quote: Original post by Hase
and on a personal note: i hated the spellcasting system of B&W. Actually I hated most of the game. I hated the Tamagochi, which after half an hour had shown no practical use whatsoever, i hated the petty way in which i had to do shitty little tasks for my villagers (allright, so i burnt down their houses and had some fun...), and i hated the "one-armed leg-amputee´s" style of moving through the landscape... a god should float and soar, and not have to drag himself through the muck...

As for the movement, the trick is to zoom way out til you see the place you want to go, then zoom in. If you do that, it''s an efficent way to move and it does give you the feeling of being a god.

As for the spellcasting, at first I thought it was a bit annoying but I think it''s fairly interesting and it''s consistant with the rest of the game. Although I found the having to physically move the mouse to stroke or hit your creature was a bit annoying.

Although, do agree with most of what you said there, Hase. Controls shouldn''t be what makes the game hard. It''s a different matter if the game is based on how quickly and accurately you use simple controls such as in the old arcade games.

A CRPG in development...

Need help? Well, go FAQ yourself.

quote: Original post by Ronin_54
Ever imagined to both control your character and your sword in a fight, with pin-point accuracy?

Actually, Die by the sword did that. I loved the game, but I heard a lot of people saying it was to hard to control both the character and the sword.

quote: Original post by Ronin_54
Ever imagined to cast spells like in Black & White, only with more difficulty?

I agree with what someone already said, the controls should be as easy to use as possible. If a game is hard to control you only get frustrated. The difficulty in a game should not be mastering the contols. (Well, a FPS is kinda like that, but I hope you understand what I mean). That would be about the same thing as making the game crash regulary because you''ll finnish the game to quick otherwise...

Two joysticks?
Two words.
Karate Champ.

It worked well enough I thought. There was another game where one joystick was used to move your character and another to fire in the chosen direction (also worked well). But then these were arcade machines.

Two mice? A mouse is just an upsidedown trackball. They used to use trackballs on arcade machines. Dual trackballs would be excelent for space combat games and people would plug in coin after coin. It also shouldn''t be any harder to code for.

PC - never happen.
Arcade machine - oh yeah!

I find myself moving away from "absolute control" methodologies towards "adjustable/configurable interpretive controls." Rather than requiring the player to learn complex button combinations, I envision allowing the player to create macros, assign "helper intelligences" to interpret input and make informed decisions.

A good example of this sort of thing was Tomb Raider and its auto-aiming. An example from a sports project I''ve been cooking for a long, long time is when two opponents in a ball-based teamsport are facing each other and the offensive player wishes to get past the defender. The user presses the "fake" button followed by the right and forward directions. The intelligence gathers that the user wishes to displace the defender and then go left, so it translates the "fake" instruction in the input queue into a "fake left" instruction (so the defender attempts to compensate by moving right - the player''s left) and leaves the right and forward unaltered. End result? The player fakes left and burns the defender to the right. Another satisfied gamer.

Why stop at two mice? Why not have five? Then you can control your entire party all at once!

Seriously though, mice are great for certain types of control, but pants for others. Given that you can only really count on people having two button mice, that means you have a grand total of 4 degrees of freedom for fine movement + 4 buttons.

Now compare with a standard keyboard + mouse setup - you have only two degrees of freedom for fine movement, but you can around 100 keys to play with... some can be used for coarse movement, enabling you to add extra degrees of freedom, others can be used for other functions.

Couple this with the fact that a) people are generally pretty crap at using the mouse with their off hand anyway, whereas people tend to use the keyboard with either/both hands b) people dont usually have two mice so you are immediately limiting your target audience to the few people that have a spare mouse floating about and I think you would agree that using two mice is probably more of a hindrance than a help.

A two joystick system might work, ISTR hearing about someone playing Mechwarrior using two joysticks very effectively, but no game should be require the user to have such a specialist setup.

