If this is for epileptic users who can get seizures from strobing, I disagree. This is a safety feature. It should not be in the video game, where it may-or-may not be reliably implemented and the algorithm to avoid it may differ from game to game. This is something that the OS should implement across the whole system. Like, if the user having a seizure is a risk, then I don’t want to trust that every game developer or movie maker or person embedding an animated GIF on a website is going to have a toggle and that it works. I want my OS telling my video card “give me average brightness frame to frame, and if average brightness is gyrating too much frame to frame, then put a clamp on that now”.
For video game consoles, maybe it should be the TV that implements it, rather than the console.
It should even be possible to stick an intermediate hardware box between the display and the video-outputting device that detects and filters it, if one wants to use existing displays. Like, I get if someone wants to have detection and filtering, but has a large-screen display that they don’t want to replace. If I had photosensitive epilepsy, I would definitely want to be sticking such a box on any large displays that I’m looking at in the dark.
To put it another way: if someone not having a seizure depends on 4chan users not posting animated GIFs with particular characteristics, then the system is already horribly broken.
I agree that it’s a valid insight that a lot of basic input things are not explained and that it’s not obvious to a first time user.
But on the other hand, I think that the vast majority of players have, at this point, learned.
I remember way back when the personal computer was getting going, the first (or maybe second) Macintosh came out with an audio tape that one could play in conjunction with an automated demo showing how to click on things and drag and so forth. What icons and menus were. Today, we just kind of assume that people know that, because they’ve picked them up on the way, so it’s not like individual software packages have a tutorial telling someone what a window is and how to use it.
And I remember being at a library where there was some “computer training for senior citizens” thing going on near me, and some elderly lady was having trouble figuring out double-clicking and the instructor there said “don’t worry, double-clicking is one of the hardest things”. I mentally kind of rolled my eyeballs, but then I thought about that. I mean, I’d been double-clicking for years, and I bet that the first time I started out, I probably dicked it up too.
But I don’t know if the way to do that is to have every game incorporate a tutorial on the console’s hardware doing things like teaching players that the console sticks are clickable. Like, maybe the real answer is that the console should have a short tutorial. Most consoles these days seem to have an intrinsic concept of user accounts. When creating one, maybe run through the hardware tutorial.
Which is why my above suggestion is adaptive to individual computers.
I got exasperated when I ripped out a “fake” progress bar in a commercial product – not a game – that another dev had previously added that I was working on and put in a real one. I don’t agree that this is some insumountable problem.
That could also work with savegames, in that you can have saves, but make the default on startup be to restore where one was in the last game. Many games provide a “continue” option at the top of the main menu, I think reflecting the fact that that’s what a player wants to do 99% of the time.
Two caveats:
If it’s an action game and there’s loading involved, it’d be nice to know when the load is done, since you may immediately have to be reacting to something in-game. I’d rather have it attempt to load the game and then go into a “pause” mode, maybe with some overlay or something indicating the current game state (like to remind you what level or wherever you are).
It’s possible – because we live in an imperfect world with imperfect software – for save games to get into a broken state, and if so, you don’t want to make it impossible to reach the main menu if trying to load the last save game is crashing the thing. Maybe make the game detect that the last load failed, akin to web browsers, and then head to a menu in that case.
A number of PC games – where the hardware’s performance capabilities are going to change from player to player – have a “benchmark” option accessible, usually in the video settings, that does a “fly-through” of some relatively-intensive levels, and then gives FPS statistics (I think usually an average count, though come to think of it, a 95% number would be nice too). Thinking of a recent example, Cyberpunk 2077 does this. The earliest game that I recall that had some similar feature was Quake, with the timedemo command, though that wasn’t accessible outside of the console.
That doesn’t deal with testing controls, but it does deal with performance (and can hit a number of the engine’s features), so it does part of what you want.
My problem with analog sticks in FPSes isn’t fine-grained control – most games have zoom, and auto-aim has done a lot to mitigate lack of acuracy. My problem is coarse-grained control – that is, it takes ages in an FPS to turn around at maximum turn speed, whereas a mouse player can rapidly snap around if they are, say, attacked from the side or behind.
