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> Senses and spatial awareness, Why radar may not be so evil after all
Exudos
post May 8 2007, 02:41 PM
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QUOTE(Alexander @ May 8 2007, 01:32 PM) *

...How are you going to make sense of smell a skill?

Your race either has a good sense of smell or it doesn't, and if you want to shut it of you'll have to hold your nose.

A skill just wouldn't make sense and neither would an on and off switch. Just as we humans can't choose to just grow a more keen nose or better hearing.


Stop being so ignorant please >.<

I'm saying the skill is specialized for trackers, whom have trained their noses to recognize different scents...
I'm saying that your character movement slows, you hunch over, and you really TRY to find scents. When you're running around and not trying to smell everything, you won't find nearly as many scents.

Please read my above posts before shooting my ideas down.
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Alexander
post May 8 2007, 02:45 PM
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If I misinterperetd your post I can't shoot it down for my own post would confuse people and have no ground to stand on.

Anyway your post, to me, just made it sound as if you wanted to make scent a skill that could be learned but the way you put it now it makes more sense.
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glibdud
post May 8 2007, 06:11 PM
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QUOTE(Alexander @ May 8 2007, 04:45 PM) *

If I misinterperetd your post I can't shoot it down for my own post would confuse people and have no ground to stand on.

Anyway your post, to me, just made it sound as if you wanted to make scent a skill that could be learned but the way you put it now it makes more sense.


I think making it a skill you can learn would be a-ok. No, you can't improve the actual acuity of your nose, but you can be trained to recognize, differentiate, and locate scents more quickly and accurately. Limits will probably be imposed based on race, but characters should be able to improve their use of the sense, at least to a point.
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Exudos
post May 8 2007, 06:40 PM
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QUOTE(glibdud @ May 8 2007, 05:11 PM) *

I think making it a skill you can learn would be a-ok. No, you can't improve the actual acuity of your nose, but you can be trained to recognize, differentiate, and locate scents more quickly and accurately. Limits will probably be imposed based on race, but characters should be able to improve their use of the sense, at least to a point.


I agree. I think of the skill as being a sort of meditative state in which you visualize scents.
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MNZ
post May 9 2007, 05:34 AM
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A couple of points: If two diffrent smells are intense enough, humans CAN distinguish between them, maybe not as good as dogs but that's where race advantages pop in. Your nose CAN be trained, I'm pretty sure I can't follow a smell like an experienced hunter.

Implementing diffrent colors for diffrent smells is not exactly a peice of cake and not very realistic anyways. Trying to smell a scent out of a bunch of others and determining its general direction is probably a more realistic approach, but sure enough isn't very easy and you don't usually know from which direction it comes from before you actually turn around and sniff in every possible direction. It could be so you could determine what scent(s) is/are around the spot you are on and how strong it is, then perhaps move to another spot and re-evaluate. I think (only think) that that's what most of us humans do, try and err until we find the right direction. Now instead of colors, you could simply have names. So you are standing somewhere, a list of names of what you smell could pop up upon pressing a button. Why? because actually using diffrent colors can be a hell of a problem not just because implementing it is difficult, but because colors are limited (you might say group diffrent things into one color... yeah maybe, but remember to remember every color and what it stands for or check it up from that help menu. Oh and the programmers have to do all that extra work of assigning the colors, grouping creatures, etc but using a list you just use the names of creatures). A list like that IMHO is the closest to reality. After all if you smell a flower and a skunk you can very well be sure that you smell -- (a ) a flower and (b ) a skunk -- <--- hey wait... that's a list! But before you can pick an odour out of a couple of'em and say "that's a dead zombie" you should have met (and hence smelled) a dead zombie before. So a list of all the smells you know has to be maintained by the server. Also each scent should have a certain "stickiness" value. Just because a dragon passed by last week doesn't mean it smells like dragon all over the place. But different scents will have different stickiness. And Alexander, I don't think Exudos meant to totally shut off smell when you are not interested in smelling anything. It's more like your smell ability becomes a bit worse when you are not concentrating, also BTW You can decrease your smell/taste or even hearing (heck even sight! I can walk down a street thinking of some peice of code and never know what the street looked like.. maybe just me) by not concentrating at it. Don't remember where I read this but try watching TV and eating and then change our concentration from the TV to your mouth and the chewing, (ie, rather than doing it passively do it actively. Like breathing which you do all the time without thinking but you can control it and do it actively) at that point you should notice a stronger taste in your mouth.

