Like I said, you can't really compare the physics engines in a certain sense because they are meant to do two very different things. Carma is a slam bang smashup crashup game in a car, while HL2 has to be much more subtle and small about the effects it allows, because the player character is a guy who can bump gently into tables (which is incredible looking by the way: the objects on the table wobbling just the right amount as you start pushing a table around, then tipping over and falling off if you push too fast and hard). Of course, HL also features driving sections in a desert buggy that look incredible and crashy as well. But being able to pick up a dresser with a gravity weapon and throw it at a 60ft tall alien walker, have it hit the walker int he back of the head, smash convincingly apart, and almost knock the walker over... that calls for a very different sort of interaction than smashing into things: not necessarily more or less fun or more or less advanced.
---I have feeling the friendlies you speak of are scripted, this point is left open until I see the final result.---
I'm pretty sure they aren't... exactly. First of all because Valve made it pretty clear that the dodging behind objects thing isn't just a matter of nodes on the map: if you move an object to a new location, they will be able to see it and use it for cover, or whatever their purposes currently are. They will take your lead: if you don't cover for them, they won't cover for you or follow you. The way Valve describes the AI is that it's priority based: in addition to all the ways in which they can react to the world, characters also CAN be given certain specific missions which they try to acheive to enhance the story at various points, but these can easily be overided by more pressing events, interrupted temporarily, and so on. They described the scripts as working like this in the AI: "if you're not doing anything more important at the moment, and other characters aren't stealing the limelight, then go over here and do this cool thing to showoff." And if a character is scripted to, for instance, start talking to you, and in the middle of them talking you throw a beaker at their head, then they have to stop and react to what you just did before they even bother with continuing what they were saying. They also said that they had tried to break up scripted sequences into much tinier pieces and put them in the AI instead. So, while a certain soldier may be instructed to kick a certain door down at a certain moment (but wont if you get his attention), all soldiers can kick down any kickable door if they decide it's necessary to reach their objective, running their own scripts for doing so when needed.
Regardless, the enemies certainly aren't going to be LESS stationary than the troops from the first HL at least. It's not like programing "running around" is so hard.
The thing about HL is that many of the creatures and interactions were _supposed_ to be a little out there and almost funny. Houndeyes were almost harmless alone, pretty goofy looking and sounding (almost cute in a way), but then this silliness got dangerous very quickly when there got to be too many of them in one area. Which happened a couple of times simply because I felt so bad about killing them for no reason.
---In many scenes, the soldiers just stand there, and shoot you. The barney was ok, but the enemies just stood there and waited to be shot.---
In those particular scenes, they were dug in defending a particular territory. In other scenes, there is no reason why they have to be. ( I do agree that in the end of the barney sequence, the enemies don't seem to be reacting much at all: just standing there. But I very much doubt that's anything other than a bug they can see as well as we can). You're also ignoring the fact that the friendlies in that scene DIDN'T just wait around to be shot: they took cover, crept around, moved when it was safer to do so, etc. If the friendlies can do it, then so can the enemies. I think the enemies being still in those scenes was largely a function of the demos being about showing off other features than the soldiers: the grav gun, the spidercrabs, the "cover me!" people, etc.
---Maybe the models are ok, but the sound just lacks. The aliens in HL1 were mostly boring because they were almost silent.---
At times, that made it much more creepy: the silent shuffling zombies, and the headcrabs that only made sound when attacking or "dancing," and the barnacles which only made messy hissing and eating noises. But other enemies were pretty noisy: the squidthing, the houndeyes, and of course the grunts radioing each other. Sometimes silence is very effective.
---For the oneeyed electric alien, I just felt sorry for them, because they were so trying to make you scared, but they couldn't!---
I didn't think they were supposed to: those aliens were slaves. You were meant to feel a little sorry for them.
---I really don't understand what people liked in the AI in HL1. Just wait, see a grenade, run around, shoot them. Nothing special. It's not bad, but it's not as perfect as people said it was.---
It was worlds removed from enemies in games like Quake2 and its ilk. Just the fact that they moved in more ways than just dumbly running straight at you was pretty new at the time. They actually took positions, advanced, assesed their situaiton, attacked, retreated, tried to draw you out with grenades, etc. I guess you were too l33t for them (or were playing in easymode), but the scene where they first appeared in battle was fun to replay over and over with all sorts of different results and tactics. Sure: it wasn't the be all and end all, but for the time it was way ahead of everything else.
---Maybe it's the fact the enemies just stand there and shoot you and never hit you?---
As is obvious in the demos, the player has some sort of godmode on. I'm assuming that they didn't spend five years on a game and forgot to add "player character can take damage" functionality.
I also though the soldiers were creepy and relentless in the way they worked: they advance slowly in large numbers, pinning you down, but when they need to, they quickly do cool stuff like smash in windows to stick their heads in and fire at you, or kick down the doors, etc. We've yet to see a demo in which they are in a large space running around. However, we have seen other soldiers in the game doing exactly this: they run, they take cover to snipe at things from behind objects, they wait until a good moment to move, they dodge, they sneak, they reload. Did you see the movie where Barney turns around while running to whip around and fire at the hoverthingy? That's "just standing there" and shooting?
---Maybe it's the fact I still can't look down and see my body?---
You're right, that's what FPS games really need: a fully realistic fat gut simulator. Remember how you could look down and see your body in Trespasser? Well, remember how that sucked? Other than blocking your view, what is seeing your body good for? This isn't an adventure into your bellybutton, it's a shooter in which you need a range of vision as unocculded as possible. I'm not sure what you man about the crosshairs or weapon model: would you prefer they be more like Quake1?
