (without the limits). Imagine playing the old tfc in 2forts. You're a demo, you can either go in the front... or go in through the water.
Well if it were like Red faction(with a twist), suddenly you could... blow a freakin' tunnel out the side of your fort, through the wall, all the way down to behind their flag, break through, steal the flag and run it back, closing your tunnel with more explosives on the way out.
The bridge would really be a no man's land when you blow half of it up, lets see the scout dodge those big freakin' holes. (erm oh wait he'd just conc oh well
Playing bf2142 on the verdun map? titan mode? need to get through that big ugly wall in the center ? Simple, use your tank, blow a big freakin' hole in it and drive through.. simple and fun.
The point is.. what happened to this promise? The promise we'd have more games like Red faction? We don't need the dead bodies, give us environments we can really change.
This posting requires mention of Duke Nukem 3D, where not only did corpses stay on the ground as solid objects, if you walked over them, you left bloody bootprints for a while. That game had so many details right.
I remember playing a LPMUD once where the recurring cleanup was switched off.
You would come in the next room and you saw:
a dead orc
a dead orc
a dead orc
a dead troll
a dead orc
a dead orc
a dead orc
5 gold coins
a dead orc
a dead troll
a dead orc
a dead orc
a dead orc
a dead troll
a sword
a sword
a dead orc
a dead orc
a dead orc
a dead troll
a dead orc
a dead orc
5 gold coins
a dead orc
a dead orc
a dead orc
a dead orc
a dead orc
a shiny armour
a dead orc
a dead orc
a dead orc
a dead orc
a dead troll
a dead orc
a dead orc
a dead orc
a dead orc
a dead orc
a dead orc
a dead orc
a dead orc
a dead orc
Darfur Online, eh? Sounds about as boring as those headlines I skip over every morning on MSNBC.
Now if we could just hear de wailing of der women too, it will be perfect.
sudo ergo sum
Oh the humanity... deathmatching in Doom I was a hoot after a few rounds, and the bodies started piling up in the kill zones! Campers started having second thoughts too, when they got back to their spot and saw what a mess it was. Ah, good times...
"Creativity is allowing ones self to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep" - Scott Adams
It made for interesting strategy if you were into that sort of thing. If you got attacked by a mob of these guys, you could just kill one or retreat past a corpse of something you had aready killed. Then as the live ones got too close you only had to damage them until they retreated. They'd go off to feed on the corpse and you could pick them off at your leisure.
Thanks for the followup!
So it's really both software and hardware improvements that have done the trick.
Plus good old "meatball AI", because games don't have to really get it exactly right, they just have to make it look better than their competitors and their own previous generation.
if i remember correctly, and i might as well be mistaken, there are a _lot_ of relatively old games that saved corpses for as long as you could care, the original wolfenstein being one of them (that was actually one of the reasons i started playing it :p). but the list as far as i remember is _long_...
wolfenstein 3d
rome: pathway to power
doom
crimsonland
the commandos series
the hitman series
deus ex
the total war series ...
and these are only the ones i remember now, not counting all the other that are already mentioned in this thread.
so why is this "news"? or is my gaming memory in desperate need for a reboot?