arkhamsoft.com

[allicorn]

Ok, considering the creativity of our happy little band here, I'm guessing that its that scary capitalized "WELL THOUGHT OUT!" that has held the post-count in this forum firmly on zero.

I figured it was about time some foolish bugger dived in, so here goes:

Despite the staggering advances in 3D graphics technology for gaming, and the ongoing struggle to acheive "photo realistic" graphics - we're not there yet. By "we" I mean the game industry in general, not necessarily just us lot.

Character animations snap robotically, smoke cuts off with square edges, textures repeat, brightly colored HUD graphics occlude our view and we interact with the world by mashing buttons and wheeling our mice around the table. Ultimately - the whole first-person experience is perhaps somewhat unavoidably marred by being viewed through those funny little rectangles we call monitors. Sure, there are some really impressive efforts on the market right now, but still, an oft repeated comment is "no amount of flashy graphics can beat the power of imagination".

There's another side to the equation of immersive media though - one I do a fair bit of thinking about myself - sound.

With current sound technology its quite possible to create 3D soundscapes that are incredibly realistic.

Go play any current flashy-graphics-FPS... look at whats on the screen. Could you honestly, for even a moment, mistake it for reality? Personally I don't think so. It might look great, but its still very clearly a bunch of pixels and shaders and graphical whizz-bangery.

Now sit at the PC with your headphones on, shut your eyes, imagine the scene around your avatar and just listen. How scary is that!? Try it with any decently put together product: Call of Duty 4, Half Life 2, BioShock, Intern 2, Penumbra...

Creating an immersive, realistic, 3D soundscape is not a small job, but the point of perfection is a lot more reachable than the comparable visual ideal.

In production terms there's also the big difference that if you need (say) a tree in your game - you can't just go out and "record" a tree - visually - and put those visuals into your game. But you most certainly can go out and capture the sound of a tree and just put it straight in there. One-hundred-percent real, totally non-synthetic and immediately identifiable as real by any hearing human being.

So - and you can probably guess more or less where this is leading - my idea is to make a game that has no graphics at all. Not even tidily presented text. Literally nothing on screen. A game composed entirely of sound.

As an input mechanism I'd suggest using voice parsing, which isn't anything like as hard as you might think. Though, you could always add a screen+keyboard backup input mechanism for anyone who either doesn't have a microphone or just doesn't get on well with a voice input system.

Ideally you would start up the game, stick on your headset, turn off your monitor and go sit in a comfy chair and shut your eyes. The entire experience of playing the game would be almost like a session of guided visualisation. Detailed 3D soundscapes would describe the scene to you (though a narrator voice would be necessary to point out details). Characters would talk to you and - in simple terms - you'd talk back. To move around and interact with the world you'd simply say what you were doing; "I pick up the frog"; "I leave the room" and so on. Optionally there might be a Duality-like menu of options instead and you'd just need to say a menu number/letter (this would be a system much more tolerant of poor mics and players with indistinct voices).

You could probably build quite a wide variety of adventure games with this system though - obviously - a preposterously bone-chilling horror adventure might be something especially effective when the player is probably sitting alone in the dark with their eyes shut.

Anyway, there's a fair bit more detailed nonsense that I could ramble on about, but that's the gist of it.

Discuss, laugh, shoot me down, and so on and so forth...

Alli
_________________
The king, with beak and talons. The king, in the form of man. Nothing escapes those eyes. He sees everything.

[Risujin]

[Quinjet]

OK, I have read this a few times and I would just like to say that I keep coming up with the same definition.
An interactive audio play.
Would that be correct? If I am, I think this is a truly brilliant idea.
I love a good audio book or play, as Alli says "no amount of flashy graphics can beat the power of imagination".
If I had one concern it might be that in a complex and scary situation, say like the escape from the library in Duality, that a racing mind could miss a lot of the input. With an audio book one is generally in a relaxed state and focused. But in Duality I often found myself panicking to make a decision (which was really great). Can a mind cope with imagining and decision making while being trapped in an audio terror. The thought is nightmarish but with the correct pacing...? love it!
I'm sold on it, just wish I could think of a way to assist if it goes any further.
Looking forward to more on this,
Q.
_________________
All alone or on a cracker

[Yahtzee]

I'm hesitant of the idea of an audio book, I think there's something about having the situation read out to you as prose that pulls the user from the experience. The idea does lend itself to interesting possibilities, though.