---Maybe it's the part with the enemies that just don't look realistic, they don't really scare you.---
Yeah: that's just what the world needs: more realistic aliens. Like mossy alien fungus and alien bacteria. Screw those giant walkers, glowly blue tentacles, and giant alien citadel eating an entire city: bring on the frisbee UFOs!
---I mean, in the first HL, all the enemies looked plastic, like drones with only one thing they can do.---
For their time, the enemies in HL were easily the most interesting enemies out there. And in addition to attacking you in all sorts of different ways, most of them were even scripted to do all sorts of different stuff to make them look even less one dimensional. Sure, you couldn't sit down and have a cup of tea with the them to discover what they really felt and wanted in life, but compared to "grrr! I am a soldier: I run and shoot you now!" of most FPS games up till then, they were far more complex.
---I mean, those alien grunts? They are so huge and have a super lame weapon that has almost no firepower, but follows you around.---
I guess you can find a way to hate everything. Many people found those alien grunts scary and intimidating for exactly that same reason: they were huge and nasty, stomping all over the place, smashing through walls and chasing you down, and you had to work to escape their weapons even after you were out of the line of fire.
---The engine is awesome, (same goes for D3), but the game itself seems it will be lacking.---
I guess you're right. An interactive physical world full of objects you can manipulate in all sorts of crazy ways, dynamic AI with priorities and lots of options working on tons of enemies and friendlies at once, scripted sequences that are interactive: none of that really has any gameplay implications. That strider sequence was just BOOOORING.
Check out the gamespot vids, available here (scroll down in the news items) and other places around the net (if you don't wanna pay to access them from gamespot). They are just plain sick.
These vids also definately come from a later build. In the teaser, the scene with the soldier getting stabbed by a big blue tentacle is amazingly cool. But in the gamespot vids, they've changed the terrain to be much less blocky, added incredible new animations to the soldier and the girl, and the water splashes and ripples oh so convincingly when the soldier is smacked into it.
They should have saved the name "Unreal" for THIS game.
What it's missing is that repetative feel of charging down the same dank sewer corridor shooting the same growling monster over and over. Oh wait: I'm GLAD that's missing. I have seriously never seen anything like it. Even the everday "battle with some soldiers" was absolutely insane with cool details: the way you block the door with the table (and all the objects on it wobble as you're pushing it), they way they tried to get in, and when they couldn't, take out the windows and start firing in at you, and then another one comes and kicked in the door, sending everything flying, chasing you up to where you rip up a radiator out of the wall and use it to block bullets and then smash a soldier in the face with it. That's "lacking"? Nah: that's bloody brilliant.
I especially liked the video where it started out by the developer saying "so, as you can see, the alien citadel has begun to EAT THE CITY." And you look around and christ: this game is perfectly rendering a mile high citadel "eating" an entire city block (also huge and stretching on forever) with giant metal "teeth." Or the video where you lead a squad of soldiers from cover to cover against a dug-in force: and when the alien helicopter comes it gets caught in the powerlines, which all jiggle in the wind it's kicking up? Yeah: that's really missing something: all the standard FPS cliches.
I think you're talking about the DOOM3 alpha, and for all I know, you're right (haven't played it: I have a freakin TNT2 card at present:). I'm talking about Half-life2. In HL2, as shown in the tech demo, you can shoot a complex wooden frame, and the wooden boards splinter and break apart exactly where you shot them. The whole frame wobbles correctly as its structural integrity is broken away, as you systematically choose which ones to take out, until like a game of jenga, the whole thing collapses. They used a gravity beam weapon to pick up and throw matresses over other things (and they deformed correctly to cover them). They used it to pick up a crash test dummy (which hung like a ragdoll) by the ass, and then used it like a broom to sweep an entire tableful of junk into a swimming pool: everything reacting with very proper-looking momentum (the things on top of the table not accelerating as fast as the table, some falling off the back as it was tipped and swept forwards). They built a giant pachinko machine out of pegs and barrels. I don't think Carmageddon has anything even approaching that kind of interactivity and sheer complexity.
Yes, but that's a very different sort of interaction (crashing cars into things, knocking them around), with a very different sort of gameplay, than an FPS. I'm not saying it's never been done before (hell, remember Trespasser?). But it's never been done well as a real element in an FPS, that added to the complexity of the game rather than being a goofy and often annoying bit of eye candy.
Nah. Heck, Giants and Tribes did okay outdoor scenes years ago with old tech. And the new HL2 engine has shown off some great outdoor scenes. Carmack (John) could certainly do it: if he doesn't it's either because that's not the kind of game engine he wants to make for this game, or he doesn't think it should be done until it can be done exactly the way he'd want it.
At the very least, I think the excitement over D3 and HL2 is that they are complex enough now that they can transcend a lot of the basic tropes of your average FPS. They have working physics models that make the game world much more interesting to deal with: not just an environment for shooting, but also one that reacts to you and you to it. For the first time, this makes possible something closer to a real story that can be closely integrated with the action: without pulling you out of the game using cutscenes and the like. All of ids games up to this one have been corridor shooters in static maps with simplistic enemies (do I shoot rockets, or lasers): this one actually looks like it breaks out of that mold, with lots of scripted sequences a la Half-life. And Half-life2 goes one better: tons of potential scripted actions built into the characters, available not only a pre-defined moments, but also dynamically. Real NPC interaction. Fantastic and unique animation. Both of these games are really quite different from the previous crop of shooters. That said, they could both be done poorly as games. But the potential for a really neat new twist on the FPS genre is definately there.
I'm sorry, Adrian. I meant Mars, not the Moon. I guess that invalidates everything I said, because I absolutely love Mars and geez: I could hang around there for days and never get bored of my metalic warehouse of a moonbase. See, again: I meant MARSbase. MARS ROCKS!!!