Now for hearing, although the idea of arrows might not be very good for several limiting reasons, it might be the best because the choices are few as sound is temporary unlike smell which stays for sometime. But then again, you could probably just leave hearing to the radar. All ears human-like and above should be able to determine the direction of a sound that is sufficiently close or high. But the 'dots' on the radar for things that are only heard should be bigger of course.

This post has been edited by MNZ: May 9 2007, 05:35 AM
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glibdud
post May 9 2007, 07:49 AM
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After further pondering, here's my suggestion for implementing the sense of smell.

There are three modes of use for scent:

Passive mode (optional; I'm not married to this idea, but it could be useful):
The player can choose one scent (or maybe a couple) to search for passively. This has no effect on anything else the character does... it simply notifies the player when the scent is detected. This could be used, for example, to find a rare and useful herb while out hunting.

Discovery mode:
The character stands still and takes in the local scents. Any strong scents will be recognized almost immediately and be represented as an icon wafting around near the character (I think pictures are more interesting than a list). The longer the character stands still, the more subtle smells will pop up and join the stronger ones (probably with smaller icons to denote the strength difference). At this point, nothing is known about the location of the scents. The player can click on a scent's icon to enter tracking mode.

Tracking mode:
When a character has zoned in on a scent, he can detect the general direction (with some fuzziness and error) from which it emanates. If he's close enough, he might even be able to determine a specific area. The representation of the direction (perhaps a hazy cone) will remain on-screen along with the tracked object's icon, which the player can click on after traveling a bit from the original location to take another reading.

Ok, it's true that scent is not directional. The real way to track via scent would be to sniff from several locations and determine a direction based on the relative strengths at those locations... but this would get reeeeal tedious. So I think that's a good place to use a little fantasy license.

The reason I separated discovery from tracking is that if a character with a sensitive nose was to be shown a direction for every item he could detect, it would get way busy on the interface. He should only need to track one thing at a time anyway.

This post has been edited by glibdud: May 9 2007, 07:50 AM
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Alexander
post May 9 2007, 10:44 AM
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Once again I have to disagree, at least directly with glibdud's passive searching... Passive searching for something specific is actually actively doing something! Passive activity means taking your mind of it, like breathing. You just can't search for something and take your mind off your searching at the same time, its impossible.

I also disagree with having both a discovery and tracking mode, this is shut simply be the tracking mode which lowers your base speed, or if you don't want your speed to be lowered reduces your effective sense of smell. As I said you either actively use your sense or you don't, no need to have two modes that do the same thing. The only differance between actively tracking and standing still to sniff is your movement, which depends on you using your arrow keys or not and not the mode your in.

However if you use the smell = colour interface you don’t have to have any kind of mode at all since lowering your speed will allow you to observe the colours longer before they past beyond range. Running will make it a blur and almost impossible to distinguish between the colours.

MNZ, unless a creature has exceptional hearing (blindsense for example) I see no use for a radar, arrows work well enough because they are vague enough so people are still guessing. It doesn't really add up having a big dot appear on a radar when they know its still going to be in the middle of the dot, bigger is even easier to see so small dots would make more sense but then they would even know the exact location if they notice the dot, which is the whole point of pointing something out, you want it to be noticed but not give away the exact location. And before you state that the dot could be big and placed over the exact location (so that the centre of the dot doesn't represent the exact location of the source) then it would/could misplace the entire direction and that’s not what you want.

Nope, I'm all for my arrow idea. Works a lot better.

Now about the colours.

