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.

Comments

Realism

[master_kaos]

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.

Re:Realism

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

That's fine -- as long as they carry through to the logical extension -- you can blow up the corpses into smaller and smaller fragments, or grab them and throw them out of the way.

I'm sick of bushes that either don't exist as immaterial, or are like a spike of some mithril adamantium substance that causes a truck to flip over.

Re:Realism

[cowscows]

I'm sick of bushes that act as barriers. First off, I could probably jump over that bush in real life. But even if I couldn't, my character is carrying a chainsaw that he already used to cut a half dozen dragons into pieces. You mean to tell me that that same chainsaw can't cut through a few shrubs?

Uh oh, a wooden police barricades. No way I can get past that. I guess my character isn't flexible enough to crawl under it, or strong enough to just push it over. Nevermind the rocket launcher that I'm carrying.

One step further

[plopez]

By extension, wouldn't you have to mop up the blood stains as well?

Not a problem anymore

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Yeah That's Always Bugged Me...

[Greyfox]

In a lot of games where the corpse IS left around none of your enemies ever seem to take note of it. Oblivion made a halfhearted attempt to for town guards but it didn't seem like any of the monsters in the game would ever notice their tribe/packmate lying there in a pool of his own blood. Likewise in WoW a patrolling mob will walk right over the corpse of one his (presumably) friends without even blinking.

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.

Re:Thief

[LighterShadeOfBlack]

Calm down. It's only a game.

Notice I said "typically" and "you" as in the average player. Sure, some people never played it at the hardest setting, so what? They're games, they're supposed to be fun. Sometimes I played it on expert and occasionally I just wanted to be a bastard and kill every single enemy. You know, play the game, not just move through it at the hardest setting checking off levels like it's some kind of task to be completed.

Even if you played to kill it was never going to be Quake-like since outright battling would inveitably lead to your death so the stealth element wasn't lost, just lessened.

Re:UOZaphod

[XO]

game of Magic? Do you realise that Magic is a card game?

Re:This wasn't what I had in mind with ragdolls

[ardor]

From your site:

"Our technology for high-quality ragdolls is patented. This broad patent covers most spring/damper character simulation systems. If it falls, it has joints, it looks right, and it works right, it's probably covered by our patent."

Thank you for stifling innovation yet again.

Re:This wasn't what I had in mind with ragdolls

[Animats]

Those who can, do. Those who can't, whine. It's a hard problem. There were some spectacular failures in the early days of game physics, the most notable being Trespasser, the licensed Jurassic Park game. That was the first attempt at a major physics-based game, and it was a disaster. The Trespasser post-mortem (Gamasutra login required) describes what went wrong and who blew it. Dreamworks lost a lot of money on that debacle.

Re:This wasn't what I had in mind with ragdolls

[ardor]

Its not that you patented your specific technique. Its the fact that your patent is broad. So with it you block any chance for high-quality ragdolls in games unless they use your solution.

So, now, those who can, are not allowed to. Its that simple.

Re:This wasn't what I had in mind with ragdolls

[Anonymous Coward]

Those who can, do. Those who can't, whine.

I think the gp's point was precisely that, thanks to you, nobody can any more.