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grim

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Will there be any way to push people?

Here is what I mean by that.

Suppose a guard is standing close to a ledge and is unaware of you. Could you walk up to his back and push? Or do you simply need to bump into him hard enough? Or throw something at him...

It would be rather neat to be able to walk up to a guard and toss them over the edge, even if there is a small railing of some sort.

I know the team has a ton of more important work, but I would like to know what's planned or even already possible. The physics probably take care of part of the problem anyway as it is.

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Hmm... I think that would be about as tricky as having guards wake up, unless you could be sure that the guard would fall to their death. I mean, what if you push a guard off a front porch, onto the lawn a couple of feet below? You'd need to turn them into a ragdoll to push them over the railing, but they'd need to be able to get back up after falling a couple of feet, which would mean we'd need the sort of code that could allow an unconscious ragdoll guard to wake up again. Unfortunately, that's very difficult to program.

 

However, if somebody wanted, it probably wouldn't be too hard to make an FM where you could frob guards standing at certain spots to turn them into ragdolls and push them off the ledges. Halflife2 did something similar - when you killed certain guards on ledges, the maps were scripted to apply a physics force to cause the bodies to fall off the ledges more dramatically.

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Yeah. The alternative is not to have them go to ragdoll, and just treat them as a moveable object - same as in T2, when people fell, they just fell as they were (there being no ragdoll feature). And then if the fall hurt them, they did their "hurt" anim when they hit the ground. And if the fall killed them, they did their "die" anim when they hit the ground.

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I see the difficulty.... it's amazing how simple ideas can generate so many complications...

A half-solution could be to make a falling-over-ledge animation that gets played if it is determined that the guard should fall....hmm....then you would need special falling animations and also different animations depending on if he dies or falls on feet (short fall).....

okay :) I get the point....

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The alternative is not to have them go to ragdoll, and just treat them as a moveable object - same as in T2, when people fell, they just fell as they were (there being no ragdoll feature).
I can't imagine why you'd want a conscious AI to go ragdoll. That would look really weird when they went to stand up again.
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You can push people in the latest Hitman, but it looks like the reaction to the push is an animation, not a ragdoll. When pushed, they an animation where they stumble forward a bit. If they hit some mapper-defined railing during that animation they go into ragdoll and a force is probably applied to knock them the rest of the way over. I'm not sure, but you might be able to push them over low-lying furniture too, and then they just do some kind of fall to the ground and get up animation (unless they've coded the holy grail getting up from arbitrary ragdoll position). They can also get knocked out if their head smacks into something enough times during the pushed animation.

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Because it entails programming everything about the way a human knows how to get up.

 

If you land on your side, you know to roll over and then do a pushup, then kneel, then stand.

 

If you land flat on your face with one arm tucked under you, the other above your head, you know to roll slightly, lift one arm up, pull the other down, etc.

 

If you simply interpolating between some random ragdoll position into a "get up" position, it looks very robotic. All the limbs move at the same speed in the most direct direction. There is no inbetween positions.

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Just because no commercial game has done it, doesn't mean it's to hard to do. Don't know where all this worshipping of commercial games comes from. These games have different rules, which is yet another reason why something would not be done.

Gerhard

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Just because no commercial game has done it, doesn't mean it's to hard to do.

No shit, sherlock. Is it really necessary to say, "No commercial games implement this very obvious and highly desirable general-purpose feature, therefore it must be hard to do"?

 

It's not like saying that no game has an entirely purple/green color scheme, therefore it must be hard to do. Sheesh.

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You know, how often I heared during the development of this mod, that this or that can't be done, or it is to hard for such noobs and whatever. It just gets boring. I'm sure ZylonBane, after I completed my 12th game development cycle, like you obviously did, I will think otherwise. But right now I'm still a noob and think I can do some stuff.

Gerhard

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You know, how often I heared during the development of this mod, that this or that can't be done, or it is to hard for such noobs and whatever.

 

I think the idea is that since such a feature would be very desirable from a realism and gameplay perspective, the fact that it has not been implemented in any major game suggests that the effort required to implement it is prohibitively high.

 

It's more a question of development time than competence.

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Thanks guys. You have no idea how many times Spar has innapropriately hit me over the head with this particular blunt instrument of discussion.

 

All it means is that it suggests it's difficult, so, we should consider it very seriously, and try to find out why it's hard. But in the case of a ragdoll getting up, it should be obvious to anyone with a minor understanding of how games work, why it's difficult. The fact that commercial games haven't done it properly is just supportive information.

 

Unlike our wild "noob" fantasies, commercial games are the real world proof of the efforts of a team working to get something out the door in a decent amount of time. And there are a hell of a lot more commercial games than ameteur ones. We all know well how many ameteur projects succumb to the common pitfalls of over-scoping, and feature-creep.

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And we all know that commercial games are always targeted for the best code available and never have petty restrictions like money or shareholders. The only thing commercial games care for is "The best player experience" with no room for compromises.

Gerhard

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