May Contain Nuts

I’ve been quietly observing my wife as she plays There, taking in what the engine can do, how the interface works, what’s available in-game to do, make, interact with, etc. I’ve been comparing There with Uru and other MMO interfaces, trying to find a balance between giving players tools to interact with the environment and maintaining a level of realism that There’s floating-blue-ring-with-orange-arrow interaction menus belie.

One of the positive things about Uru’s interface is that all interaction with other devices took place in the KI. Obviously, it may have been able to be a bit simpler in terms of the design, but I think that the concept was a solid one. By taking all of the data interaction in the game and moving it to a single object, players no longer have to contend with lots of screens and menus cluttering their screen, leaving the game’s graphics to do more of the “talking”, as it were. I feel the immersion level increases by removing all of the secondary screens from the display and simply showing the player the game world itself.

Obviously, any sort of single-device interface needs to be well-designed and well-planned to enable future expansion of the concept, as well as to enable ease of use for the player. It also needs to have two functional modes: full-screen and small-screen, similar to Uru’s BigKI and MiniKI displays. In Phoenix, I want to develop something more akin to Verizon’s V phone. The small-screen mode would enable the player to see the V’s screen and interact with it on a basic level, bringing up things like contact lists and maps, as well as enabling basic tools like text chat, phone calls, etc without requiring the player to step out of the game world (like the MiniKI, you can still walk around while you’re interacting with it). The full-screen mode is more in-depth and provides the player with the full gamut of menu options, enabling them to do everything the small-screen mode can do and much more.

This effectively covers any digitally-oriented interaction with the environment, such as voice chat, text communication, emails, photos, video, sound, etc. However, that doesn’t solve our interface requirements for physical interaction with the environment itself. As I noted, There indicates the ability to interact with something by hanging a blue circle with an orange arrow inside it over the object in question. Hovering over this icon brings up a menu of things you can do with that object. While this is handy in There, it’s largely because many of the objects you can interact with have more than one function (like hoverboards, which can be ridden, gotten off of, put away, gotten out, retrieved to your position, etc.). I don’t honestly anticipate this level of complexity in Phoenix, though some form of interface standards will need to be developed regardless.

Again looking at Uru, its simplicity of interface was very appropriate, because there wasn’t much in the environments that required the player to do more than throw a switch or sit down on a bench. Obviously one big example to the contrary would be all of the kicking puzzles, which would have benefitted from a more robust physical interaction interface. The trick is creating an interface that enables that level of interaction without breaking the reality of the world, because I don’t know of any time I’ve been walking through a room and little bobbles appeared over the chairs indicating I could sit down in them. Another suggestion I’ve seen is to cause interactive objects to glow when you approach them, but again, this seems rather unrealistic. Ultimately, though, some sort of visible UI needs to be instituted to allow for more robust interactions with the environment using totally unnatural tools such as a keyboard and mouse.

Still, I liked the simplicity of Uru’s cursor-based control scheme, where anything you could interact with was indicated as a hotspot, and clicking it would perform the relevant action. To the greatest extent possible I want to retain this simplicity, but in some instances, it’s not advisable. More on that in a moment.

Something else I want to enable is the ability for players to make their private spaces truly their own by enabling them to decorate and arrange their apartments and offices to their liking. This includes prints to hang on the walls, the fabric and style of the furniture, the style of flooring, the colors of the walls themselves, etc. Obviously, players will be able to choose what they want from a large but ultimately finite library of existing meshes and fabric styles, but by using color overlays on the fabric textures, you can create hundreds of different chairs from 1 texture and mesh. But more than simply being able to pick their furniture and finishings, players should be able to arrange the room how they want it. This is an instance where requiring a more robust physical interaction interface becomes important, as moving furniture around by bumping into it is highly undesirable. One possibility is to create two different kinds of hotspots: basic and advanced. Basic hotspots simply cause the avatar to perform a scripted task attached to that hotspot, like sitting on a bench or picking up an object and placing it in your inventory. Advanced hotspots would, when the right-mouse-button is pressed, bring up a small roll-out menu of options, like move, rotate, pick up, sit down, etc. Left-clicking would perform the “default” action for that object, which may be indicated by a small icon below or to the side of the basic cursor.

For example, in the instance of arranging furniture in your apartment, you have two chairs, a table, and a poster. Left-clicking on the chair causes you to simply sit down in it, and may be indicated by an icon to that effect (basic hotspots may include these icons as well for the sake of being more verbose about what happens when you click something). Generally speaking, though, left-clicking a hotspot will do the most likely action, so sitting in a chair or throwing a switch is sort of understood when clicking on a chair or a switch. Right-clicking on the chair would bring up a roll-out enabling you to move the chair around the room, rotate it to face a different direction, sit down in it, change its settings (which would bring up the PAD), or “pack” it into your inventory, allowing you to take it somewhere else (more on the specifics of this later). Right-clicking on the poster would enable you to move it around the walls, change the image/frame (again, opening your PAD), or pack it away.

I’ve got more to discuss, but this is long enough as it is, so I’ll bring up the rest of it later ;).

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 12th, 2006 at 3:12 am and is filed under Computing, Game Development, Phoenix. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.