Biggest problem with these games (I've found, anyway) is that your sword controller cannot magically stop in mid air when your virtual sword hits another sword or a wall or whatever. It really ruins the immersion.
It will also have to drastically downplay the importance of footwork. In a real swordfight, where to put your feet is nearly as important as where to put the sword.
Yep, that and the controller has no weight. To make a realistic game you would then need to make the character have a max swing agility (slow than the player) and also give the character a stamina bar. Anyway that's not to say you can't have fun sword fighting motion games. It just means you can't approximate reality 1:1 in all dimensions.
But you can still approximate reality if you just accept the control dimension will be abstract! Consider that Sim City uses an abstract interface to simulate city planning. Surely thats not the interface real city planners use (meetings, proposals) but it's still approximating a reality of city planning much more closely than other games.
I wonder if it is possible in some way with gyroscopes. Not going all the time, but spun up quickly, to provide counter resistance for a specific direction of rotation. You could spin up two, in opposite directions, to counter the torque from acceleration. Difficult to spin them up fast enough, but perhaps just the sensation of some resistance would be enough feedback.
>In general, if you drill down deep enough on the actual sword techniques, the tree of possible outcomes gets pruned way down. It turns out that you rarely have to solve the fully general problem of one sword stopping another sword traveling at top speed at an arbitrary location in space. Which is a hard problem!
Next biggest problem is that, in reality, Medieval duels rarely lasted more than a minute before one side was fatally injured. Not nearly long enough for a video game.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned haptics in this thread. Novint for example produces commercial haptic controllers. Haptics are what can get your controller to magically stop mid-air.
I don't mind putting a bit of cash towards projects where those involved really don't have the resources to pull it off otherwise, but does Neal Stephenson really not have enough cash to bootstrap this himself?
There are tons of things I would like to do, that I could afford to do, but that I still won't do if I have to bear the whole financial risk myself. I'm sure that's true for a lot of people.
Kickstarter is being used a lot for preorders rather than fundraising. There are a lot of obvious reasons someone might want to do this despite technically not needing financing.
Stephenson is no doubt an extremely successful writer, but that doesn't confer the type of resources that being an extremely successful entrepreneur does. And game development doesn't come cheap either, especially not innovative game development.
I thought it might be to gauge demand. Why spend a million dollars on an unannounced project only to find out no-one wants it? And if people really want it, they'll put up a few dollars, perhaps.
Sounds like they're not looking to bootstrap a business that would produce a return on investment. Instead of making a commercially viable game, they're talking about founding a platform and cultivating a market for sword fighting games.
Anyone remember Die by the Sword? Admittedly it was more sword flailing than sword fighting, but it's the only game I've played that had a semblance of direct control. It was also the first game to use IK for everything from sword fighting to rope swinging and ladder climbing. Even nowadays it's rare to see IK used in games for anything except relatively minor pose fix-ups (blending canned poses offers better control, and IK fix-ups can then be applied on top to get perfect alignment for aiming, etc).
Of course fencing, especially at the higher levels, is much more a sport than a form of combat. I'm only intimately familiar with saber, but there the rules play a very important role. Having the right of way changes everything, and a lot of blade contact is about getting the right of way rather than actually preventing your opponent from doing something. If you have the right of way, you don't care about being hit as long as you hit your opponent sufficiently quickly after that--I don't think real sword fights work that way :).
All this makes fencing more fun and interesting, but also more of a game. This really affects the tactics people use.
Also, foil works the same way with a very similar set of rules about the right of way. There are some minor variations, but the basic idea is the same--if you have the right of way, you get the point even if you hit after your opponent. Epee is different, with no right of way, but I never really liked it so can't comment much. If anything, it seems epee is less focused on footwork than saber, but it could just be my inner saber biases showing.
Fencing, while awesome, is a poor proxy for actual sword fighting. If you were actually facing something sharp, you would be much more worried about getting hit at all and so would probably parry more.
