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[forsaken1111]

I'm amazed at how many games get away with clipping through walls. It's like we as gamers have dealt with it for so long that we don't notice anymore. You'll see really modern games with creatures' body parts just phasing into a wall when they get close. Kinda weird.

I concur. The only games I've ever seen without clipping is GTA IV and V

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goBl0XJMKn8

[LeoLeonardoIII]

I'm not talking about clipping bugs like that, which make you fall out of the world. I'm talking about you turn slowly and your sword just passes through some tree or whatever. Or your hair clips down into your armor because they don't want to code it to fall over the armor or be tucked underneath.

[WillowLuman]

It is currently possible to code for such things, but it does require a lot more processing power due to all the loose-physics, makes the assets take even longer to assemble, and is still prone to clipping bugs. We're not yet at a point where such features are optimizable, I think. Textures and polygons can be turned up for higher-end machines, but stuff like hair calculation requires a lot of extra code.

[LeoLeonardoIII]

We already have different body parts reacting to input in the form of hit location and ragdoll. I don't see why your sword can't have collision detection with the wall. One reason might be because players would need to take it into account, for example not being able to swing a sword or polearm wildly in a cramped dungeon because you would hit the walls, or friendly fire because your buddy was standing too close. I think that's a great feature.

As for monsters, instead of coding the monster's footprint to have collision detection, do it for each part. If a part collides with an impermeable surface, the whole creatures knows to step back.

[forsaken1111]

Player model movements are handled by animations from motion capture data, not the physics engine. The physics engine is what handles object clipping and collision detection. Your sword is attached to your hand as far as the engine is concerned, and the engine plays the 'attack' animation when you attack. The systems are entirely separate.

And in games where the systems are not separate, you get really strange behavior sometimes. One game I can think of is Cortex Command. Rather than animations, that game uses movement instructions and actuated parts on a pseudo-2d plane and the parts collide with the terrain but weird shit happens like you getting stuck up against a single pixel of floating dirt or falling over because your leg apparently missed the ground which is RIGHT THERE

[Eotyrannus]

They could probably compromise, like having a 'tuck my arm in close' and 'do an uppercut or something' instead of 'spread my claws as far as possible' and 'slash as widely as possible' if you're a werewolf and you're attempting to explore an old ruin and you're in a corridor.

[LeoLeonardoIII]

Yeah I don't buy that they can't get it done. I just think it's become accepted by gamers so it's not a priority at all to develop a game that doesn't do it. With all the other game dev constraints, where you don't even get all the things that you NEED in the game, much less wants or idle fancies, something like that is never gonna get fixed.

[forsaken1111]

I didn't say it can't be done, it is just computationally very difficult and can lead to some very strange behavior.

[Sensei]

Yeah, crude dynamic attack animations would be plausible, but unarmed skill and attacking underwater both look like planned features that got cut so what do you expect?

[Putnam]

We already have different body parts reacting to input in the form of hit location and ragdoll.

no we don't?

[WillowLuman]

We already have different body parts reacting to input in the form of hit location and ragdoll.

no we don't?

I think he's referring to anther game.

We already have different body parts reacting to input in the form of hit location and ragdoll. I don't see why your sword can't have collision detection with the wall. One reason might be because players would need to take it into account, for example not being able to swing a sword or polearm wildly in a cramped dungeon because you would hit the walls, or friendly fire because your buddy was standing too close. I think that's a great feature.

As for monsters, instead of coding the monster's footprint to have collision detection, do it for each part. If a part collides with an impermeable surface, the whole creatures knows to step back.

Ha! Bethesda having polearms. Good one...

[Culise]

Morrowind had spears.

Yeah, and I miss them greatly, but they didn't really think them through all the time.  I mean, halberds that don't do chopping or slashing damage?  The first time I saw that, right next to their icon that very clearly showed the axe head of the halberd, my mind just blue-screened for a moment. 

((That said, I love how SkyRe actually has polearms, as well as perks for them, even if they had to do some creative classifying to fit them into the limited weapon categories available.))

[WillowLuman]

Halberds aren't axes, though they superficially resemble them. They're designed for hooking people off of horses.

[Culise]

Halberds aren't axes, though they superficially resemble them. They're designed for hooking people off of horses.

Ah, wasn't the hook on the back was intended for that purpose against horse riders, rather than the axe blade on the front?  It just feels weird that the blade of the halberd cannot be used in a chopping motion at all effectively, when that was a valid use for the actual thing.  The intent of the blade on the end of many polearms, whether the halberd, glaive, or the like, is to extend its use beyond simply piercing with a spear point. 

[umiman]

The halberd was originally designed as an all-purpose superweapon, hence the axe blade, the spear tip, and a hook on the rear side.

The hook was for dismounting mounted opponents, as Hugo mentioned.

The axe head was in fact, for chopping people. Like an axe. Hence "axe head".

The spear tip was for the spearwall formation as well as fighting other spear users (which were extremely prevalent at the time).

It was an extremely versatile weapon that evolved from farm tools (like many other medieval weapons), such as the voulge and the bill.

The problems with it was that it was hard to use properly and required a lot of training, especially compared to its predecessors and its successors, which were basically spears and very long spears. It was also very heavy and short ranged. Not to mention when you make a weapon that can do everything... you naturally end up with a weapon that specializes in nothing.

It was made redundant with the return of the pikewall formation, or basically a tight formation of very long spears. It's very strange and slightly ironic. Over 1300 years of military warfare technology, and we ended up using the exact same phalanx tactics used by Philip of Macedon in 330BC. It's made even more interesting by the fact that we returned to this formation as an answer to the use of gunpowder, line infantry, and the other military trends of the early gunpowder age. At that point, the halberd basically became a novelty.

Sorry for the detour. Please return to your regularly scheduled Skyrim now.