Smells can be placed in a few categories. Smells that are nice and sweet, smells that you just notice but have nothing good or bad about it, and finally the bad smells that turn your storage inside out. These three categories can be linked to the three primary colours (red, green and blue.) By giving each smell a colour code depending to which categories it belongs to or reaches out too you give the player a hunch to what it could be while clearly stating if its a good or bad smell. The more foul a smell the more true red coloured it could be while a less foul smell becomes yellow. Green is for neutral smells and blue for nice smells.

The strength of the smell can be indicated by lighter or darker variations of the colour of that specific smell. A very light colour indicates that the smell is very faint while dark colours are heavily present in the area. A scent colour isn’t a big blot or vile on your screen, it shut be shown as a gas that thickens and thins and trails as far as your smell range goes allowing other coloured gases to join in one place. At such intersections you’ll have to move around a bit and try to find your trail again if it became misplaced.

Your skill in smell might allow you to label a particular colour and the higher your skill the more labels you can add so when such a labelled smell comes around you get a notification that it’s the same smell you encountered before. The higher your skill also allows for better or easer recognition of the labels smells.

Using colour packs a lot of information that would otherwise take a lot of text or numbers or icons to display (*sigh* although I could come up with stuff that would compact the numbers and icons as well...) ARG!! Colour I say! Colour!! It's flashy, and flashy is good in games, people like it over boring statistics. Wow that might be my best argument yet.
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echorev
post May 9 2007, 01:30 PM
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I agree with MNZ in that I don't think there should streams of colors rolling across the player's screen, but rather a constantly updated list of smells that the player may or may not select to gain more info on it.

I'm not sure about the main difference between the player and character's ability to hear. If a dragon roars behind you, and you have speakers, you'll definitely hear that. Why do you need an arrow to point behind you to show that your character hears it too ? Aren't you your character ?

Along with sight, sound is something the player and the character can both experience, so I don't really see a pressing need to implement something that will separate the player and character on this.


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glibdud
post May 9 2007, 01:41 PM
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QUOTE(echorev @ May 9 2007, 03:30 PM) *

I'm not sure about the main difference between the player and character's ability to hear. If a dragon roars behind you, and you have speakers, you'll definitely hear that. Why do you need an arrow to point behind you to show that your character hears it too ? Aren't you your character ?


With stereo sound, if you hear a dragon roar but can't see him, you have no way to tell if he's in front or behind you, or have much of a guess of how far. The best you'll be able to do is "He's sort of on my left somewhere". Surround sound might work, but I don't think we can assume our players have that.

In addition, my intent in bringing this up is for more subtle sounds, like detecting someone trying to sneak up behind you. You could just make a sound and let the player figure it out for himself, but most games have a variety of sliders that let you independently adjust different sound effects, like ambient sounds, background music, and sound effects. If you try to play subtle sounds for the player to notice, his sound settings may result in it being totally masked by the ambience or music.
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glibdud
post May 9 2007, 02:04 PM
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QUOTE(Alexander @ May 9 2007, 12:44 PM) *

Once again I have to disagree, at least directly with glibdud's passive searching... Passive searching for something specific is actually actively doing something! Passive activity means taking your mind of it, like breathing. You just can't search for something and take your mind off your searching at the same time, its impossible.

It's not meant to be for actively searching for something. It's for when you want a gentle reminder when you're in the vicinity of something aromatic that you might be interested in. Your nose doesn't just shut off when you're not thinking about smelling something. If I needed a particular plant as a magical reagent and the scent of it wafted past my nose while I wasn't even thinking about it, there's a good chance it would jog my memory.

But like I said... I'm not married to that one. Its uses would probably be relatively few, and possibly not worth the development effort.

QUOTE(Alexander @ May 9 2007, 12:44 PM) *

I also disagree with having both a discovery and tracking mode, this is shut simply be the tracking mode which lowers your base speed, or if you don't want your speed to be lowered reduces your effective sense of smell. As I said you either actively use your sense or you don't, no need to have two modes that do the same thing. The only differance between actively tracking and standing still to sniff is your movement, which depends on you using your arrow keys or not and not the mode your in.

