Elderscrolls with motion sensing controls

Post » Sun Aug 22, 2010 11:51 am

I'm in the camp of thinking this is potentially a good idea. Obviously not with the need to actually take a step to climb each of 7,000 steps and other counterproductive ideas, but with a carefully thought out mapping of movements to actions.

The implementation exists today for Oblivion and other games through software created by USC. It's called FAAST and can be thought of as mapping movements to keystrokes and mouse actions.

Google "oblivion FAAST kinect" and take a look.

It's a work in progress, it's not perfect, but I can see myself trying this on Skyrim.


See, here's my problem with responses like this: The most common argument in favor of cheap gimmicks like Kinect and Move is some version of "how uber-immersive" and/or "realistic" it would be to act out whatever you're doing. Fair enough. But then someone like me points out what a screaming pain some things (like walking up the 7,000 steps, or turning away from the display device to look at something attacking you from behind) would be, and suddenly it's "Well, we could push and hold a button to walk" and so on- except doesn't that destroy all the overhyped "immershun" of the gimmick's big draw, which is acting it out?

It's sort of a "pick one side of the argument and stay on it" situation. The gimmick is allegedly great and immersive because you "act as if your character naturally would" but only for the stuff that's convenient and fun, then go back into controller mode for other things- which it seems by any rational measure would break any immersion gained by doing "air swordfight." :shrug:
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Chris Guerin
 
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Post » Sun Aug 22, 2010 9:43 am

I just feel that any amount of money that it would take to make this possible would be totally reimbursed by the satisfaction people would get when they are able to see an arrow being shot up at them and naturally move their shield in front it to stop it.


Yes, spend a bunch of money on something only a small part of your consumers can/will use...sounds like an irresponsible business practice.

On a programming level all it would really take is mapping actions to buttons. A complex task to decipher the actions themselves, for sure, but with modular programming strategies it can be done alongside everything else anyway. I can't speak much for the memory requirements, while kinect does do a lot of the important processing itself it still leaves the interpretation up to the developer, and there are a lot of potential actions you can make.


I don't quite agree. Hitting a button to swing your sword will basically do one animation. The way the OP described it (and the way it would need to be done to make it anything more than a gimmick) was a direct mapping of your wire-frame skeleton to the character. You see, if you do one motion with your arm you'd need to know the context of that motion...attacking, sword or no sword, just stretching? The animations wouldn't really be fixed and it'd really have to be more dynamic...basically a live MoCap session every time you play the game...which is then interpreted and applied on the fly.

If it was simply mapping general motions to buttons (eg swing arm to attack) the experience would be quite different from what the OP described. It would be more like Legend of Zelda: twilight princess, where you could swing the wii mote any way you wanted, as fast or slow as you wanted, it basically didn't the same thing.

Well, until they come up with mental control.

Take a few User Interface classes. Learn that not all controls are suited to all tasks. Sure, waving the Wiimote around is great for things like bowling & golf. But for a bunch of other games, using the Wiimote is just pandering to the gimmick.

Motion controls are good for some tasks. Trying to fit motion controls to all tasks is bad design. Hopefully, in a couple years, the gimmick will just be another way to do things, and game designers will be free to only use motion control for the things that really need it.


(Would you really want to play, for example, Civilization by waving your hands at the screen? Instead of a mouse & keyboard? Or how about PvP'ing in World of Warcraft - people have upwards of 50+ keybinds for that. Kind of hard to do that by waving a stick with a few buttons around.)


I agree. I think the motion controls will start to be implemented in more games, but not as the main controls. They would be something like extra controls... need just one more button for your control scheme? Instead of squeezing it on the remote in some weird button combo, make it a motion. but motion controls would need to become much more widespread and standardised.

There are too many differences in the abilities between wii, ps3, and 360 motion controls to make developing for a cross platform game a good idea. Not even mentioning the fact that there really isnt a motion control option for pc yet.
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Lynne Hinton
 
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Post » Sun Aug 22, 2010 12:45 pm

As I said in a similar post,

Until they have advanced that kind of gaming technology to the point where I'm literally walking into a holodeck to play TES XXVII, I'm good with my controller. :hehe:
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Marnesia Steele
 
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Post » Sun Aug 22, 2010 12:06 pm

If it was on the Move and motion was strictly for combat, I think itd be pretty fun. But absolutely not on the Kinect or Wii.

Edit: I dont really think any of the current motion controls are any good though, if the Move had joysticks on them(Im pretty sure they dont, but I dont have a PS3) then maybe. Just split a normal controller in half and add the tracking ball somewhere and youre good.
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Sophie Morrell
 
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Post » Sun Aug 22, 2010 7:17 am

Probably because "technology like this" is a gimmick. Even if they could get Kinect for example, to work with an ES title, nobody would want to stand for 6+ hours doing so. Kinect could be free and I wouldn't want one.
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Leanne Molloy
 
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