What About This?

[obscurus]

It is my understanding that Doom 3 does per-pixel collision detection, if so, can the following be done?

 

When shooting an arrow at a guard, the arrow remains embedded in the guard where it hit (maybe there could also be an animation of the guard pulling out the arrow, or even cooler, pulling it out, nocking it in his bow and firing it back at you).

 

Leave wound decals on people who have been injured, such as big bruises on blackjacked AIs (maybe have a normal map for the bruise decal to make a nice big lump), slash marks on sword victims etc.

 

Have blood spurting out of wounds.

 

Leaving every arrow where it lands, even if broken, rather than making them disappear (and maybe using arrows on the ground as an AI suspicion trigger).

 

Is any of this possible? Would it be too much work to implement? Too computationally expensive?

 

What does the team think?

[New Horizon]

Would it be too much work to implement? Too computationally expensive?

 

I think you're probably looking at a little bit of both.

 

I'm sure it's possible but you're looking at a lot of extra work. Realistically, you would want the arrow to protrude from the area you shot it into. I'm not a part of the coding or modeling division but to me that could add up to taking more cycles than it's worth. Then you have to take the animation to pull it out into consideration. You could use a generic "pulling out" animation but depending on where the arrow struck, it could end up looking silly.

 

A guard would be doing himself a lot more harm by pulling the arrow out anyway. Probably tear his organs to shreds.

[obscurus]

Actually, that could be kinda funny, having the guard pulling out the arrow, then saying "Uh oh, I don't think I should have done that, (gurgling noises)" then dropping dead from internal injuries caused by removing the arrow... :lol:

 

I may be on the wrong track here, but would it really be much more expensive to bind an arrow object to the gaurd model than having a guard model and an arrow model in the same scene, but not connected?

 

Maybe it is - there are a lot of games out there that claimed they would have this type of feature, but it never made it into the final release...

 

Oh well, woulda looked nice

[Springheel]

We had a discussion about leaving arrows in the guard, but there's a few problems with that. The biggest one is that it could lead to clipping errors depending on where it hits. It could also wind up looking silly, with arrows sticking out of a guard's feet or hands. It could also get in the way during combat...imaging trying to swing at an attacking guard and frobbing the arrow sticking out of his chest instead.

 

We may do something where the last 'death arrow' remains visible in the body--it depends on how it works in playtesting.

[FishFace]

You wouldn't frob it accidentally if the frob/attack keys were separated, of course. I think a possibility would perhaps be to have certain areas/angles where the arrow will stick, others where it would snap off or fall off.

I guess there's still the problem that a guard with an arrow in his hand is unable to fight effectively, but it would be unrealistic for it not stick in there, protruding from the other side... I'm not so sure about the "death arrow" because this would raise problems of consistency, which isn't so good... I think it might end up being an all-or-nothing situation, and all would be far too expensive in time and CPU.

I would like to see better blood than in TDS - it was quite ridiculous. More like HL style, which gets smeared on walls and so on - YUM!

[obscurus]

Actually, that brings up another idea - you could frob the arrow out of the guard, causing the guard massive pain and a fair bit of damage in the process, could make for an amusing fight.

 

Oh and realistic blood would be nice, or if it is not realistic, how about Quentin Tarantino - Kill Bill style blood, and have it so the player and any other AI slip over in pools of blood.

 

Are you guys likely to include oil flasks like in TDS?

[New Horizon]

Are you guys likely to include oil flasks like in TDS?

I believe we decided against oil flasks. We're trying to stay closer to Thief 1 and 2 for the basic toolset.

[Domarius]

I hope oDDity doesn't see your suggestion for animating the guard pulling the arrow out of him self - from a pretty much UNLIMITED posibilitys of positions the arrow could be in on his body...

[obscurus]

OK, OK I know that would be a bit hard to animate... Maybe you could have the gaurds hand moved towards the arrow, and the arm would be pulled along using the ragdoll system or inverse kinematics (yeah, I know this would be a load on the CPU and hard to do).... just a wistfull musing....

[New Horizon]

In the scheme of things, the gameplay is of the utmost importance to us. Details such as this, while nice to look at, aren't going to make the game more fun to play in the long run. This would be the type of detailing that would be added after the toolset has been released, had time for feedback, bug fixed based on that feedback and then considered finished.

[The1wayman]

Hello guys i just login, to say GREAT JOB (I love the caracters they are realy professional something that a real professional caracter modeler is capable of doing, hey Oddity are you a professional caracter modeler ?

 

 

Now on topic, this arrow stick on body thing is that so dificult to do , Severance: Blade of Darkness is a old game and have this feature, along with the same type of lighting/shadowing(volumetric shadows and dinamic lighting) as Doom3 , the only bad thing is that they don´t put in a take out arrow of body animation they fall of after some time, but is cool to see the arrows stick in the body, i will show a video to you guys if you want to see how it work in BOD.

 

 

p.s- sorry for the bad grammer, i´m Portuguese .

 

cheers

 

A link to the video:

 

BOD Video

Edited May 31, 2005 by The1wayman

[Pyrian]

I agree that this is nice-to-have, maybe-somebody'll-patch-it-in-later sort of stuff.

 

That being said, you could probably do a very good job by making a finite number of hit locations (2-4 per limb), and a break/remove animation for each relevant one. Once broken, clipping would be minor.

[oDDity]

THe whole thing is a complete waste of everyone's time.