Fencing raises another good point: realistic swordfighting is actually pretty boring compared to movie swordfighting. (If it weren't, then movie swordfighting wouldn't need to be so unrealistic).
If I'm gonna play a swordfighting video game I wanna be Errol Flynn, not Benjamin Kleibrink. [Who? 2008 Olympic foil champion. Yes, I had to look that up, that's the point.]
As someone who just finished reading Snow Crash today (great stuff btw, can't wait for another Stephenson's book) I'd be thrilled to see this and try it in action.
As someone who's been into martial arts for some time I'm very sceptic about this. There's a lot more to realistic fighting than just swinging and clashing swords: footwork, body movement, weight transfer...
Nevertheles, even if it won't turn out to be perfect it could stil be a lots of fun. I'll be watching their progress.
> There's a lot more to realistic fighting than just swinging and clashing swords: footwork, body movement, weight transfer...
I agree. I'm pretty sure he's not aiming at making something totally immersive and realistic, but just a good game that has better sword play than anything else.
Many games do one thing pretty well, and are good enough for everything else. Black had nice gun play; Burnout had nice crashing. Hopefully this will have sword play that is better than just button mashing.
> Nevertheles, even if it won't turn out to be perfect it could stil be a lots of fun. I'll be watching their progress.
I'm surprised there was no mention of the Mount and Blade[1] series, which took a serious look at this sort of combat through the use of contextual mouse movements for parries and attacks. I wonder if he's unaware of the franchise, or just didn't feel the need to mention it.
I'm also not convinced that today's odometry based controllers will give you high enough fidelity to model swords convincingly. Any sort of wiimote or kinect based sword/lightsaber game has always seemed very waggle centric without any deliberate movement. Also, I'm not really thrilled about the thought of having to buy plastic swords to swing in my room.
Skyward Sword has some pretty nice swordplay, and it uses the Wii Motion Plus attachment to get more accurate movement data. If you just waggle you'll get killed easy.
One of the most interesting games I've ever played was Bushido Blade 2. The best thing about it was realistic vulnerability: get stabbed once and you die (or maybe lose use of an arm). The disappointment was made up for by lots of quick rounds.
I always thought it was silly to have games where you'd get shot 20 times and keep fighting exactly the same, just lose some of your energy meter, then suddenly flop over and die when it reached zero.
I wish him luck. Various projects have come along with backing from people outside the video game industry with the goal of being more realistic, more revolutionary and so on. But it's a lot harder to make a playable fun game. Realism often isn't fun. Modern Warfare 3 is the culmination of 20 years of evolution from Wolfenstein, and still is nothing like being a real soldier.
I'm curious how they plan to implement actual medieval / early Renaissance combat tactics with a controller like the one in the video - how would you do half-swording or something like the Mordhau?
For people who aren't medieval geeks - half-sword is when you hold the sword halfway up the blade with your left hand, in order to deliver a more accurate, powerful thrust; perhaps after trapping your opponent's sword between your arm and body. Mordhau ("murder-strike") is when you invert the sword and use it as a mace. These things came about because swinging a sword into an armored opponent isn't actually going to do much to him.
It seems like the kind of combat you could simulate might potentially be fun, but wouldn't actually simulate a real fight from the period - not enough grappling / bashing.
[+] [-] antipax|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yummyfajitas|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] acgourley|14 years ago|reply
But you can still approximate reality if you just accept the control dimension will be abstract! Consider that Sim City uses an abstract interface to simulate city planning. Surely thats not the interface real city planners use (meetings, proposals) but it's still approximating a reality of city planning much more closely than other games.
[+] [-] 6ren|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jere|14 years ago|reply
>In general, if you drill down deep enough on the actual sword techniques, the tree of possible outcomes gets pruned way down. It turns out that you rarely have to solve the fully general problem of one sword stopping another sword traveling at top speed at an arbitrary location in space. Which is a hard problem!
