Little things in game engines that the devs always seem to miss

[JesterRaiin]

...those impassable 3 pixels thick fences made from wooden planks that should fall with first wind or even with stronger fart.

...those door that can be opened only by a keycard, lever or button five kms away but not with grenade, landmine or a few kicks of armored boot.

...those unclimbable 1 meter high walls.

...those grey and brown land textures.

Aw hell...

 

[WalrusPowers]

Assassin's Creed. It's a game about assassins. People who stealthily kill other people. I'd think that darkness would play an important factor in the whole stealth thing.

Forgive me for going off topic; but Assassins Creed? A stealth Game? FUCK NO.

 

[veloper]

Here's a couple more:

1. Lack of a triple buffering option; v-sync for most games hurts the framerate for no good reason. (Valve is still one of the few devs out there to get this OLD feature right).

2. Very poor multi-threading, if at all, so the game can't run faster on modern hardware. (SW:TOR is the most recent example of this. The game's crappy engine can only utilise a single cpu core).

 

[TheYellowCellPhone]

Every FPS ever: Why can't you raise your arms to climb up that ledge?

 

[if_then_else]

One word: Inertia.

Think of every side-scrolling platform game. You are on top of a moving platform, you jump, the platform keeps moving, BUT YOU DON'T!

Some of the newest platforming games with physics simulation fix this (I'm thinking LittleBigPlanet from the top of my head), but it was really common on previous generations of games. It has always bugged me...

 

[Esotera]

1. In a physics engine: Almost always, developers seem to neglect the fact that gravity is acceleration. Why is it that when I jump off a high place I almost always find myself falling at a constant speed? I mean, there is a little bit of acceleration at the start of the fall, but then you stop accelerating and fall at a constant speed.

To make the game more fun to play/it gets too blurry. Real-life physics would probably be boring, and expensive to calculate.

2. In graphics engines, developers never seem to realize that all their colors look gray and dull even when they are supposed to be bright? Would it kill them to make things a little less desaturated and up the contrast a little? I mean, you look at Assassin's creed and it's kind of ridiculous how poor the lighting and color can be in certain places.

Don't really know the answer to this one, other than it's probably a lot harder to make something look good with what you've specified, so they focus on other stuff.

3. Why is it always so light at night? THE MOON IS NOT THAT BRIGHT, guys. The ground shouldn't be perfectly visible. It should be difficult to see. I go outside right now and I see blackness, and it contrasts sharply against any lit areas. Look at assassin's creed 2 and brotherhood (again I use AC as an example for poor lighting) to see the worst of this sort of thing. Even if the city has torches and lights, the alleyways should be darker, and there needs to be more contrast; a whole street shouldn't be a pinkish-orange glow. Furthermore, there should be less people outside.

So you can actually see what you're playing? It wouldn't be much fun staring at a black screen. The one thing I didn't like about Bioshock was I found it too dark - had to turn the brightness up on the tv.

4. Physics engine: Why is that dead body half inside that other one? Come on, work on the collision detection, guys.

Dead bodies aren't exactly a priority for graphics...it's assumed the player will spend more time looking at other stuff. They used to disappear within two seconds of dying though, so this might change as technology continues to advance.

5. Graphics engine: Why is it that when I look down in a first person shooter I can't see my feet? I mean a few FPSs actually get it right (most notably the F.E.A.R. series) in that you can see your own body. F.E.A.R. was really good at that, especially with the martial arts that you could perform. Seeing your waist, legs, and torso do a scissor kick from first person is awesome. In other words, I shouldn't feel like I'm a floating camera with arms and a gun.

Yet again, no idea. I've never seen decent feet in a game, and can't understand why it's so hard to make them look good.

That's all that comes to mind right now for me. How about you guys?

Invisible walls. Fuck everything about them. If you don't want the player to go in that direction, create a gigantic unclimbable wall or some other obstacle, but don't stop me from exploring.

 

[yoshiru]

1: I'm curious about this one. Maybe they're concerned people won't know what's going on if they're falling relentlessly fast. It's frustrating in Skyrim when I die from falling when I don't feel as I've been falling fast enough for death. HOWEVER: Mirror's Edge gets this right. When you fall, it's scary.

2: It's a trend, it'll change.

3: The game is not about running around in a realistic night. Otherwise, it would be too dark to do much of anything (this is why most people sleep at night). Night is usually used to make the world seem dynamic, or to enhance a scary situation (HL2 - Ravenholm). The Thief series gets this more right and it's really fun, but it's not for every game.

4: Which would you prefer? seeing two rag-dolls sometimes clipping through each other, or 20 frames per second. Think about it.

5: It's probably a choice of immersion. I'm sure some gamers would see bodies and arms in their screen as a weird addition to the HUD that they don't need. Also, there are two weird things with seeing legs. In L4D, when you see legs, you look down and they look reallllly far away and reallly long (because of the way we see things, we actually TONS more than a computer screen captures). Finally, it's hard to make the legs not clip with dead bodies, stairs, and stuff. So there is also that.

 

[Gibboniser]

5. Graphics engine: Why is it that when I look down in a first person shooter I can't see my feet? I mean a few FPSs actually get it right (most notably the F.E.A.R. series) in that you can see your own body. F.E.A.R. was really good at that, especially with the martial arts that you could perform. Seeing your waist, legs, and torso do a scissor kick from first person is awesome. In other words, I shouldn't feel like I'm a floating camera with arms and a gun.


That's all that comes to mind right now for me. How about you guys?

I think this is primarily so they don't have to render the character model, just saves a few resources. Though I do vastly prefer it when I can see my legs.