Have you seen the HL2 tech demo? They start off by deforming an entire room: the floor buckling up as if like a waterbed. And the dynamic physics engine is amazing: they shoot apart this complex wooden structure, with wood splintering, and the whole structure reacting and wobbling as various supports are blown away, till it finally collapses altogether. No scripted sequence that, either. They played plinko with barrels. It's intense stuff.
But no indication that all the WALLS were all destructible. Which, we agree, is not necessarily the coolest thing MP, but in SP it still does take away a bit from the realism, especially if they control the number of explosives your character can get anyway. Still, you're right: it is kind of silly. I mean, what fun is a maze if you can bore a hole straight through the center?
I'm betting both, though of course they can't help but be competitors on some level. I dunno: I finally saw the tech demo of the source engine though. I dunno if they've got volumetrically rendered raindrops or anything, but they've got a physics enginge that just defies belief as far as how cool and realistic everything acts. I mean, they used a gravity ray to pick up a dead guy by the leg, shake him around like a ragdoll (which D3 also has, but....) then used him as a broom to sweep a whole table full of items into a swimming pool. They grabbed a matress floating in the pool and draped it over some other floating junk, and it deformed over it just like a real matress. And it all looked real.
I have to say: these HL2 movies are beyond belief. It's not that the graphics are top-notch: they're gorgeous for what they need to be (don't know how to compare between games, though D3's models look more detailed, higher res): it's that the game looks like the first ever to make a real physics engine work in a game: and be part of the fun instead of an annoyance. The 30meg video of the running battle with the soldiers just goes on and on with cool stuff: and yet none of it looks scripted or canned: it could have played out very differently, in a million other cool ways. The way that objects tipped, wobbled, and tumbled, not to mention reacted to gunfire (like you shooting away a rolling barrel in the teaser) opens up whole new worlds of design possibilities that I hope Valve has really made the best of.
The characters also look stunningly lifelike. Again, not because they are perfect 1zillion poly models, but because the animation and attention to sutble physical detail is incredible. HL2 is defiantely on my buy list, and I'm actually far more exicted about it than DOOM3, no matter how amazing it might look.
That said, I'm really hoping that DOOM3 will be the game that puts id back on the map as a great SP experience. They have't really had a truly groundbreaking SinglePlayer experience since Doom, and that was largely because they were the first: they came in before FPS games got bogged down with cliches that were originally fresh in DOOM. But in D3 it looks like they've combined a love for top-notch technology with a desire to make it really work as an cohesive gaming experience. It looks creepy as hell. I just hope the game spreads out a little more from the suspiciously parodiable feel of:
Player: Hey, I'm running around in a gorgeously rendered dank sewer!
Carmack: No fool, it's a moonbase complex.
Player: They have sewers on the moon?!
Carmack: I... uh, yes. ...
Carmack: Lookout: a spider!
Player: Oh no! And look: a space crate! Made out of human femurs and plywood and some staples made out of a little girl's braces! I hope it's full of ammo and health, but you never know what's what up here on this crazy... wadda call it? Moon?
And yeah, that's ADRIAN Carmack I be talking about, Word.
You hear me though Carmack? I can only spend so much time on the moon: if you don't take me somewhere out in the open, like a gorgeously rendered outdoor plain of hell stretching out in all directions, or inside the guts of a giant, organic demon-spawn citadel with blood-seeping lungs for walls and tanned human skin for throw rugs, I don't know what I'll do. Probably just sit my ass down on a crate and doodle on the PDA that you thought would make for a great action game. I hope it has a spreadsheet function, because tax day is always around the corner! (note to id: make evil tax-spider and Hitler-spider)
I think the two games will be very different as far as what they're going for. HL2 looks like a really immersive action game that's all about big battles, crazy physics, a subtle but well scripted storyline, and frantic action. D3 seems much slower and more secretive: something's always ready to rip your guts out, and you're afraid to move an inch. Then you snap and burst out with guns blazing, nearly get your head swiped off, and run in terror.
Two different types of games, two different sorts of engines. We're lucky, lucky PC gamers we are.
My point was that, yes: the discovery that carbon was common in the rest of the universe should at least be grounds to up our estimation about the possibility of life in the rest of the universe.
---Do you honestly believe that modern science is not establishing a route to a philosophy of materialism? From what I can see it is for the most part. Just some thoughts.;)---
I do believe it. The neat thing about science is that it's essentially just the (old school, i.e. John Locke) liberal idea that no one gets a final say, and no one gets any special authority: all ideas must face eternal and diverse criticism. That idea has a way of transcending, in practice, any other philosophical gurflummery that people try to attach to it. Because it's essentially just a social mechanism for decentralizing the production of truth, not a philosophy in and of itself.
And as I noted before, I don't think, even if people think they ARE establishing some philosophy of materialism, that they are ultimately doing anything. The fact remains: if there are any "supernatural" things that interact with the rest of reality in any meaningful way, then they will inevitably become part of "materialism" anyway, exposing the emptiness of the distinction.
Furthermore, there are plenty of intelligent science theorists and scientists who are careful NOT to confuse what they call "methodological materialism" with "metaphysical materialism." By the former, they mean just that science as a method can only deal with what it can test: stuff it can interact with. But they realize that the lack of interactibility and detectability in the here and now doesn't necessarily prove anything about what is or isn't out there. It just isn't ripe for explanation until we CAN get some hard data on it.
Even there, I think we're using words that are far too complicated. What we need to focus on are some straight binaries. Exist/Not exist. Known/Unknown. "Material/Not Material" is useless in this regard, especially because if something is non-material, then it is essentially unknown by default. But if it is unknown, then we also can't know whether or not it is material or not either (we don't even really know how we would tell, even philosophically)! So all non-material things live in the realm of the unknown, and the only sorts of things that even can become known are previously unknown material things (like quarks). That makes the distinction essentially meaningless: we should just stick to "known/unknown" and be done with it, rather than trying to classify different "sorts" of existence, when we don't even know what that even means.
