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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...
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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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.
Also, in team play. Want to block off a path? Litter it with your opponents' corpses.
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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.
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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.
In the old C64 game Nemesis the Warlock you had to pile up corpses to make platforms to reach high parts of the levels. In some levels this was the only way to reach the exit.
Ahh yes, nothing like playing some flatout or carmageddon, and hitting the corner of a wooden shack or frail tree with a mac truck only to be completely wasted due to that object being "permanent". There was an MMO released last year called auto assault, which unfortunately lacked in many areas, but one thing I really liked about it was the nearly completely destructable environment. Roll up into an enemy camp guns ablaze, or roll OVER the enemy camp, through every building/structure.
If corpses are going to block projectiles, they need to be destructable. I could see this adding quite a bit of strategic element to even an FPS. I really wish that in battlefield 2 the tanks wouldn't immediately explode, because they made great infantry shields right up until they went boom, and presented a nice little mobile fortification.
If corpses don't somehow hold an interaction with the game, I see little point in their long lifespan. If I can't pile them high as a makeshift sand wall, or eat them to regen some health, sweep them along to digital heaven already.
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