Friday 2010-08-27 Dev. update and Discussions

[Dozer_EAF19]

As far as I'm concerned, the only use for any blood/gore effect is to give the feedback 'is that guy dead or not?'. This is handled nicely by the character animations though, so there's no need for actually drawing blood on canopies etc.

In Il-2, you can tell when you've hit the pilot, because instantly all the target aircraft's controls are locked in the central position. Maybe a jerky movement of the controls, followed by them moving to a random position, would be more realistic (by which I mean, less immersion-breaking, and therefore making the game more enjoyable to play, by not giving the player the message 'Hey! You're playing a computer game!' which little things like, for example, the controls locking in neutral in Il-2, gives.)

[Blackdog_kt]

I more or less agree with Dozer. I don't mind gore that much but i don't consider it necessary either, so in that sense i'd like to see the development time spent on something that has a more universal appeal on the potential buyers of this sim.

What would be nice to have though is some kind of feedback to let you know when you kill those little pixelated people. Simply having a randomized effect from a list of possible outcomes would be good enough.

Sometimes when flying straight and getting bounced the virtual pilot would remain in the upright position and the controls relatively centered. So, after a while the plane would roll to the side due to the torque effects being uncorrected by the dead pilot, Also, the loss of thrust from the damage and drag from the torn metal of the airplane would give a small amount of altitude loss...as this goes on, we'd get the kind of thing we see in movies with a crippled plane slowly making its way toward the ground in spirals.

Some other times, upon the game registering the pilot as killed it could force a random control input. In these cases the controls would be violently moved to a random direction, with the enemy aircraft jerking violently before losing control.

In other cases, the pilot would simply slump over and slowly nose over towards the ground and so on, you get the idea.

This would be nice visually, especially for people who like making ingame videos, lend some extra variety to the way kills are depicted, provide some kind of feedback to let the attacking player know that he scored a pilot kill and can stop shooting (or, in the case of non-violent jerking of the stick by the "dead" pilot, not provide enough of a feedback...games that keep you guessing are games that don't bore you easily ) and it wouldn't even require the use of gore that would be detrimental to the game's marketing.

If gunner's could be randomly made to just silence their guns or jerk them violently to a random direction as mentioned before, that would round out the package for me. If we really wanted to nit pick, we could have the outcome of pilot kills dependant on plane attitude...a pilot killed during a dive will have more probability of slumping forward on the stick, pressing it down even more, than pulling it back.

Come to think of it, only FPS games show extensive gore and that's because they are usually taking place in an imaginary setting. Sure, there's blood in the ArmA series as well but not the amount of blood you see in games like left 4 dead or metro 2033. The reason is simple, some people get upset when seeing excessive blood effects in what they perceive as the transfer of a real-life scenario to their screens, but they are not affected the same when watching a thousand zombies get burned by a flamethrower, because zombies are not real. It's just human nature, most people have a built-in mechanism to show aversion to and empathize with harm done on whatever looks to us like a living person or animal, while we don't empathize with what can be clearly distinguished to be fake. That's why a game about killing monsters has no trouble selling copies even with over the top gore effects, but games with settings much closer to reality would face a problem if they used similar effects.

In any case, i think that some kind of death animation (that animation doesn't even have to involve the pilot, just the way he loses control of his aircraft) would be nice to have, not because i want to see blood and guts but because i want to know when the other aircraft is out of the fight.

[Splitter]

Originally Posted by Blackdog_kt

I more or less agree with Dozer. I don't mind gore that much but i don't consider it necessary either, so in that sense i'd like to see the development time spent on something that has a more universal appeal on the potential buyers of this sim.

What would be nice to have though is some kind of feedback to let you know when you kill those little pixelated people. Simply having a randomized effect from a list of possible outcomes would be good enough.

Sometimes when flying straight and getting bounced the virtual pilot would remain in the upright position and the controls relatively centered. So, after a while the plane would roll to the side due to the torque effects being uncorrected by the dead pilot, Also, the loss of thrust from the damage and drag from the torn metal of the airplane would give a small amount of altitude loss...as this goes on, we'd get the kind of thing we see in movies with a crippled plane slowly making its way toward the ground in spirals.

Some other times, upon the game registering the pilot as killed it could force a random control input. In these cases the controls would be violently moved to a random direction, with the enemy aircraft jerking violently before losing control.

In other cases, the pilot would simply slump over and slowly nose over towards the ground and so on, you get the idea.

This would be nice visually, especially for people who like making ingame videos, lend some extra variety to the way kills are depicted, provide some kind of feedback to let the attacking player know that he scored a pilot kill and can stop shooting (or, in the case of non-violent jerking of the stick by the "dead" pilot, not provide enough of a feedback...games that keep you guessing are games that don't bore you easily ) and it wouldn't even require the use of gore that would be detrimental to the game's marketing.

If gunner's could be randomly made to just silence their guns or jerk them violently to a random direction as mentioned before, that would round out the package for me. If we really wanted to nit pick, we could have the outcome of pilot kills dependant on plane attitude...a pilot killed during a dive will have more probability of slumping forward on the stick, pressing it down even more, than pulling it back.

Come to think of it, only FPS games show extensive gore and that's because they are usually taking place in an imaginary setting. Sure, there's blood in the ArmA series as well but not the amount of blood you see in games like left 4 dead or metro 2033. The reason is simple, some people get upset when seeing excessive blood effects in what they perceive as the transfer of a real-life scenario to their screens, but they are not affected the same when watching a thousand zombies get burned by a flamethrower, because zombies are not real. It's just human nature, most people have a built-in mechanism to show aversion to and empathize with harm done on whatever looks to us like a living person or animal, while we don't empathize with what can be clearly distinguished to be fake. That's why a game about killing monsters has no trouble selling copies even with over the top gore effects, but games with settings much closer to reality would face a problem if they used similar effects.

In any case, i think that some kind of death animation (that animation doesn't even have to involve the pilot, just the way he loses control of his aircraft) would be nice to have, not because i want to see blood and guts but because i want to know when the other aircraft is out of the fight.

I totally agree. I don't mind gore at all, but I really feel no need to see it in a game like this. If the devs included it (and I am fairly sure they won't) they would also have to put in a "no gore" switch.

Plus, "gore" in some other games is a real FPS eater. It can take a fair amount of rendering power to animate the little bits.

Like you, I really just want to know that I got the gunner or pilot. I don't have to see bits of him flying out of the aircraft. It wouldn't bother me, just don't need it.

Of course, I feel a little pang of sympathy every time I score one of the "insta kills" where the aircraft just blows up and you know no chute is going to pop out. Every time it happens, I think back to some pilot interviews I have seen where they get a bit emotional talking about such times in their flying careers. I'm sure those instances brought the reality to them that they weren't just shooting at planes.

Splitter

[Madfish]

To be honest, many newcomers to flight sims get "owned" badly by experienced pilots or well-equipped pilots. Instead of worrying about a little gore and the mental health of the people who see it from 200 meters distance I believe the mental effect of newbies getting owned constantly is much worse.
Also I doubt there would be many flight sim veterans who'd get mad about blood effects.

I do agree on the added development effort though and that there would be better things to invest time on. For example my thread about new game modes!