---The 'monkeys on typewriters ending up with war and peace' flies in the face of reason, IMHO, and yet it is a crutch and fundamental pillar of evolutionary theory, attractive because one can always simply require the disbeliever to roll the dice a trillion more times or so.---
If your only idea of how evolution or the various theories of abiogenesis work is just "rolling the dice" then you're already tripped yourself up. The whole point to both these theories is that there are some natural MECHANISMS that produce organized results. Not just chance assembleges at all: it's the particular principles of chemistry, and later, genetics, that actually induce certain things under certain conditions, leading to other inducements, often in a feedback loop.
---consider this: they have never discovered fossilized remains of an inter-species mutation; e.g., a creature evolutionarily between A and B.---
Oh for goodness sake: did you think you could dazzle the boards with such a well-refuted lie? Even the very suggestion shows that you are not hip to the way in which evolutionary theory destroyed the very idea of "kind" whereby we could say that a creature is "between" two "other" kinds. Our idea of "kind" is simply our eagerness to pretend that what we see today represents a bunch of stable and eternal Platonic forms from which any deviation from is some sort of mutant. But ALL species alive today are potentially intermediate forms to something in the future, and their ancestors WERE intermediate forms between them and something even earlier. Worse, the idea of "intermediate forms" is doubly misleading, because it implies that any given direction is "going somewhere," transitioning between one discrete thing and a new, pre-defined goal. But the theory of evolution is NOT suggesting that in the least. There is no discrete goal that something is somehow knowingly "transitioning" towards.
Even if all that were not the case, we DO have plenty of fossils which demonstrate the sorts of big-scale "transistional forms" that you're asking about (ones that just happen to strike us as grossly "in-between" two sorts of creatures we are comfortably familiar with today because they share certain large and obvious features: but in reality, are ONLY "in-between" from our present perspective, not in any real sense). Talk origins has a whole listing of them.
---Carbon is a major building block of life. Would the discovery of carbon on the earth and in the rest of the universe convince most scientists that life is likely to be abundant in the cosmos?---
But that's not what's being said. What's being said is that prior to this experiment, no one even knew that ammino acids could be created in (simulated) natural-like conditions. The experiment showed then that this could actually happen. That doesn't prove that life happens that way, but it does vastly improve our estimation of the likiood of finding life elsewhere in the universe.
---It starts with the assumption that the metaphysical doesn't exist and should not be considered in their investigation.---
No no no. This is nonsense anyway, since ROCKS are as much "metaphysical" as anything else would be. But science is not a metaphysical seive, it is a testability/falsifiability seive. "Naturalism" has nothing, inherently, to do with it. That's just some militant atheists' joneses. I dare you to even define "supernatural" in a way that isn't just a form of "not natural," which itself is worthless, because we don't know what "natural" even is. (how can we define a set when we don't know all it's contents or even the similarities between all it's contents or even if there ARE any other sets?)
"Supernatural" explanations aren't tolerated not because they ruled out: but because they break the rules of inquiry. They claim to explain things, when all they do is give a name to things we STILL don't understand any better than when we honestly admitted our ignorance. They often aren't testable. They are often consistent with ANYTHING (making them even more worthless) because they can be ad hoced once they encounter any disproof.
No: if there exists "supernatural" things, then they exist, and are the same as "natural" things in that respect, and should not be treated as a separate category. If a God exists in any meaningful way, then it should be amenable to science to the degree that it interacts with the rest of existence. Because science should not be a route to a philosophy of materialism, but simply a route to testable explanation, wherever that route leads.
Re:I've used genetic algorithms
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Digital Darwin
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I sure wish he'd move his mysteriously fat ass off the couch and do some dishes for once.
Re:I've used genetic algorithms
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Digital Darwin
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Yeah. Please guys: don't continue a discusion in these forums! These forums are for posting jpegs of naked celebrities only!
Re: I've used genetic algorithms
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Digital Darwin
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---The fact remains that there is just no good explination for how life (and the chemicals of life) arose out of nothing. Most "scientific" expliniations are just half-baked suggestions.---
I'm not sure I see your problem here. The various proposals for theories of abiogenesis are NOT accepted in the same way that evolution is. Their own authors state that they are speculative. So... what's your problem? Science is full of unanswered questions.
Re: I've used genetic algorithms
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Digital Darwin
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---There are gaps in the fossil record. Species seem to go from one form to another with no evolutionary steps in between. Evolutionary biologists explain this with the theory of "punctuated equilibrium" - an intellectual kludge at best.---
Eh? No. The fossil record, in Darwin's day was far far far more incomplete. In fact, no one expected it to get any better. So when the theory was first widely accepted among scientists, it was WITHOUT the confirmation of the sort of fossil evidence: the gaps in the record were MUCH MUCH bigger than they are today. So, if this wasn't a big problem back, then, how can it be now that we have a much better and more complete record today? If you think about it, ANY new fossil found multiplies the number of "gaps" that there are, but this is progress, not regress, towards a more complete reocrd.
Likewise, the idea that biologists respond with PE is nonsense. First of all, outside of Gould's circle, radical PE is not taken all that seriously as a new or important idea. But secondly, the major reason for gaps in the record isn't because of PE, it's simple random distribution. Fossilization IS fairly rare, and we would expect that the record would be incomplete. There's nothing kludgy about this: we've known it for centuries.
Re: I've used genetic algorithms
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Digital Darwin
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---Where is the philosophical "connective tissue" to the physical world?---
Logical possibility, coupled with modeling that tries to mirror certain key features of the physical world. It can certainly be argued that a ey feature was left out: something that would alter the results. But that's what we should be arguing about when we argue about specific models: simplicity is not an argument against the very idea of using models at all to learn about the world.
