Click And Drag In Future Games...
I've finally figured out that the only reason I find the click and drag system uncomfortable is because it's assigned to the left mouse button - this means that there's a danger of accidentally clicking something when you mean to move somewhere, or vice versa. Plus if I want to move across a room and interact with something, I have to hold the button down, let go, then press it again.
Would it be at all possible for the click and drag system to be re-assigned to the right mouse button in future?
That way we could interact with objects while walking, and it would mean that the double left-click run could return.
Would it be at all possible for the click and drag system to be re-assigned to the right mouse button in future?
That way we could interact with objects while walking, and it would mean that the double left-click run could return. Sign in to comment in this discussion.
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But you can still accidentally move with the left button, which is his issue I think.
Doesn't happen often to me, since moving requires a distinct dragging motion, but I can only speak for myself.
While you are dragging, your mouse movement controls the direction, so obviously you can't be looking and clicking at other things while you are doing this, because if you moved the mouse to hover over a hotspot it would change the walking direction.
But, I still can't figure out why the normal 'click here to walk' controls aren't implemented in the ToMI. I suppose the control pad movement is better for people playing with... pads, but why put it in a PC game? At least give us the option.
You must not have seen the threads explaining about needing the extra programming to put clickable movement hotspots on the floor (especially in 3D environments where there's the distance factor) and the new camera angles they are using meaning that the floor isn't always there to see.
It's not just a case of adapting to control pad movement - I like the click and drag (as an alternative to keyboard movement) - because it provides direct control - who says PC players don't want direct control of the character movement?
They deliberately excluded point and click walking because they wanted:
And probably more stuff I forgot. Clicking on the floor just doesn't make the cut these days. I don't see why people uphold point and click as the ultimate form of gameplay because it ain't all that fabulous. It's functional but do I want to play games the same way forever? No, I want them to evolve and show me more.
It has nothing to do with extra/difficult programming. It is mathematically impossible to solve for an intersection point that doesn't exist (well, in some cases there is an imaginary solution but that's hardly useful here) -i.e. the ground plane is not being clicked on. New cinematography direction says we want to have interesting camera angles, so we needed a way to move the character around without the ground plane being in the shot. That left us with WASD and Click/Drag.
If a next Sam n Max game ill be like ToMI I just won't buy it because of the user interface. I really hate it. It was the lousiest spend money. Hey, i bought Bone, Sam'n'Max Season 1+2, (season 1 twice ( translated) ). I liked to play them. But i get angry when thinking that i spend money for ToMI. Not for story , just because of the user interface.
A lousy use interface as for me the point not to buy Monkey Island 4 ages ago. And it will be definitly be the "do not buy" reason for me for new Telltale Games. Heck, camera is just a bit of presentation. Much more user unfriendly mouse movement is necessary to use ToMI than e.g. Bone.
It's a little bit sad to don't play new games ith the rabbity thing, but if you use the steering of Tales of Monkey Island I ill be glad NOT to buy another Sam'n'Max.
And one thing: What does a cinematography director know about gameplay? His ork is about presentation, not about using sth.
I still think this reasoning doesn't convince everyone (me, for example
Also, TTG-Yare, thanks for taking all the time sharing your thoughts about the control method, instead of just saying - "hey, live with it" (or not saying anything at all)
Are you unconvinced by the mathematical impossibility, or the cinematography decision that lead us there? I can help you understand the former but not the latter.
Hey, glad to help! Also, thank you guys for keeping the number of "That guy who made the controls should be fired!" posts relatively low.
Well some of us know that even if you agreed with _US_ (that the controls were a bad idea) you were likely told "program it or else" by top brass. Also I'm willing to bet it acctually involved _MORE_ code than the original interface (since the original one could be called with a simple command akin to "onMouseClick:Walk(X,Y)" while the new one requires indipentant commands for each button as well as intervals and shifts in camera angels depending on which button is pressed, etc)
Very astute. Though it was less "program it or else" and more "here's the requirements your system needs to meet".
Yeah, I want them to evolve too, but this is no evolution.
Well, I thought it would be simple to give priority to the ground, but what do I know... It seems 3D doesn't make things any simpler. Well, I hope some day you guys find a better solution.
Just throwing out more ideas. An imaginary axis on the mouse would be nice, too.
I tend to forget how nice the people at TTG are. In retrospect I suspect none of them would ever use thw words "or else"
Heh, neither as such, actually
About the intersection stuff, I do understand that it's impossible to calculate exactly. The question is, how accurately it can be estimated, and what kind of extra data is needed - I imagine it easily leads to an extra "click-map" for each shot. And even so, it may not feel accurate enough - I cannot tell without actually trying it. So, if the statement is "not feasible", I can easily believe that - but I'm very reluctant to accept the "impossible"
After all the counter-hype (is there such a word?