First of all: this would be crap for a commercial project, yes. But this isn''t for a commerical project. It is to try out something. Up until now, games with swordfighting are ''crap'', since it''s just point-and-click.

Off course, you can use one mouse to control your sword, and the keyboard to control movement. Still, this leaves the player with not enough control over movement. Sure, the sword moves around nicely, but turning and walking go ''crappy'' with a keyboard, since you no longer use the mouse to look around.

Still, in a ''swordfight'', you don''t need 100 keys. You need to move your sword on your screen, and turn around your opponent (only thinking about 1-on-1 duels). Those 100 keys are fun to control a spaceship. Or a mech. Or to control Gordon Freeman with his 100+ weapons, jumppacks, flashlights, medkits, etc. etc.

Same goes for a mage. A mage needs to cast spells. Not operate a submarine with 300+ control options.

I think you only would use two mice for the fighting scenes. For other scenes, you could use point and click, or just the keyboard with mouselook.

For swordfighting...

how about a mouse for movement and joystick for sword? (Not much of a special setup involved.) Joystick would have maybe two buttons on the stick itself and a hat. One button for high swings the other for low. Pressing one then the other would say start low and move higher depending on the delay of the second button press. Movement of the stick would be the other axis the sword can wielded, and the hat could maybe do something.

Ok, I hadn''t thought this through. Just sort of brainstorming. A mouse in the right hand and a joystick in the left should be something average people can deal with. Joystick might seem more like wielding a sword. I don''t know about spellcasting, but it seemed like a good idea when I started writing.

Joystick in the right hand, mouse in the left :D

Most mice can be used both left and right handed, while nearly all the modern sticks are fully biased to the right hand...

Original post by Ronin_54
First of all: this would be crap for a commercial project, yes. But this isn''t for a commerical project. It is to try out something. Up until now, games with swordfighting are ''crap'', since it''s just point-and-click.
Huh? You must not have played many "swordfighting" games, Ronin. I suggest downloading and trying the demos for Prince of Persia (if you can get to a DOS prompt) and Silver. Both go far beyond the click-to-kill swordplay that you speak of.

I do, however, like kseh''s idea of using a joystick and mouse (though I was under the impression that this was standard fare in Quake.) Having a smooth and variable control over both movement and aim should work quite well (though I don''t know which hand should go to which controller.)

The same idea could also be transferred to the "dual-analog" gamepads as nearly everyone I''ve seen has two two-axis "thumb-sticks", quite often both double as buttons. One could be treated as a joystick and the other as one of those "button-mice" used on some laptops (and thankfully easier to control given the larger dimensions.) Maybe even treat both in a mouse-like manner. As you said, this is up for experimentation.

Anyone here ever play Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss? Here is a game that never got the recognition it deserved. I believe it was the first game to use dynamic lighting effects, but I digress.

This game had a rather simple yet intuitive way to deal with melee combat. The location of your mouse pointed on the screen determined where and what type of attack you made. The implementation was fairly simple, but one could build on this presumably. You could use the keyboard to control movement and the mouse to control the melee weapon, just like you would in most FPS titles.

Not sure how you would deal with using multiple weapons though. A shield could be useful because it would kind of cover a particular ''attack zone'' on your body, meaning (depending on the size) you would have more protection on the right or left side of your body (probably right side...I think typically swordsmen are trained to fight right-handed but I could be wrong). As for two swords, well, I suppose if you were making a a game that used ''fencing'' techniques you could implement the different positions or stances used by professional fencers. For example, if you fight with a rapier and a main-gauche (the dagger used for defense, in the left hand -- hence ''main gauche'', French for left hand ), the position of your main gauche will be tied to where your sword is. Just like in boxing, where your right hand might make a jab and the left automatically protect the left side of your face, etc. What I''m trying to say (although I''m not articulating it very well) is that you would only have to control one weapon, because the action of the second would be determined largely by the action of the first.

Just my thoughts on the matter...

R.