Slashdot Mirror
Like I said, you can't really compare the physics engines in a certain sense because they are meant to do two very different things. Carma is a slam bang smashup crashup game in a car, while HL2 has to be much more subtle and small about the effects it allows, because the player character is a guy who can bump gently into tables (which is incredible looking by the way: the objects on the table wobbling just the right amount as you start pushing a table around, then tipping over and falling off if you push too fast and hard). Of course, HL also features driving sections in a desert buggy that look incredible and crashy as well. But being able to pick up a dresser with a gravity weapon and throw it at a 60ft tall alien walker, have it hit the walker int he back of the head, smash convincingly apart, and almost knock the walker over... that calls for a very different sort of interaction than smashing into things: not necessarily more or less fun or more or less advanced.
---I have feeling the friendlies you speak of are scripted, this point is left open until I see the final result.---
I'm pretty sure they aren't... exactly. First of all because Valve made it pretty clear that the dodging behind objects thing isn't just a matter of nodes on the map: if you move an object to a new location, they will be able to see it and use it for cover, or whatever their purposes currently are. They will take your lead: if you don't cover for them, they won't cover for you or follow you. The way Valve describes the AI is that it's priority based: in addition to all the ways in which they can react to the world, characters also CAN be given certain specific missions which they try to acheive to enhance the story at various points, but these can easily be overided by more pressing events, interrupted temporarily, and so on. They described the scripts as working like this in the AI: "if you're not doing anything more important at the moment, and other characters aren't stealing the limelight, then go over here and do this cool thing to showoff." And if a character is scripted to, for instance, start talking to you, and in the middle of them talking you throw a beaker at their head, then they have to stop and react to what you just did before they even bother with continuing what they were saying. They also said that they had tried to break up scripted sequences into much tinier pieces and put them in the AI instead. So, while a certain soldier may be instructed to kick a certain door down at a certain moment (but wont if you get his attention), all soldiers can kick down any kickable door if they decide it's necessary to reach their objective, running their own scripts for doing so when needed.
Regardless, the enemies certainly aren't going to be LESS stationary than the troops from the first HL at least. It's not like programing "running around" is so hard.
The thing about HL is that many of the creatures and interactions were _supposed_ to be a little out there and almost funny. Houndeyes were almost harmless alone, pretty goofy looking and sounding (almost cute in a way), but then this silliness got dangerous very quickly when there got to be too many of them in one area. Which happened a couple of times simply because I felt so bad about killing them for no reason.
---In many scenes, the soldiers just stand there, and shoot you. The barney was ok, but the enemies just stood there and waited to be shot.---
In those particular scenes, they were dug in defending a particular territory. In other scenes, there is no reason why they have to be. ( I do agree that in the end of the barney sequence, the enemies don't seem to be reacting much at all: just standing there. But I very much doubt that's anything other than a bug they can see as well as we can). You're also ignoring the fact that the friendlies in that scene DIDN'T just wait around to be shot: they took cover, crept around, moved when it was safer to do so, etc. If the friendlies can do it, then so can the enemies. I think the enemies being still in those scenes was largely a function of the demos being about showing off other features than the soldiers: the grav gun, the spidercrabs, the "cover me!" people, etc.
---Maybe the models are ok, but the sound just lacks. The aliens in HL1 were mostly boring because they were almost silent.---
At times, that made it much more creepy: the silent shuffling zombies, and the headcrabs that only made sound when attacking or "dancing," and the barnacles which only made messy hissing and eating noises. But other enemies were pretty noisy: the squidthing, the houndeyes, and of course the grunts radioing each other. Sometimes silence is very effective.
---For the oneeyed electric alien, I just felt sorry for them, because they were so trying to make you scared, but they couldn't!---
I didn't think they were supposed to: those aliens were slaves. You were meant to feel a little sorry for them.
---I really don't understand what people liked in the AI in HL1. Just wait, see a grenade, run around, shoot them. Nothing special. It's not bad, but it's not as perfect as people said it was.---
It was worlds removed from enemies in games like Quake2 and its ilk. Just the fact that they moved in more ways than just dumbly running straight at you was pretty new at the time. They actually took positions, advanced, assesed their situaiton, attacked, retreated, tried to draw you out with grenades, etc. I guess you were too l33t for them (or were playing in easymode), but the scene where they first appeared in battle was fun to replay over and over with all sorts of different results and tactics. Sure: it wasn't the be all and end all, but for the time it was way ahead of everything else.
---Maybe it's the fact the enemies just stand there and shoot you and never hit you?---
As is obvious in the demos, the player has some sort of godmode on. I'm assuming that they didn't spend five years on a game and forgot to add "player character can take damage" functionality.
I also though the soldiers were creepy and relentless in the way they worked: they advance slowly in large numbers, pinning you down, but when they need to, they quickly do cool stuff like smash in windows to stick their heads in and fire at you, or kick down the doors, etc. We've yet to see a demo in which they are in a large space running around. However, we have seen other soldiers in the game doing exactly this: they run, they take cover to snipe at things from behind objects, they wait until a good moment to move, they dodge, they sneak, they reload. Did you see the movie where Barney turns around while running to whip around and fire at the hoverthingy? That's "just standing there" and shooting?
---Maybe it's the fact I still can't look down and see my body?---
You're right, that's what FPS games really need: a fully realistic fat gut simulator. Remember how you could look down and see your body in Trespasser? Well, remember how that sucked? Other than blocking your view, what is seeing your body good for? This isn't an adventure into your bellybutton, it's a shooter in which you need a range of vision as unocculded as possible. I'm not sure what you man about the crosshairs or weapon model: would you prefer they be more like Quake1?