There's a longer explanation here: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/260688528/clang/posts/24...
[+] [-] Lukeas14|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jvrossb|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] daenz|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tomelders|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ConstantineXVI|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ArmstrongRSBC|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mbrubeck|14 years ago|reply
"And you wrote the software."
"Yeah. That, too," Hiro says.
―Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash
[+] [-] jrockway|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] trevelyan|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vidarh|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Cushman|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dasil003|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PostOnce|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ArmstrongRSBC|14 years ago|reply
The production alone on that video
$$$
[+] [-] pavedwalden|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] psykotic|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] znt|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] binarycrusader|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cheatercheater|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dmoy|14 years ago|reply
See: relatively little blade contact in extremely high level fencing.
[+] [-] tikhonj|14 years ago|reply
All this makes fencing more fun and interesting, but also more of a game. This really affects the tactics people use.
Also, foil works the same way with a very similar set of rules about the right of way. There are some minor variations, but the basic idea is the same--if you have the right of way, you get the point even if you hit after your opponent. Epee is different, with no right of way, but I never really liked it so can't comment much. If anything, it seems epee is less focused on footwork than saber, but it could just be my inner saber biases showing.
Fencing, while awesome, is a poor proxy for actual sword fighting. If you were actually facing something sharp, you would be much more worried about getting hit at all and so would probably parry more.
[+] [-] planetguy|14 years ago|reply
If I'm gonna play a swordfighting video game I wanna be Errol Flynn, not Benjamin Kleibrink. [Who? 2008 Olympic foil champion. Yes, I had to look that up, that's the point.]
[+] [-] brown9-2|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ralfd|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] radical_cut|14 years ago|reply
As someone who's been into martial arts for some time I'm very sceptic about this. There's a lot more to realistic fighting than just swinging and clashing swords: footwork, body movement, weight transfer...
Nevertheles, even if it won't turn out to be perfect it could stil be a lots of fun. I'll be watching their progress.
[+] [-] DanBC|14 years ago|reply
I agree. I'm pretty sure he's not aiming at making something totally immersive and realistic, but just a good game that has better sword play than anything else.
Many games do one thing pretty well, and are good enough for everything else. Black had nice gun play; Burnout had nice crashing. Hopefully this will have sword play that is better than just button mashing.
> Nevertheles, even if it won't turn out to be perfect it could stil be a lots of fun. I'll be watching their progress.
Yes, I'd settle for lots of fun.
[+] [-] amelim|14 years ago|reply
I'm also not convinced that today's odometry based controllers will give you high enough fidelity to model swords convincingly. Any sort of wiimote or kinect based sword/lightsaber game has always seemed very waggle centric without any deliberate movement. Also, I'm not really thrilled about the thought of having to buy plastic swords to swing in my room.
[1]:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=psLA87SgZcw
[+] [-] acgourley|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rsanchez1|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nathan_long|14 years ago|reply
I always thought it was silly to have games where you'd get shot 20 times and keep fighting exactly the same, just lose some of your energy meter, then suddenly flop over and die when it reached zero.
[+] [-] nazgulnarsil|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] x1|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] msy|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] uvTwitch|14 years ago|reply
...I'm okay with this.
[+] [-] justinhj|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eli|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mehulkar|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fromhet|14 years ago|reply
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clang
[+] [-] gklitt|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Cushman|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] defen|14 years ago|reply
For people who aren't medieval geeks - half-sword is when you hold the sword halfway up the blade with your left hand, in order to deliver a more accurate, powerful thrust; perhaps after trapping your opponent's sword between your arm and body. Mordhau ("murder-strike") is when you invert the sword and use it as a mace. These things came about because swinging a sword into an armored opponent isn't actually going to do much to him.
It seems like the kind of combat you could simulate might potentially be fun, but wouldn't actually simulate a real fight from the period - not enough grappling / bashing.
[+] [-] magoghm|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Roboprog|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alinajaf|14 years ago|reply