I’ve seen some people talk about hacking together some mechanism to try to deal with this using the Steam Controller and Steam Input – I think that it might have been something like a double-tap-to-rapidly-turn, but my impression is that whatever was going on there was more-elaborate than just the combination of an analog stick and a gyro for fine movement.
character speed control on PC - we had this stuff figured out in 2002, when Splinter Cell came out! Why the hell are we still stuck with terribly slow walk and slightly too fast jogging?
So, this may not be a real problem if people aren’t dead-set on hard realism, but one point that I recall being made is that in general, in-game characters tend to move more-quickly than real world people do. IIRC from a long-ago article, Quake 2 was calculated to have the main character running at about 35 mph. Even an unencumbered Usain Bolt doing a short sprint isn’t gonna be in that neighborhood. That has some significant tactical impacts in a number of games in terms of, say, the ability to close on a ranged attacker or the value of ambushing.
A number of military sims that I’ve seen – a game genre where having realistic speeds often matter a lot – provide “time compression”, where one can speed up the game world to get through periods where nothing interesting is happening. That does require the game to be able to simulate the world at a higher rate than normal, though.
The checkpoint I’ve described has nothing to do with “game checkpoints”, where the game saves. This is going to be a checkpoint in the loading process.
People far more educated than you or I have tried.
Let’s pretend for a moment that you aren’t just making an unfounded assertion. Give me a list of names.
Anti-cheat systems in general tend to be fragile to changes in the game environment.
Honestly, I used to want that, and I’ll believe that game devs could do better than they do today, but honestly, I think that the problem is, end of the day, fundamentally not a technically-solvable one. The only way you’re going to reasonably-reliably do anti-cheat stuff is going to be to have a trusted system, where the player can’t do anything to their system.
I’d say that it’s one of the stronger arguments for consoles in general versus PC gaming. On a console, the playing field is pretty much level. Everyone has the same software running on their system, the same number of frames on their screen. Maybe there might be limited differences to the controller or better latency to a server, but that’s it. It’s hard to modify the system to get that edge. A console is pretty close to the ideal system for competitive multiplayer stuff. On a PC, in a (real-time) competitive multiplayer game, someone is always going to have some level of an edge. Like, the ability to get higher resolution or more frames per second, the ability of games to scale up to use better hardware, is fundamentally something of a pay-to-win baked into the system.
There will always be a place for competitive multiplayer games, but I honestly think that a better route forward for many games is to improve game AI from where it is today and then use computer opponents more heavily. While humans make for a very smart enemy “AI” in a lot of ways, and using them may be a technically-easier problem than doing comparable enemy AI, there are also all kinds of baggage that fundamentally come with competitive multiplayer play:
Limited lifespan for the game. At some point, nobody (or not many) people will be playing the game any more, even if it doesn’t depend on the game publisher to operate online servers. At that point, the game will head into the dustbin of history – it’ll be hard to meet the threshold to get enough people together at any one time to play a game. Multiplayer games are mortal, and single-player games are immortal.
You can’t pause. Or, well, you can, but then that doesn’t scale up to many players and can create its own set of problems. A lot of people need to change an infant’s diaper or get the door or take a call. They can play against computers, but they can’t (reasonably) play against other players.
Cheating.
Griefing.
Sometimes optimal human strategy isn’t…all that much fun to actually play against. Like, I remember playing the original Team Fortress, and that a strategy was to have classes that could set up static defenses (pipe bombs, lasers, turrets, etc) set them up right atop spawn points. That may well be a good strategy in the game, but it’s also not a lot of fun for the other players.
Immersion. Doesn’t matter for all games, but for some it does. I don’t expect humans to role-play, to stay in character, because I know that it’s work and i don’t want to hassle with it myself. But, end of the day, playing against xxPussySlayer69xx is kind of immersion-breaking.
