In every action movie, there have to be like dozens of impossible situations (unsurvivable) that the good guy has not the least bit of a problem to cope with. In games (as in real life) its quite hard to get by cool impossible situations that the player walks away from. Cause if these happen all the time, they are not impossible anymore Could this be helped by the game cheating to help the player in some hotspots ? Like, along the game its hard to kill 3 baddies at once, but at some point you are faced with 7 baddies (which is obviously an impossible situation), and your gun gets a bit tougher, more accurate, the enemies bullets miss you, and before you know it, you hacked them. Well, maybe not just cheating in that hotspot from the first time, but after the player going again and again through the hotspot and dieing (and getting nervous), ... I think he wont realise were cheating, and if he thinks of it, he''ll just say nah and pretend he''s that good (and be happy about it). Of course this raises a lot of ethical questions : will they find out we''re cheating ? , what would the player think about it if he found out? , is it fair to just lie ?, would it sell ? PS: this wouldnt work in multiplayer, obviously

quote:
this wouldnt work in multiplayer, obviously

Why not? It is not that hard for me to imagine a game where all players win almost every time. Think about a game like CounterStrike. You could allow the players to move freely and then cheat by delaying the shot one all computers except the one that fired the shot. You could also make it so that on one player''s screen he had hit the enemy rigth in the head while on another player''s screen he had missed. You could also make bots that acted almost like the real players but missed a couple of shots once in a while. It would be easy to find out that the game was cheating. But it would not be that hard to write a game that cheated this way.

I hope this makes sense. I''m in a real hurry. Sorry...

Heh, I had the same idea half a year ago. You can read it here.

-Hans [home]

That has been happening in car racing games since Pitstop. They use a method called compression that gives the slower cars a bit of extra speed or shave a bit of speed off the leading cars to keep the cars more or less in the same area of the track. It makes for a much more exciting game as you are usually battling for position with one or two other cars. Otherwise you would just be racing yourself most of the time and what fun is that?

Steve ''Sly'' Williams  Code Monkey  Krome Studios

I''m planning to do a similar a thing in a 3d survival horror game I''m working on.

I''ve even re-termed the monsters "actors" instead of "enemies" since their AI is orientated around providing the player with a more dramatic experience.

For example:
The player is walking down a dark alley way. Unbeknownst to him, there is a zombie walking down an alley way which will eventually intersect. Say the zombie reaches the intersection well before the player - if he were to jump out then the player would see the zombie from a bit of a distance and have plenty of time to react. But if the zombie were to wait until the player hits the intersection too...

Shock! Full screen zombie close-up. Much more dramatic. :D

Well... it''s a basic example of what I''m including but there you go.

E

I had another solution here, but it didn''t seem to grab folks.

I don''t like the idea the least bit. I know that a lot of AI cheats, and I avoid it like the plague. Worms is a prime example, especially Worms 1. If you ever played it, the computer AI was very very weak, wasn''t capable of using any sophisticated weapons. It made up for this by being psychotically accurate with the bazooka and grenade (things relatively easy to code). it provided a totally unrealistic and quite boring opponenet.

Now you want to cheat and make the player more powerful. Even thinking about such a thing means you probably have a hole in your design, and this is just a quick way to patch it up while adding "drama" to the game. Plus $10 says the player would catch on, in fact thanks to the Internet, you can''t get away with anything. Even if 1 out of just 10 000 players finds out, he/she will post about it, and now everyone else knows too. And if you know ur getting an unfair advantage, it''s not as fun (also why i refuse to allow an opponent in a game to handicap themselves even if they are vastly better than me).

I think you just need to take Half Life one step further, and really go for that movie feel, where the player gets to accomplish something big, but at the same time, it is a once-per-game kinda thing. Not the kill 7 soldiers in one area, have trouble with 3 in other areas. A good way of giving the player an advantage without actively cheating is terrain that can be hid behind, blown up, melted, etc. Here are some very memorable things from Half-Life, where after beating them, the player feels a sense of heightened accomplishment:

The Jurrasic Park/Godzilla scene where the giant alien is stomping on cars and u have to lead him out and blow him up with missiles, and then scale down the cliff. That was probably my favorite part of the game, just because it let me be in Jurassic Park

The huge surface part where ur fighting marines in the desert using an assorted set of tactics, and even getting to fight on a cliff. That was just plain awesome.

Anytime your fighting stuff that is falling out of a ceiling, or your fighting stuff while ur falling out of the ceiling. The idea is to heighten the sense of action, thus getting the mind to associate the player with a Rambo type character. Since Rambo is associated with killing many bad guys at once, and being an all out bad ass, the player automitcally attributes those attributes to themsleves. It''s psychology.

The Half Life demo. Better than anything in Half Life itself. That one huge ass area with all those crates and that huge battle going on between aliens and marines, it was just amazing. Not since Wolfenstein was i so impressed with a 3D game. I felt like i was sooo there. BEST GAMING EXPERIENCE EVER


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My ideea was not to make the player cheat through the game (most games do that anyways, like in halflife you kill hundreds of creatures, many of them having dedicated their life to warfare).

I was thinking how could impossible situations appear in games. One way (the way its been done) is to make the player stronger that he would have been in reality (in halflife you eat bout 50 bullets till the end of the game), or make the NPC''s stupid and weak. The result is that what happens gets quite predictable. Wheter you''re Tresh or me two years ago, you cant really do something that you cannot do, can you.

Am I getting a bit illogical ? Well, once while playing Counterstrike i found myself in front of two guys who had no problem killing me on their own. They started shooting at me (which meant I was dead), then I sweeped my M4A1 machine gun across them (1/4 seconds top). They both fell down, headshot. Hey, I cannot do that. It only happened once. Wont happen again.


I cannot do that ! I''ve heard/seen Counterstrike impossible situations involving other fellow too. Yet I strongly believe that the game didnt cheat, only I was a bit lucky, and I played better than average.


Now, what if Counterstrike did cheat ? Not too often, perhaps once in 100 frags, not breaking any game rules (machineguns have a big random factor), just enough to give that feel of ANYTHING can happen to the game.

And the cool thing with this approach is that no player will fight to tell the world his best lucky shot was a game cheat, and claims of cheat from the unlucky who died by game cheat are so so common noone will listen to them anyways .



I see now that adding single player very hard spots where the player cannot (simply cannot) go through without the game cheat is wrong. I can see walkthroughs like "... then load the game about ten times until one of your bullets bounces off the walls and through the heads of the 10 ninjas ambushing you then ..."

In multiplayer it''s an even bigger no no. Especially if gaming is to ever be recognized as a "sport" and get huge sponsors and allow geek gamers to become sports stars In single player, i think that cheating isnt a good way to implement this illusion. In fact implementing the illusion directly is bad period. I dont know about u, but i hate it when movies to that impossible thing. it''s one of the lamest things ever. What you should do to make the player feel he''s doing something really awesome and good is do it indirectly, like i listed in the examples above.




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