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FFS having some hands on a wheel in a game isn't rocket science. Valve really should have done this - how did that slip through QA?
Actually, maybe it was one of the things that was making testers barf and giving them fits and stuff when testing the vehicles... I totally agree, the lack of hands really ruined HL2. Had valve put hands on the wheel of the buggy, and when picking up physics objects, I would have given HL2 9.7 out of 10. As it stands, I'd give it about 7.3. Let's hope valve releases a hands patch in the near future.
Or maybe we'll have to wait until HL3 :( It's pretty easy to see why they didn't include hands:
On the buggy - you can look around about 90 degrees to either side of the front of the buggy, so if you added hands you'd also have to add arms, and probably shoulders, so at what point do you stop rendering things? The arms would also obscure the view quite a bit, which would be irritating given the lack of control you have over your viewpoint in an FPS compared to real life. Plus, even assuming you could work all of this, the extra polys/texture memory for a high resolution pair of arms would probably has been the first thing to get cut again when you start looking for optimisations. Holding objects - Basically thiswould be really, really hard to do. If you think of how many different ways you use your hands to hold different objects, that should give you some idea of why. Even if you could program some very flexable code that would make the hands grasp things intelligently, adapt to different sizes of object correctly, and not look stupid 90% of the time, it would very likely be a very large hog on resources. Remember that the objects still interact with the world while you carry them, so when they start colliding with things you'd have to keep updating the hands, and that's when it'd get CPU intensive. As an aside, I personally don't think valve originally intended you to be able to pick up objects with your hands, as the gravity gun was a neat way around the problem of hand grasping animations. But then seeing how well people responded to the interaction with physics in the game meant they decided to add the current method to allow for physics stuff in the early parts of the game. I could be (more) wrong about this bit, but it always seemed to me like a 'gameplay first' decision - as much gameplay as you can get out of stacking crates... Hands are missing for immersion's sake - your hands are on the keyboard and mouse (or if you're czg at a barney bit, on your schlong). Seeing someone else's hands on the steering wheel or crates you pick up and etc is a cue that you're controlling someone else, not being them.
This post brought to you by italics. if they put hands on every object you could pick up, that object would have to be close enough to reach with your arm, which means it would totally obscure your view, and the entire object would not even be on the screen. Since the player needs to be able to walk around while holding stuff, and needs to be able to position the object correctly before letting go of it, it's better for the objects to float at an unrealistic distance for the player, rather than an arm's length away.
Gameplay. You need hands to hold someone you care for
You need hands to show that you're sincere When you feel nobody wants to know you You need hands to brush away your tear When you hold a brand new baby You need tender hands to guide them on their way You need hands to thank the Lord for living And for giving us this day Singalongamax, 1865 slime: but objects already obscure the view
its not just the lack of hands - its more the way the object is floating in the air about half a meter before your view I cant recall any situation where you had to place the object with precision ( didnt play till the very end yet tho) And you could throw anyway. Maybe its really more a problem of the view and the ease of manipulation, rather than the technical one. Many 3d view games have animations of player interacting with the world, including more than the grabbing and throwing of the objects. And the argument about polycount and texture mem is just laughable, sry preach. Btw you get to see the hands of HL protagonist, just as u put on the suit. Lun: yeah sure, remove the hands holding guns and grenades too plz! Valve should have made it a part of the plot - freeman had both hands cut off, but gained the ability to manipulate objects at a distance, just using his will (BS yes) Anyway it�s not that much of a problem if you dont focus on it. There are other shite moments, like the areas where you _could_ get, just piling few nearby crates, yet you cant - thanks to the clipping everywhere except the place where you are supposed to climb. And the general lack of interactivity, that really ruined immersion so masterfully created by the environment designers and artists Yeah, I love how it looks, dont like how it plays Many 3d view games have animations of player interacting with the world, including more than the grabbing and throwing of the objects.
I can think of many FPS titles, No One Live Forever (where's my lip stick case!), Blood, MOH, that had some interesting hand motion actions other than just holding a weapon. If it really destroyed the emersion to have the player represented outside of the body then Max Payne for one would have never worked. Seeing your hands is about as useful as seeing your feet. And what fps game can you see your feet in? Gore. And Gore sucked money ass. I rest my case.
i forgot...
What if you're holding a gun and you want to pick up a crate that needs two hands to pick up? And what if you're holding a two-handled gun and want to pick up anything? Do you guys want to play a game or a simulation? a game with physics should support a basic grabbing action ( d3 had this crane... )
also, i loved to see hands (and tits with health bar) in that jurassic park game. just that the handling sucked. im pretty sure the hl team could do better than that. :) You have to buy food or else you'll starve to death! So, Valve should add that too.
that was Ultima III right? Those games take me back. Good God, some of those were difficult. Scenerios like having to use a high level teleport spell to move through a series of enclosed caverns, and then resting up after every jaunt. If developers made games that difficult these days all you would hear is bitch, bitch, moan, moan from the candyass critical community (rocking on my porch, shaking my cane).
of Quake level reviews excepted from the above, for what I have in mind http://www.bookofhook.com/Article/GameDevelopment/WhatsWrongwithGameJournal.html
and the ladies of Game Player Magazine who can't be bothered to put out their Virginia Slims while using a keyboard. That title has nothing to do with anything but I thought it sounded cool.
In the last few months I've read several articles about why game journalism sucks. There are plenty of people out there already doing something about it. Nintendorks, Game Girl Advance, and Grand Text Auto are a few of the cooler indy game sites out there. This is not a resurecting thread, it's just my humble opinion about HL2 I lately played (compared to you guys) these last days...
I finally found the time to play HL2, and what a good surprise ! Like many of you said previously: this game is really better than Doom3. Doom3 is very very (very Thanks to Valve and Siera for this fun moment... I'm now waiting for HL3 ! Okay, so it's very, very obvious, but it's also very, very cool. Respect to him and respect to Valve for making such things possible.
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