Cocytus Succeeder
Posts: 2297
Joined: Saturday, 14th April 2012, 21:35
Thursday, 6th December 2012, 10:50
Game Performance > Common Sense
As requested in this thread, here is my long tangent:
The primary purpose of playing a game is to have fun by overcoming challenges, in some form or another. One of the duties of the developers to ensure the game is ‘balanced’ – the challenges are neither too easy nor too hard. Put in a broader perspective, game balance is just one part of optimising game ‘performance’ – that the fun is delivered at a reasonable rate. If the challenges are balanced at an appropriate difficulty but solving them is a tediously repetitive grind or the player has to wait several minutes while the computer does some calculation, then the game is in an unsatisfactory state. Thus one aspect of game performance is ensuring the rules of the game are relatively easy to understand for BOTH humans and computers. Due to the way computers work, certain parts of common sense are unacceptable for game performance.
In crawl, some of the most glaring examples are shared with pretty much most similar games: there is no need to sleep, there is no need to excrete and your injuries are represented by this single number called HP. In particular, your HP (unless you’re a DD) goes up over time no matter how you were wounded before and your combat efficiency is exactly the same whether you’re at 100% or 1% HP. These are utter defiances towards ‘common sense’ but nobody suggests changing them. Everyone understands that sometimes common sense must be ignored for the good of the game. It’s just that different people will disagree on where exactly that line should be drawn, leading to thoughts like “cutting up a corpse with a poison weapon should give poisonous chunks” or “corpses should drop 100% of the time if you don’t use a messy killing method”.
Over in Dwarf Fortress (DF), there is more simulation going on and each year the scope expands. But on the flip side the game must run at a reasonable efficiency – “death by low frame rate” is one of the main reasons games end when in the hands of seasoned veterans. Does it make sense that you can build a 100-storey tower suspended over a pit with one plank of wood on one edge? No, but it would be hell trying to calculate when something will collapse and then communicate that to players. So the game simply checks if the structure is connected to the rest of the ground and deems a structure collapse to only happen if a section is completely disconnected from everything. Players have built such colossal architecture and kept it suspended with a single bar of soap.
To keep things running smoothly, sweeping generalisations have had to be made. One such example in DF is throwing things: does it make sense that you can crack someone’s skull by throwing a handful of vomit at them? No. Does it make sense that you can throw a lion corpse at another lion so hard that the body gets jammed inside the other body? No. Does it make sense that a colossal bronze golem can be decapitated by throwing a small fluffy critter at it? No. But these ridiculous scenarios are necessary casualties of common sense. Crawl has similar generalisations too: does it make sense a troll can kill a hydra with a pizza? No.
DF has been expanding the scope of its simulations over the years, and each time there would be struggles with common sense. Prior to 2010, DF used an HP system but split it up so each separate body part and organ had its own HP bar. After 2010, HP completely disappeared from DF and injuries were simulated with material science calculations: “a weapon of this shape and this material is swung at this speed that hits the left upper arm at a random angle of incidence. What is the result on the skin, fat, muscle and bone of the arm it hits, factoring in the armour which is of this material?” The one exception to the abolishment of HP? Undead. Removing HP meant creature death was now simulated with “did the brain receive critical damage?”, “has the creature lost a critical amount of blood?”, “did the creature get decapitated?” and such medical questions. The exact same questions were applied to undead at first. The result: undead were invincible as all the medical questions were meaningless to them, but DF wasn’t simulating “this object has been hit so much it’s now a finely mashed paste, unable to hold shape”. That was hotfixed: undead now have an HP until the game expands upon how necromancy actually works. Whether that’s a victory or defeat for common sense is up for debate: strictly speaking, undead don’t exist in ‘common sense’ in the first place.
But the saga of “Undead vs Common Sense” doesn’t end there. In 2012, some preliminary aspects of necromancy were fleshed out. One immediate consequence: after their “HP” was removed, undead would collapse back into corpses but necromancy didn’t care whether how the corpse came about. So the bodies came back to life, again and again. Oh you decapitated this zombie? No problem, the head and the body can come back to unlife separately! Your warrior just had his arm cut off? Now he can fight his own undead arm! This was the intended results of the feature but side effects crept in. How to stop a corpse from endlessly reanimating? One way was to drag it to a butcher’s workshop and ‘dismantle’ the object into a long list of objects: various organs (yes, you can specifically cook the intestines of an elephant with the lung of a bear), a pile of generic meat, other inedible products (can’t eat cartilage or nervous tissue), the skin and a pile of generic bones. The bones won’t re-animate as they no longer ‘belong’ to the corpse. The skin does, so is fair game for re-animation! Just because it’s now essentially a sack of air in the shape of what it looked like in life doesn’t make it any less deadly. To eliminate this undead skin object, one can (after temporarily incapacitating it by bashing away at its HP) drag it to a tannery and tan it. ‘Common sense’ says tanning should take several days to accomplish. Screw that, dwarves take a single skin object and produce a single ‘leather’ object after one job which can take a fraction of a day. Oh but if the creature used to have a lot of hair in life (like a horse)? Well, the hair comes back to unlife too so dwarves need to drag that to another workshop and get it spun into thread. Leather and thread no longer belong to the corpse object so are no longer fit for unlife. Does any of that make sense? Common sense ran away long ago. But to a DF mindset, it makes perfect sense.