Dividing the active mode up into discovery and tracking is purely for ease of use. For a character with a sensitive nose, displaying directionality for all the scents he detects at once would make for a very busy and difficult-to-sort-out interface, no matter how you do it.

As for the colors... the way you describe it it's just a linear scale, from amazingly pleasant to abusively sickening. I really don't think there are enough distinguishable shades of blue to cover the number of possible "nice" smells you can get from standing in a field of wildflowers. It's a good thought, but smell has more dimensions than that.
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Honis
post May 9 2007, 02:20 PM
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I like the ideas coming out for smell.

Hearing I would like because not everybody who plays the game will have more than 2 speakers. This is why I like the radar idea for sound. Since I'm done with finals and have the time, I'll draw it.

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Its not the first situation, or even the last two that I would worry about in game. its the bunny or thief creeping up on me that I would worry about. My personal hearing would never be able to pick it out at normal volume levels (I could turn it up, but risk blowing my speakers if I forget and start casting a spell). If my character is well endowed in the ear department, I would want the spot for the bunny to be larger and the radar to cover a greater range. Of course, with my super hearing, it would be easier to flash into blindness maybe to the point of hurting me. Would introduce equipment like ear plugs to use while in the bustle of the city.

The same blindness can be used to overwhelm people with sensitive smells. Dogs even need to cover there nose sometimes. Introducing items like nose plugs for the poorer part of the city. I don't know how smell could be implemented

The Blindness would also keep the pickpockets to the city where senses are more easily overwhelmed.


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MNZ
post May 9 2007, 02:26 PM
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Well, you can't disagree with glibdud's passive searching when you have later proposed it.

QUOTE
Your skill in smell might allow you to label a particular colour and the higher your skill the more labels you can add so when such a labelled smell comes around you get a notification that it’s the same smell you encountered before. The higher your skill also allows for better or easer recognition of the labels smells.


That's basically what he proposed with the exception that you don't get a notification if you are not interested in one.

Anyways, I still don't like the idea of colors. 'Seeing' scents is just not a good idea. Plus categories of Nice/pungent/discusting/etc just won't do. Everything should have a unique smell and trying to describe it is just over complicating the problem. It would be flashy alright..... But I like glibdud's idea of icons (although it would mean an icon for every possible smell, lots of work) and pressing an icon to track the smell. Personally I feel glibdud's suggestions are very good.

First while running around (ie. passive mode) and you encounter a strong smell it pops up (as icon or text on some corner/panel on the screen). Strong smells shouldn't need sniffing (you ARE breathing right?) . You could click it and follow it using your skill (and I have to agree, sniffing in every direction would get tedious, so just a simple 'sniff' button should do it for you and tell you where you think it's coming from). Then if you are specifically looking for something you could have it selected so you are notified when you smell it (but you might not be able to smell it if you are not concentrating at smelling as the scent might not be strong enough). Then again if you want to you can stand in place and sniff to try to pick out those various sents in the air that might not be obvious to the casual observer.

Now regarding hearing... I don't think arrows are vague in any sense. Plus why extra work for the devs? if the radar will be there why not use it for hearing too. And about those dots, they are quite a problem. But then again if you use arrows, what will they point at?? you want them to point at which sound exactly? there's usually a ton of sounds around (unless you go with yet another list of sounds and pick one out, etc). The radar should do its job well here, and not placing the center of the dots exactly on the sound source but rather having the sound source inside the radius anywhere should be good enough at not pinpointing anything. Like Jerky said on the "Ideas for player races" thread, You have to make concessions and compromises. When you come to think of it, the posters in the ideas section, including myself sometimes, mostly don't consider how something will be implemented (because they might not be the ones who will implement it). You need to put that into consideration really. No need to complicate something when you could simplify it and get similar results.
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Alexander
post May 9 2007, 02:58 PM
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Fine, have it your way, turn it into a carnival for all I care.

