The worst thing possible for a game is when you try to link the physics engine with the gameplay, and find that the physics engine is limiting you. Or for example trying too hard to make everything physically correct.

An example is Cortex Command. The game is, technically speaking, the most realistic game ever in terms of physics. Characters aren’t boxes that get moved by the Finger of God, but have joints, muscles and excert forces. Physics dictate how the character moves (response, velocity, ect) and animates that move. That is, a physics engine dictates the gameplay.

In link-dead, as I see it, characters animation is secondary to gameplay data. That is, the entity is moved by simple gameplay logic and animated to look realistically by physics and inverse kinematics.

Which mechanic is more complicated and technically impressive? Cortex command of course. Which is more *fun*? The link-dead model.

One thing gameplay developers need to realize that technical elegance and complexity, even if hidden, does not automatically mean fun gameplay. The awesome living, reacting, dynamic sandbox world you believe will be the best thing since pong turns out to be boring. From the developer’s perspective it may well be factinating, but the developer here is forgetting that the end result the player is seeing is a world generic, repetitive and predictable like an excel spreadsheet.

The same rule goes for many specific ideas. Things that look fun on paper but fail to amuse – physics engines are one of those pitfalls, a fad that every cool studio on the block has, so you can’t miss it either.

As for indie game dev – I still dream about it. But honestly it’s not something that’ll make you a millionare. Either you join the big boys, like activision, whose CEO said this – quote

We have a real culture of thrift. The goal that I had in bringing a lot of the packaged goods folks into Activision about 10 years ago was to take all the fun out of making videogames,

or you start an indie studio, and attempt to create that massive, beautiful RPG you’ve always been dreaming about, 100 times cooler and more mature than Fallout 3 – which ends just as brutally as an attempt to propell yourself to the moon using household materials and dynamite.

Or you start churning out various generic strains of tetris and minesweeper like a soviet bioweapons factory that, while preventing you from having to chew your leather shoes for nourishment and steal electricity for heating your 3×2 cellar home, it will leave you cynical and disilusioned.

Being that I’m not at the level of programming and working with physics yet, I don’t know much about Box2d. I do find it odd, that Box2d couldn’t be stripped down to what’s useful for Link-Dead. It has to be so frustratingly tedious to have to rewrite something from scratch, since what’s available still isn’t satisfactory.

Just don’t take out too much physics. I like it when I can nail a crate with a nade and then it falls off whatever it was sitting on to crush the enemy beneath (if such a situation should exist in your vision of Link-Dead). 😛

C compiler makes things work faster than C++ compiler, and the binaries/executables are smaller.

Once upon a time developers sat down and wondered – what would make their game sell well? To make it look cool of course! And so they decided to make the graphics super awesome. More bloom! More particles! const int CONF_MAX_PARTICES = 9999999999999999!!!!

However as static pictures got outplaced by moving pictures you began to see the animation, and how every thrown object has a gyroscope inside and is always aligned with the Y axis. So.. game developers introduced physics.

Many hours were wasted creating _awesome_ physics engines for FPS games. Friction, super-advanced collision detection and response, simply magic! But then they realized the only place the player was actually using the physics was to arrange enemy corpses in a giant “PENIS” sign or try to put the ragdolls in suggestive poses with various pieces of the environment or weapons.

There are games that indeed make good use of physics and there are games that have awesome engines that for all gamers care, could be removed.

Example of the first: Half-Life 2, Crysis, Far Cry 2

Example of the second: Stalker and most other FPS games with physics.

Point is: include physics only if it can aid gameplay and find an actual use for the engine.

Also, from Box2D to custom-made sub-soldat engine? That’s like switching from a Hummer to a Fiat 126p