The primary purpose of playing a game is to have fun by overcoming challenges, in some form or another. One of the duties of the developers to ensure the game is ‘balanced’ – the challenges are neither too easy nor too hard. Put in a broader perspective, game balance is just one part of optimising game ‘performance’ – that the fun is delivered at a reasonable rate. If the challenges are balanced at an appropriate difficulty but solving them is a tediously repetitive grind or the player has to wait several minutes while the computer does some calculation, then the game is in an unsatisfactory state. Thus one aspect of game performance is ensuring the rules of the game are relatively easy to understand for BOTH humans and computers. Due to the way computers work, certain parts of common sense are unacceptable for game performance.
In crawl, some of the most glaring examples are shared with pretty much most similar games: there is no need to sleep, there is no need to excrete and your injuries are represented by this single number called HP. In particular, your HP (unless you’re a DD) goes up over time no matter how you were wounded before and your combat efficiency is exactly the same whether you’re at 100% or 1% HP. These are utter defiances towards ‘common sense’ but nobody suggests changing them. Everyone understands that sometimes common sense must be ignored for the good of the game. It’s just that different people will disagree on where exactly that line should be drawn, leading to thoughts like “cutting up a corpse with a poison weapon should give poisonous chunks” or “corpses should drop 100% of the time if you don’t use a messy killing method”.
Over in Dwarf Fortress (DF), there is more simulation going on and each year the scope expands. But on the flip side the game must run at a reasonable efficiency – “death by low frame rate” is one of the main reasons games end when in the hands of seasoned veterans. Does it make sense that you can build a 100-storey tower suspended over a pit with one plank of wood on one edge? No, but it would be hell trying to calculate when something will collapse and then communicate that to players. So the game simply checks if the structure is connected to the rest of the ground and deems a structure collapse to only happen if a section is completely disconnected from everything. Players have built such colossal architecture and kept it suspended with a single bar of soap.
To keep things running smoothly, sweeping generalisations have had to be made. One such example in DF is throwing things: does it make sense that you can crack someone’s skull by throwing a handful of vomit at them? No. Does it make sense that you can throw a lion corpse at another lion so hard that the body gets jammed inside the other body? No. Does it make sense that a colossal bronze golem can be decapitated by throwing a small fluffy critter at it? No. But these ridiculous scenarios are necessary casualties of common sense. Crawl has similar generalisations too: does it make sense a troll can kill a hydra with a pizza? No.
DF has been expanding the scope of its simulations over the years, and each time there would be struggles with common sense. Prior to 2010, DF used an HP system but split it up so each separate body part and organ had its own HP bar. After 2010, HP completely disappeared from DF and injuries were simulated with material science calculations: “a weapon of this shape and this material is swung at this speed that hits the left upper arm at a random angle of incidence. What is the result on the skin, fat, muscle and bone of the arm it hits, factoring in the armour which is of this material?” The one exception to the abolishment of HP? Undead. Removing HP meant creature death was now simulated with “did the brain receive critical damage?”, “has the creature lost a critical amount of blood?”, “did the creature get decapitated?” and such medical questions. The exact same questions were applied to undead at first. The result: undead were invincible as all the medical questions were meaningless to them, but DF wasn’t simulating “this object has been hit so much it’s now a finely mashed paste, unable to hold shape”. That was hotfixed: undead now have an HP until the game expands upon how necromancy actually works. Whether that’s a victory or defeat for common sense is up for debate: strictly speaking, undead don’t exist in ‘common sense’ in the first place.
But the saga of “Undead vs Common Sense” doesn’t end there. In 2012, some preliminary aspects of necromancy were fleshed out. One immediate consequence: after their “HP” was removed, undead would collapse back into corpses but necromancy didn’t care whether how the corpse came about. So the bodies came back to life, again and again. Oh you decapitated this zombie? No problem, the head and the body can come back to unlife separately! Your warrior just had his arm cut off? Now he can fight his own undead arm! This was the intended results of the feature but side effects crept in. How to stop a corpse from endlessly reanimating? One way was to drag it to a butcher’s workshop and ‘dismantle’ the object into a long list of objects: various organs (yes, you can specifically cook the intestines of an elephant with the lung of a bear), a pile of generic meat, other inedible products (can’t eat cartilage or nervous tissue), the skin and a pile of generic bones. The bones won’t re-animate as they no longer ‘belong’ to the corpse. The skin does, so is fair game for re-animation! Just because it’s now essentially a sack of air in the shape of what it looked like in life doesn’t make it any less deadly. To eliminate this undead skin object, one can (after temporarily incapacitating it by bashing away at its HP) drag it to a tannery and tan it. ‘Common sense’ says tanning should take several days to accomplish. Screw that, dwarves take a single skin object and produce a single ‘leather’ object after one job which can take a fraction of a day. Oh but if the creature used to have a lot of hair in life (like a horse)? Well, the hair comes back to unlife too so dwarves need to drag that to another workshop and get it spun into thread. Leather and thread no longer belong to the corpse object so are no longer fit for unlife. Does any of that make sense? Common sense ran away long ago. But to a DF mindset, it makes perfect sense.