*Carries himself off mumbling and sulking to himself*
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Dwilf
post May 9 2007, 05:26 PM
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I'd rather the little radar(i can turn off if i want) then arrows all over the edge of my screen. Option to have either even better if devs hav time unless better idea invented later.

Have a bunch of spot, listen, smell, spidey-sense, etc... checks. Show results on radar.
Active mode sounds good. Bonus to your checks but you gotta move slower or even stand on the spot and peer about with your ear cupped (looking like a muppet) trying ever so hard to spot the goblins your paranioa has you convinced are hiding just behind that bush over there. smile.gif


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glibdud
post May 9 2007, 05:47 PM
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QUOTE(Dwilf @ May 9 2007, 07:26 PM) *

I'd rather the little radar(i can turn off if i want) then arrows all over the edge of my screen. Option to have either even better if devs hav time unless better idea invented later.

Have a bunch of spot, listen, smell, spidey-sense, etc... checks. Show results on radar.
Active mode sounds good. Bonus to your checks but you gotta move slower or even stand on the spot and peer about with your ear cupped (looking like a muppet) trying ever so hard to spot the goblins your paranioa has you convinced are hiding just behind that bush over there. smile.gif


And to enhance the paranoia, some of the sounds you detect would turn out to be squirrels and such. *cackle*
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Exudos
post May 9 2007, 09:48 PM
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Alright guys, I think you are all a little confused as to what i proposed with colors, or what I implied.
I implied that your screen goes black when you use the (sniff) skill, and floating trails of colors appear, mixing around and floating up into the sky, being blown by the wind.. This simulates stopping and sniffing the air with your eyes shut, and a very trained nose.

HOWEVER
Actively I do not think floating colors should be ANYWHERE, that's just plain annoying... I don't know how smells would work when you aren't using the skill. For hearing I have to say the same, i have no real ideas for it as well. [Ideas that have not already been mentioned that is]

OH, maybe you could listen and the world goes black and then you see giant vibrations come at you, painting the scenery around you, this could work as Alex's blind sense... biggrin.gif Dunno. You could maybe see vibrations going through the air, or see visual little explosions of sound going all over the place. It'd be crazy cool, but its really just another silly idea >.<

This post has been edited by Exudos: May 10 2007, 12:47 AM
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MNZ
post May 10 2007, 04:31 AM
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Dwilf I like the idea of the checks. If all these senses will go into the game then you certainly need a way to be notified of things that you only want notification about. Very nice idea. Also it seems this radar will turn into a very complex gadget hehe. And perhaps when you are tracking something (using smell) an arrow representing direction could be on the edges of the radar rather than the screen.
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Jerky
post May 10 2007, 12:34 PM
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Has anyone played the new Zelda game? When you turn into a wolf, you can go into sense-mode, which then will display things you wouldn't normally see, but severely limits your normal vision. When you are folloing a scent, its a cloud trail. Just thought it was interesting since the discussion here has talked about this same thing, almost.

I found if fun to use that feature, in fact you have to to get past certain parts in the game.

Now, how it pertains to the discussion at hand... I don't know. I thought I would throw it out there though. It can be fun.


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glibdud
post May 10 2007, 01:38 PM
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QUOTE(Jerky @ May 10 2007, 02:34 PM) *

Has anyone played the new Zelda game? When you turn into a wolf, you can go into sense-mode, which then will display things you wouldn't normally see, but severely limits your normal vision. When you are folloing a scent, its a cloud trail. Just thought it was interesting since the discussion here has talked about this same thing, almost.

I found if fun to use that feature, in fact you have to to get past certain parts in the game.

Now, how it pertains to the discussion at hand... I don't know. I thought I would throw it out there though. It can be fun.

I like the idea, but I would imagine keeping trail information on all MOBs would hog up a fair amount of server resources. Unless you decided to cheat and just make a fake trail meandering randomly from the character's location to the target.
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greendots
post May 10 2007, 02:17 PM
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I would think that a player would only be tracking one thing at a time.

Do we know if we want tracking in the game? And what value will the tracking skill have? We can use it to find rare mobs who might have a special loot or item component. We could have bounty hunters.
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