Environmental Interactions
A couple posts ago I made a few comments on how players should be able to interact with the environment and objects within it. I’d like to take a moment to expound on that a bit, as I think my comments were somewhat misinterpreted.
First, I want to make it very clear that I think the puzzles in Uru that were driven exclusively by the physics engine (such as the Teledahn slave prison, and more obnoxiously the Gira fish baskets) were very poorly designed from the start. While Teledahn’s puzzle was at least solvable by alternate means if you had enough people in the Age with you, Gira was all or nothing, and the interface made it incredibly difficult to maneuver the fish baskets into place.
Now, with that said, players will still need some way on interacting with the environments, and total removal of the physics engine would be inadvisable, if only because I know how much of a nightmare Cyan had with realMYST (which was made before Plasma had a proper physics simulator). I just think that there are other ways of interacting with objects besides kicking them around. To re-use my example of arranging the furniture in your apartment, I at no time had any intention of requiring the player to kick their furniture around the room. In fact, the furniture will probably be locked down and immobile when it’s not being re-arranged, because really, how often do you bump into your recliner and send it scooting across the room?
What I want to do is expand the utilization of hotspots in the game to include more than one possible action. Most hotspots will still only have one action (benches have a sit action, switches have a toggle action, doors have an open/close action, etc.), and it should be pretty clear simply from what you’re clicking on what the game will do once you click it (you don’t expect to open a bench by clicking on it, you expect to sit, and you will). Some objects, however, will have more than one possible action. When this is the case, the cursor will change to a hotspot icon that is slightly different from the standard hotspot icon. Right-clicking on this object will roll out a string of icons + text indicating what you can do to that object.
In the case of moving your chair, you would walk up to it and right-click it. You would be presented with a small menu with “sit”, “move”, “rotate”, “settings”, “pick up”, and “store” options. Sit, being the default action, will also be performed when left-clicking on the chair, and your avatar will sit down in it. Move and rotate will display control overlays for the item you want to move. Since I don’t have a handy image of a chair that I can use, I’ll use a Quab from Ahnonay to illustrate my point. Moving the Quab will display a set of arrows around the object with a control grip in the center. You can use the control grip to move the object in all any direction (2-dimensionally), or you can use the arrows to move the object along that axis only. Rotating the Quab will display a ring around the object, which you can grab with your cursor and drag to rotate the object. Please note that these are crappy Photoshop attempts at simulating 3D widgets with some clever drop-shadows and bevels, so the final widgets will look and overlay a LOT better… this is just a quick bash to illustrate what I’m talking about.
These widgets will also only be visible to you, and only while you are involved in moving/rotating the object. It’s one of the sacrifices of realism for the sake of playability that I’m willing to make, because I recognize that there needs to be a more controlled way of moving things around than simply slamming your avatar into them and hoping they go where you want (not that that can’t be fun at times… just not when you’re trying to accomplish something). I think enabling the player to control their possessions this way in the engine itself ultimately makes the interactions more realistic, and it also enables us to allow players to move/rotate things outside of just specific areas where they would have access to a floor plan.
Also on the subject of hotspots… this is not a puzzle-oriented game, so the objective is not to find all the hotspots and click on them. A hotspot is simply something that indicates that you can interact with a certain object, and usually it will be clear from the object’s design that you can interact with it anyway, so the hotspot isn’t the sole way of knowing you can do something. It’s just there to confirm that you can. I just prefer that hotspots not be indicated visually by large floating icons whenever you get anywhere near something/someone like they are in There. It’s distracting, and I simply do not like that form of interface. Many of the hotspots in the game won’t even be necessary to getting “through” the game (if you can actually get “through” an MMO)… they’ll just be placed on park benches and whatnot to allow you to sit down on them or do whatever other action may be associated with the object in question. Like I said, though, if something is important and players need to know they can interact with it, there will be indications to that effect beyond the cursor changing when you mouse over it.
Also, one final note before I wrap this out for the moment. There will be instances in the game where players will need to interact with computer systems and other technology that cannot be accessed with the PAD. The most notable example that comes to mind besides piloting a spaceship (which is far to complex to use as a simple example here) is interacting with an elevator in a building. In order to cut down on the number of places in the city that we have to build, elevators will behave more like turbolifts than traditional cable-car-in-shaft elevators. They will be capable of transporting the player straight to the door of whatever location they’ve selected. However, for security, the elevators will only allow the player to select locations to which he/she is authorized to go. The authorization is done “wirelessly” through the PAD… just walk into the elevator and touch the elevator’s control screen and the authorization is already done for you. The elevator control screen will then display a customized list of locations in the building based on where you can go. The screen itself will have a similar style and interface to that of the PAD, and you need but to click on a location with your cursor and the car whisks you off to it (yes, I know, this sounds a lot like the Nexus… it’s not intentional, I swear… it was actually an idea I developed from one of Pat’s suggestions, and he’s never played Uru, so nyah). Other devices such as game tables and some more specific data terminals will also not be PAD compatible (and this will be indicated as such), and need to be interacted with from within their own control scheme. However, the objective of the technology interface is to make it as unified as possible, and direct as much activity as I can through the PAD interface in an effort to provide a consistent UI which people know will always be accessible to them. Even when the PAD itself cannot be used for the interface, it is usually in charge of “authenticating” the player when they interact with another device. Obviously this is an illusion, since the player’s data vault is what ultimately says where they can go and what they can do, not the PAD on their hip, but it’s nice to have an IC explanation for these things :).
January 16th, 2006 at 1:27 am
Might I humbly suggest going over to a friends house and playing through the the first level of Half-Life 2 to see how Valve does it? They have a fairly nice and straightforward method that allows you to simply pick up items and drop whem where you need them. Perhaps not the best system since controlling rotation is nearly impossible. Actually, the method you suggest is somewhat similar to the method implemented in the Half-Life 2 mod titled “Garry’s Mod” where you can manipulate the object in 3-dimensional space using your mouse to control positioning relative to your view, your mouse wheel to control distance from you, and the key “e” to freeze the object and control its rotation with mouse movements.
Still, the idea you suggest is very good, reminds me a lot of… something I can’t remember at the moment. But I’ve seen something like this before, I’m just having difficulty remembering where. I think it was a map/mission editor for something that employed a similar system.
Your system is much better than SWG’s I’ll tell you that, moving furniture in your house required a lot of commands. You would have to select the object and type something like /move . And to rotate something you would have to type /rotate Rearranging your house really got to be a chore.