---Maybe it's the part with the enemies that just don't look realistic, they don't really scare you.---
Yeah: that's just what the world needs: more realistic aliens. Like mossy alien fungus and alien bacteria. Screw those giant walkers, glowly blue tentacles, and giant alien citadel eating an entire city: bring on the frisbee UFOs!
---I mean, in the first HL, all the enemies looked plastic, like drones with only one thing they can do.---
For their time, the enemies in HL were easily the most interesting enemies out there. And in addition to attacking you in all sorts of different ways, most of them were even scripted to do all sorts of different stuff to make them look even less one dimensional. Sure, you couldn't sit down and have a cup of tea with the them to discover what they really felt and wanted in life, but compared to "grrr! I am a soldier: I run and shoot you now!" of most FPS games up till then, they were far more complex.
---I mean, those alien grunts? They are so huge and have a super lame weapon that has almost no firepower, but follows you around.---
I guess you can find a way to hate everything. Many people found those alien grunts scary and intimidating for exactly that same reason: they were huge and nasty, stomping all over the place, smashing through walls and chasing you down, and you had to work to escape their weapons even after you were out of the line of fire.
---The engine is awesome, (same goes for D3), but the game itself seems it will be lacking.---
I guess you're right. An interactive physical world full of objects you can manipulate in all sorts of crazy ways, dynamic AI with priorities and lots of options working on tons of enemies and friendlies at once, scripted sequences that are interactive: none of that really has any gameplay implications. That strider sequence was just BOOOORING.
Check out the gamespot vids, available here (scroll down in the news items) and other places around the net (if you don't wanna pay to access them from gamespot). They are just plain sick.
These vids also definately come from a later build. In the teaser, the scene with the soldier getting stabbed by a big blue tentacle is amazingly cool. But in the gamespot vids, they've changed the terrain to be much less blocky, added incredible new animations to the soldier and the girl, and the water splashes and ripples oh so convincingly when the soldier is smacked into it.
They should have saved the name "Unreal" for THIS game.
What it's missing is that repetative feel of charging down the same dank sewer corridor shooting the same growling monster over and over. Oh wait: I'm GLAD that's missing. I have seriously never seen anything like it. Even the everday "battle with some soldiers" was absolutely insane with cool details: the way you block the door with the table (and all the objects on it wobble as you're pushing it), they way they tried to get in, and when they couldn't, take out the windows and start firing in at you, and then another one comes and kicked in the door, sending everything flying, chasing you up to where you rip up a radiator out of the wall and use it to block bullets and then smash a soldier in the face with it. That's "lacking"? Nah: that's bloody brilliant.
I especially liked the video where it started out by the developer saying "so, as you can see, the alien citadel has begun to EAT THE CITY." And you look around and christ: this game is perfectly rendering a mile high citadel "eating" an entire city block (also huge and stretching on forever) with giant metal "teeth." Or the video where you lead a squad of soldiers from cover to cover against a dug-in force: and when the alien helicopter comes it gets caught in the powerlines, which all jiggle in the wind it's kicking up? Yeah: that's really missing something: all the standard FPS cliches.
I think you're talking about the DOOM3 alpha, and for all I know, you're right (haven't played it: I have a freakin TNT2 card at present :). I'm talking about Half-life2.
In HL2, as shown in the tech demo, you can shoot a complex wooden frame, and the wooden boards splinter and break apart exactly where you shot them. The whole frame wobbles correctly as its structural integrity is broken away, as you systematically choose which ones to take out, until like a game of jenga, the whole thing collapses. They used a gravity beam weapon to pick up and throw matresses over other things (and they deformed correctly to cover them). They used it to pick up a crash test dummy (which hung like a ragdoll) by the ass, and then used it like a broom to sweep an entire tableful of junk into a swimming pool: everything reacting with very proper-looking momentum (the things on top of the table not accelerating as fast as the table, some falling off the back as it was tipped and swept forwards). They built a giant pachinko machine out of pegs and barrels. I don't think Carmageddon has anything even approaching that kind of interactivity and sheer complexity.
Yes, but that's a very different sort of interaction (crashing cars into things, knocking them around), with a very different sort of gameplay, than an FPS. I'm not saying it's never been done before (hell, remember Trespasser?). But it's never been done well as a real element in an FPS, that added to the complexity of the game rather than being a goofy and often annoying bit of eye candy.
Nah. Heck, Giants and Tribes did okay outdoor scenes years ago with old tech. And the new HL2 engine has shown off some great outdoor scenes. Carmack (John) could certainly do it: if he doesn't it's either because that's not the kind of game engine he wants to make for this game, or he doesn't think it should be done until it can be done exactly the way he'd want it.
At the very least, I think the excitement over D3 and HL2 is that they are complex enough now that they can transcend a lot of the basic tropes of your average FPS. They have working physics models that make the game world much more interesting to deal with: not just an environment for shooting, but also one that reacts to you and you to it. For the first time, this makes possible something closer to a real story that can be closely integrated with the action: without pulling you out of the game using cutscenes and the like. All of ids games up to this one have been corridor shooters in static maps with simplistic enemies (do I shoot rockets, or lasers): this one actually looks like it breaks out of that mold, with lots of scripted sequences a la Half-life. And Half-life2 goes one better: tons of potential scripted actions built into the characters, available not only a pre-defined moments, but also dynamically. Real NPC interaction. Fantastic and unique animation. Both of these games are really quite different from the previous crop of shooters. That said, they could both be done poorly as games. But the potential for a really neat new twist on the FPS genre is definately there.
I'm sorry, Adrian. I meant Mars, not the Moon. I guess that invalidates everything I said, because I absolutely love Mars and geez: I could hang around there for days and never get bored of my metalic warehouse of a moonbase. See, again: I meant MARSbase. MARS ROCKS!!!