I'm picturing an audio game where you are equipped with a joystick. You hear the atmospheric sounds of a lonely, bleak environment, punctuated only by your footsteps as you push on the joystick. But everything you can interact with in some way occasionally emits noise, with hopefully 3D sound output being sophisticated enough to allow the player to pinpoint where the noise is coming from. As you get closer to them, the noise grows louder. Essentially playing a normal game in a completely wall-less environment with a handful of interactables and the monitor switched off. Electronic 'Marco Polo', if you will.

Think of how the game elements could be emitting noise. Heavy footfalls or roaring imply monsters. Crying implies the imprisoned princess. If you judge yourself to be very close to a monster you can hit a button to swing your sword wildly around, and maybe you'll hit him, or maybe you won't. Alternatively, run away. It would be like groping around in the dark. Scary in an entirely new way.

This might be an interesting PC game project to do if you know your 3D sound programming.

[allicorn]

[Risujin]

[darthkiwi]

This sounds to me like a very intriguing, and potentially amazing and original idea. It sounds to me as though there are two basic setups people have reached in this thread:

1) You play it like a text adventure or a choose-your-own-adventure book (like Duality). Advantages: Simple for both the player and the coder. No potential stumbling around in the dark hopelessly lost. Disadvantages: less "real", more restricting.

2) You play it like a 3D walkaround or a FPS, but with a huge emphasis on sound and nothing on-screen. Advantages: more real, more immersive, possibly more terrifying as a result. Disadvantages: Potential stumbling around in the dark, you'd have to "announce" the existence of anything silent (like, as Risujin said, a book) which breaks the idea of a more "real" game.

There's also the decision of explaining why you are playing with no graphics. While it's certainly perfectly alright for you to just say, "there are no graphics, this is a sound-based game", it's possible you could incorporate this into the story: would the protagonist be blind, for example?

As for the input decisions... if you can make an accurate voice parser, that would be best. If you can't, stick to Duality-style menu choices or, of you end up using a joystick to move the player, just have buttons on that.

I think what you need to do is basically try everything out, see how well it turns out and then pick the one which has the most advantages: it's hard to get a handle on something that hasn't been done before!

Also, is Yahtzee the Yahtzee Croshaw?

[allicorn]

Hoho - major thread necromancy here since the last post was around 10 months ago!

Anyhoo, just thought I'd mention that this idea hasn't been forgotten and in the last few days this finally bubbled up into the upper regions of my to-do list and some actual coding was done with the goal of deciding whether this really is feasable or not.

The upshot being, I've got some test code now which presents a room with some noisy objects in 3d sound and allows you to issue commands by voice to move around and examine the various things and get some narrated descriptions. The listener turns and moves smoothly around the room and I think the relative 3d positions of objects are pretty easy to distinguish as they rotate around and move past you.

There's also a bit of work been done on an editor for building Duality-like adventure frameworks where text descriptions and menus are replaced by narration, 3d sounds and dynamic speech-to-text dictionaries.

So, it all seems fairly do-able. I've got a very short little adventure scripted out and, time permitting, it might all come together within a month or two. (I'm going to regret saying that when I resurrect this thread again in another 10 months time! )

Alli
_________________
The king, with beak and talons. The king, in the form of man. Nothing escapes those eyes. He sees everything.

[Quinjet]

Dude!
I am kicking myself for not mentioning it sooner but I saw a mod description the other day that was describing what looked like this type of play feature. As you do I thought "Oh I really must tell Alli...." and then another interesting thread caught my eye.
Not totally sure where I saw it but I'm guessing it was on ModDb. I will keep a lookout for it on my searches.
I'm ready for some playtesting if you need me.
Q.
_________________
All alone or on a cracker

[darthkiwi]

Ooh - this sounds interesting and innovative. And fun, too - and very atmospheric.