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RE: Animation time


Hans Ronne wrote:
>
> Exactly. I think the best (or at least less confusing) way would be to
> maintain a linear sequence of events, but make the animations
> easier to
> interpret for the human brain. They could then probably be
> played faster than now.

Ok, having played a few zillion hours of Civ and SMAC, I can safely say
the following about the 4X TBS genre:

1) all games of this genre suffer from unit scaleup problems as the game
progresses.

2) once you're dealing with hordes, watching all the battles is
interminably dull.

The assumption that everything must be watched is fundamentally
incorrect.  It may very well be intelligible; it is also as much fun as
watching grass grow.  I suggest that The Solution is rapid simultaneous
movement display, with a local Replay feature if the player wants to see
how a specific battle actually went.  If you blasted your enemy to
smithereens, and you're marching onwards just as you'd expect, what do
you care about how it happened?  You *know* that your tank horde is
going to crush that stack of obsolete, puny spearmen.

I'm not sure how much work a local Replay feature would be.  I'm sure
it's not a trivial amount of work, since you need to record all the game
states.

A more advanced idea might be a Passive Replay system.  The player does
not need to say that he wants a replay; rather, ghosts of how the battle
went are played in in a continuous but slow loop.  As the player scrolls
around and stops to look somewhere, to contemplate his next move, he
sees the ghosts of what happened before.  This could be modal: if the
player finds it distracting, he could turn it off.


Cheers,                     www.indiegamedesign.com
Brandon Van Every           Seattle, WA

Taking risk where others will not.


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