Have you seen the HL2 tech demo? They start off by deforming an entire room: the floor buckling up as if like a waterbed. And the dynamic physics engine is amazing: they shoot apart this complex wooden structure, with wood splintering, and the whole structure reacting and wobbling as various supports are blown away, till it finally collapses altogether. No scripted sequence that, either. They played plinko with barrels. It's intense stuff.
But no indication that all the WALLS were all destructible. Which, we agree, is not necessarily the coolest thing MP, but in SP it still does take away a bit from the realism, especially if they control the number of explosives your character can get anyway. Still, you're right: it is kind of silly. I mean, what fun is a maze if you can bore a hole straight through the center?
No dude: Einstein predicted this right after coming up with general relativity. It's called the Fanboyiesnberg principle.
Heh, I caught that too: demo showing in a constant loop, and people gather whenever it was shown... hmmmm...
I'm betting both, though of course they can't help but be competitors on some level. I dunno: I finally saw the tech demo of the source engine though. I dunno if they've got volumetrically rendered raindrops or anything, but they've got a physics enginge that just defies belief as far as how cool and realistic everything acts. I mean, they used a gravity ray to pick up a dead guy by the leg, shake him around like a ragdoll (which D3 also has, but....) then used him as a broom to sweep a whole table full of items into a swimming pool. They grabbed a matress floating in the pool and draped it over some other floating junk, and it deformed over it just like a real matress.
And it all looked real.
I have to say: these HL2 movies are beyond belief. It's not that the graphics are top-notch: they're gorgeous for what they need to be (don't know how to compare between games, though D3's models look more detailed, higher res): it's that the game looks like the first ever to make a real physics engine work in a game: and be part of the fun instead of an annoyance. The 30meg video of the running battle with the soldiers just goes on and on with cool stuff: and yet none of it looks scripted or canned: it could have played out very differently, in a million other cool ways. The way that objects tipped, wobbled, and tumbled, not to mention reacted to gunfire (like you shooting away a rolling barrel in the teaser) opens up whole new worlds of design possibilities that I hope Valve has really made the best of.
...
The characters also look stunningly lifelike. Again, not because they are perfect 1zillion poly models, but because the animation and attention to sutble physical detail is incredible. HL2 is defiantely on my buy list, and I'm actually far more exicted about it than DOOM3, no matter how amazing it might look.
That said, I'm really hoping that DOOM3 will be the game that puts id back on the map as a great SP experience. They have't really had a truly groundbreaking SinglePlayer experience since Doom, and that was largely because they were the first: they came in before FPS games got bogged down with cliches that were originally fresh in DOOM. But in D3 it looks like they've combined a love for top-notch technology with a desire to make it really work as an cohesive gaming experience. It looks creepy as hell. I just hope the game spreads out a little more from the suspiciously parodiable feel of:
Player: Hey, I'm running around in a gorgeously rendered dank sewer!
Carmack: No fool, it's a moonbase complex.
Player: They have sewers on the moon?!
Carmack: I... uh, yes.
Carmack: Lookout: a spider!
Player: Oh no! And look: a space crate! Made out of human femurs and plywood and some staples made out of a little girl's braces! I hope it's full of ammo and health, but you never know what's what up here on this crazy... wadda call it? Moon?
And yeah, that's ADRIAN Carmack I be talking about, Word.
You hear me though Carmack? I can only spend so much time on the moon: if you don't take me somewhere out in the open, like a gorgeously rendered outdoor plain of hell stretching out in all directions, or inside the guts of a giant, organic demon-spawn citadel with blood-seeping lungs for walls and tanned human skin for throw rugs, I don't know what I'll do.
Probably just sit my ass down on a crate and doodle on the PDA that you thought would make for a great action game. I hope it has a spreadsheet function, because tax day is always around the corner! (note to id: make evil tax-spider and Hitler-spider)
I think the two games will be very different as far as what they're going for. HL2 looks like a really immersive action game that's all about big battles, crazy physics, a subtle but well scripted storyline, and frantic action. D3 seems much slower and more secretive: something's always ready to rip your guts out, and you're afraid to move an inch. Then you snap and burst out with guns blazing, nearly get your head swiped off, and run in terror.
Two different types of games, two different sorts of engines. We're lucky, lucky PC gamers we are.
My point was that, yes: the discovery that carbon was common in the rest of the universe should at least be grounds to up our estimation about the possibility of life in the rest of the universe.
;)---
---Do you honestly believe that modern science is not establishing a route to a philosophy of materialism? From what I can see it is for the most part. Just some thoughts.
I do believe it. The neat thing about science is that it's essentially just the (old school, i.e. John Locke) liberal idea that no one gets a final say, and no one gets any special authority: all ideas must face eternal and diverse criticism. That idea has a way of transcending, in practice, any other philosophical gurflummery that people try to attach to it. Because it's essentially just a social mechanism for decentralizing the production of truth, not a philosophy in and of itself.
And as I noted before, I don't think, even if people think they ARE establishing some philosophy of materialism, that they are ultimately doing anything. The fact remains: if there are any "supernatural" things that interact with the rest of reality in any meaningful way, then they will inevitably become part of "materialism" anyway, exposing the emptiness of the distinction.
Furthermore, there are plenty of intelligent science theorists and scientists who are careful NOT to confuse what they call "methodological materialism" with "metaphysical materialism." By the former, they mean just that science as a method can only deal with what it can test: stuff it can interact with. But they realize that the lack of interactibility and detectability in the here and now doesn't necessarily prove anything about what is or isn't out there. It just isn't ripe for explanation until we CAN get some hard data on it.