Latency is always going to be an issue. You can mitigate it a bit with prediction and engine improvements or more telecom infrastructure, but the laws of physics still place constraints on the speed of light. There are ways you can minimize it – LAN parties, if you can get enough people. Regional servers, though that guy who lives in Hawaii is always gonna just have a hard time of it. But it’s always going to be there; you’re never going to truly have a level playing field.
The game is intrinsically mandatory-online. If you have a spotty or no connection, the game doesn’t work.
Another issue is the advance of technology. If it isn’t there now, I can imagine a generic AI engine, something like Havok is for physics, becoming widespread. And as that improves, one can get more-and-more compelling AI. Plus, hardware is getting better. But humans are, well, human. Humanity isn’t getting better at being a game opponent over the years. So my long-run bet is gonna be on game AI tending to edge in on humans as an opponent for human players.
Also, at least on the PC, it’s possible to just back up saves.
I mean, I feel like there’s legitimately value to having an “ironman mode”, but I’d really like to have the option not to use it, for a number of reasons.
One of which is that sometimes games have bugs – I just hit a bug in Starfield that was easily worked around by rolling back to an earlier save and taking a slightly different action. However, Starfield had autosaved between the action that triggered the bug and it becoming visible to the player, which would have been a problem if (a) I hadn’t manually saved prior to that and (b) Starfield didn’t do the multiple-autosave-slot thing.
The player can always impose not using saves on themselves, but they can’t debug games.
Hmm. That works for games with static cutscenes. But some games don’t have fixed cutscenes. Like, okay, take Starfield. A bunch of your actions can affect what people say in a given cutscene. So what you’ll see in a given cutscene may change.
I’ve only seen that a couple times, but yeah, the fact that NPCs can be off doing their own thing – the engine is a pretty open sandbox – can mean that they’re talking during a cutscene, and the way Starfield works, whichever character started talking first gets priority for the caption – the other caption only comes up after the first one finishes.
I kind of wish that they’d just stack the captions onscreen.
and it means you’re always doing that load “the first time”
So keep the checkpoint list for each world.
perhaps you add new content or DLC regularly that throws off this calculation
If it uses the last checkpoint times, then it should adapt to that.
All that for a return on development time invested that’s probably not worth the effort. It is worth it to show progress to confirm that the system hasn’t locked up
I think that we’re going to have to disagree. I would like to have a progress bar.
Hmm. I think that a better way to do it is probably in the OS, rather than in-game, on a per-game basis.
Processors thermal-throttle today, and OSes can limit what modes they’re allowed to shift into. And my guess is that usually, if someone wants to constrain performance, they want to do it systemwide, rather than for an individual game.
On the game developer end, if the player wants to play both in a performance-limited and not-performance-limited mode, I’d think that there are probably two ways to go about that:
Permit for two different sets of saved video settings, where the player can flip between them. Honestly, I think that this is probably more tweaking than most players are going to do.
Provide some kind of adaptive quality mechanism. Then, if the computer becomes “lower end”, then the adaptive quality system just twiddles settings until the target framerate is maintained.
There’s also a third point you make here, and that is that in a world with battery-powered devices, CPU/GPU usage actually matters. It’s not zero-cost to just use whatever’s available. I remember submitting an issue some time back for Caves of Qud, where the thing ran a busy loop when the window didn’t have focus, even though the game was paused (which the dev fixed, kudos to them). I noticed it because the fans would spool up when the game was in the background. That’s a game that, because it’s turn-based, has the potential to use very little CPU time, even when the game is in the foreground.
I think that there’s a fair argument that historically, most game developers, aside from maybe mobile or portable console guys, haven’t needed to worry much about consuming resources if they were available.
Speaking as a player, though, I don’t much care about power consumption if a system has wall power. But I care a lot about it if it’s battery-powered.
For phones, I kind of wish that Google would consider providing a “battery usage” rating in the app store that provides some kind of approximate metric for how much CPU time the game uses while active – if Google is going to send all kinds of telemetry from devices, might as well use that for something useful. Maybe permit the game developer to register multiple “modes” (high-power, low-power) and give a ranking for each. As things stand, though, there’s no way for the potential customer to know power consumption, and this would help push that information out to the customer.