Even there, I think we're using words that are far too complicated. What we need to focus on are some straight binaries. Exist/Not exist. Known/Unknown. "Material/Not Material" is useless in this regard, especially because if something is non-material, then it is essentially unknown by default. But if it is unknown, then we also can't know whether or not it is material or not either (we don't even really know how we would tell, even philosophically)! So all non-material things live in the realm of the unknown, and the only sorts of things that even can become known are previously unknown material things (like quarks). That makes the distinction essentially meaningless: we should just stick to "known/unknown" and be done with it, rather than trying to classify different "sorts" of existence, when we don't even know what that even means.
---The 'monkeys on typewriters ending up with war and peace' flies in the face of reason, IMHO, and yet it is a crutch and fundamental pillar of evolutionary theory, attractive because one can always simply require the disbeliever to roll the dice a trillion more times or so.---
If your only idea of how evolution or the various theories of abiogenesis work is just "rolling the dice" then you're already tripped yourself up. The whole point to both these theories is that there are some natural MECHANISMS that produce organized results. Not just chance assembleges at all: it's the particular principles of chemistry, and later, genetics, that actually induce certain things under certain conditions, leading to other inducements, often in a feedback loop.
---consider this: they have never discovered fossilized remains of an inter-species mutation; e.g., a creature evolutionarily between A and B.---
Oh for goodness sake: did you think you could dazzle the boards with such a well-refuted lie? Even the very suggestion shows that you are not hip to the way in which evolutionary theory destroyed the very idea of "kind" whereby we could say that a creature is "between" two "other" kinds. Our idea of "kind" is simply our eagerness to pretend that what we see today represents a bunch of stable and eternal Platonic forms from which any deviation from is some sort of mutant. But ALL species alive today are potentially intermediate forms to something in the future, and their ancestors WERE intermediate forms between them and something even earlier. Worse, the idea of "intermediate forms" is doubly misleading, because it implies that any given direction is "going somewhere," transitioning between one discrete thing and a new, pre-defined goal. But the theory of evolution is NOT suggesting that in the least. There is no discrete goal that something is somehow knowingly "transitioning" towards.
Even if all that were not the case, we DO have plenty of fossils which demonstrate the sorts of big-scale "transistional forms" that you're asking about (ones that just happen to strike us as grossly "in-between" two sorts of creatures we are comfortably familiar with today because they share certain large and obvious features: but in reality, are ONLY "in-between" from our present perspective, not in any real sense). Talk origins has a whole listing of them.
---Carbon is a major building block of life. Would the discovery of carbon on the earth and in the rest of the universe convince most scientists that life is likely to be abundant in the cosmos?---
But that's not what's being said. What's being said is that prior to this experiment, no one even knew that ammino acids could be created in (simulated) natural-like conditions. The experiment showed then that this could actually happen. That doesn't prove that life happens that way, but it does vastly improve our estimation of the likiood of finding life elsewhere in the universe.
---It starts with the assumption that the metaphysical doesn't exist and should not be considered in their investigation.---
No no no. This is nonsense anyway, since ROCKS are as much "metaphysical" as anything else would be. But science is not a metaphysical seive, it is a testability/falsifiability seive. "Naturalism" has nothing, inherently, to do with it. That's just some militant atheists' joneses. I dare you to even define "supernatural" in a way that isn't just a form of "not natural," which itself is worthless, because we don't know what "natural" even is. (how can we define a set when we don't know all it's contents or even the similarities between all it's contents or even if there ARE any other sets?)
"Supernatural" explanations aren't tolerated not because they ruled out: but because they break the rules of inquiry. They claim to explain things, when all they do is give a name to things we STILL don't understand any better than when we honestly admitted our ignorance. They often aren't testable. They are often consistent with ANYTHING (making them even more worthless) because they can be ad hoced once they encounter any disproof.
No: if there exists "supernatural" things, then they exist, and are the same as "natural" things in that respect, and should not be treated as a separate category. If a God exists in any meaningful way, then it should be amenable to science to the degree that it interacts with the rest of existence. Because science should not be a route to a philosophy of materialism, but simply a route to testable explanation, wherever that route leads.
I sure wish he'd move his mysteriously fat ass off the couch and do some dishes for once.
Yeah. Please guys: don't continue a discusion in these forums! These forums are for posting jpegs of naked celebrities only!
---The fact remains that there is just no good explination for how life (and the chemicals of life) arose out of nothing. Most "scientific" expliniations are just half-baked suggestions.---
I'm not sure I see your problem here. The various proposals for theories of abiogenesis are NOT accepted in the same way that evolution is. Their own authors state that they are speculative. So... what's your problem? Science is full of unanswered questions.
---There are gaps in the fossil record. Species seem to go from one form to another with no evolutionary steps in between. Evolutionary biologists explain this with the theory of "punctuated equilibrium" - an intellectual kludge at best.---
Eh? No.
The fossil record, in Darwin's day was far far far more incomplete. In fact, no one expected it to get any better. So when the theory was first widely accepted among scientists, it was WITHOUT the confirmation of the sort of fossil evidence: the gaps in the record were MUCH MUCH bigger than they are today. So, if this wasn't a big problem back, then, how can it be now that we have a much better and more complete record today? If you think about it, ANY new fossil found multiplies the number of "gaps" that there are, but this is progress, not regress, towards a more complete reocrd.
Likewise, the idea that biologists respond with PE is nonsense. First of all, outside of Gould's circle, radical PE is not taken all that seriously as a new or important idea. But secondly, the major reason for gaps in the record isn't because of PE, it's simple random distribution. Fossilization IS fairly rare, and we would expect that the record would be incomplete. There's nothing kludgy about this: we've known it for centuries.
---Where is the philosophical "connective tissue" to the physical world?---
Logical possibility, coupled with modeling that tries to mirror certain key features of the physical world. It can certainly be argued that a ey feature was left out: something that would alter the results. But that's what we should be arguing about when we argue about specific models: simplicity is not an argument against the very idea of using models at all to learn about the world.