Notice how the amount of people upset vocally went down as the game extended through the plotline? People got over the change. (Well, the majority.) But you can't please everyone or harass Yare enough.
Instead of actually clicking the floor, you click on the screen. There's an overlay over the main screen that acts like the clicking hotspot, which then maps to the ground position, as if you were clicking on a 2D plane in a 2D adventure game. The reason is because you don't click on the scene, you click on the screen, as if you were tapping your finger on a glass window. It's hard to actually point to a point on the ground from that glass window, because it not only requires you know the field of vision, but also the point of vision. However, if you were, for example, to draw a grid on the window, and draw that same grid (with perspective in mind) on the floor, you can actually say "my finger is at B20", and then the position on the floor, B20, can actually easily be accessed.
That's how I figure it. Not only does it require a bit more maths, it also requires a bit more processing power, seeing as you are actually required to make the intersection line as wide as possible, not to mention you'd have to adjust the angle of said line to the screen.
But any Telltale Games employee can correct me here.
Now, you can still do it without seeing the floor BUT there's no way to actually get where you want to go. Probably you click somewhere in the screen trying to go to some point but the character actually go somewhere else. Since they cannot change the camera angle (And another stuff I can think of like trying to fix it IN TIME could be really complicated), they decided to go after WASD and Click and Drag.
Now, I have to admit while I like WASD, I finished trying to find the nearest Hot Spot to where I want to go because Guybrush moved faster. Wallace and Gromit actually moved quite faster than Guybrush, and cannot be my computer, because both games has the same requeriments. So, that my bet.
The only fault (For WASD and C&D) that really annoys me is having camera changes changing the orientation while moving. If TTG can improve it to correct the orientation, to avoid reseting the orientation and "moving back" (Point in case: outside the courthouse in Flotsam)
I hope for a way to customize the keys (Not just WASD, but also the other keys) and the sensitivity (Plus the "correct orientation setting" to avoid peeps complaints about the change)
Personally, I still prefer the interface they had for Sam and Max and Strong Bad. Click once, they walk there. Hold down click and you can keep them walking. It was perfect. Of course, it would be really nice if they managed to come up with an interface that catered to everybody's preferences.
It's like, the cinematography in ToMI was better than the cinematography in Sam & Max Season 2, by some amount.
The controls in ToMI were worse than the controls in S&M, by some amount.
I don't think the cinematography was better enough to justify the decrease in control quality. I don't think this is the fault of the people implementing the controls, or even the people working on the cinematography, I just think it's a misguided mission overall.
A lot of people at TTG seem to think of the one-sidedness of the S&M sets as being some glaring flaw, but I don't think it ever bothered anyone. It certainly never bothered me. I gradually got used to the ToMI controls, but I was always aware of them, which is pretty much the opposite of immersion.
Or those people stopped playing the games... I felt really cheated when I bought W&G, so I haven't picked up ToMI. I have tried it, but the controls are not good. Everything just feels sluggish according to me. I want to concentrate on the puzzles, not the controls.
I also don't understand the argument that it is mathematically impossible. You already have a bottom plane that the characters can walk on, why not add that you walk to where you clicked? That would solve 95% (if not more) of all the cases. The other places can easily be covered with hotspots.
Can someone give examples of places where point and click are not feasible? Preferably with screenshots, since I haven't played through any of the wasd-games.
You've had two seasons, Telltale. Where are all those really good-looking shots you needed direct control for?
I'd really hate to see what you guys would do in an FPS, an MMO, a platformer, or anything else that actually requires you to have any kind of skill with WASD.
The way I picture it in my head is that the stuff you said works in 2D but in 3D there is a third dimension. Shock. So you can't just give the game "B20" because it also expects how far into the 3rd dimension you want to travel to - "B20 and 20 metres off into the distance" for example.
To use your example, I can be pointing out a glass window at something outside, but unless I tell you, you won't know whether I am pointing at something 10 inches away from the window or 1 mile away.
Sorry, I don't understand why there's no way to get there.
I prefer to play my adventure games relaxed. It's not at all how I would play an action game. I have no problem with WASD in other games, but it's annoying in an adventure game, even more with changing camera angles.
That would be extremely cool of you, Yare!
I had to look up what a frustum is... thanks for embiggening my vocabulary.
This article covers the process of taking a point in screen space and transforming it into a ray in world space extending from the view camera (to determine what you clicked on in the game): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_tracing_(graphics)
For anybody interested, that is.
The mathematics are way over my head, but even so that was very informative. In the perspective projection diagram, is the "eye" actually the camera?
And also: that is not rocket science. Have you ever thought how on earth can a doctor use a 3D interface on medical devices without a keyboard? VRT images are used in clinical systems with point and click. Works quite easily, because rotating rotates the world space. How can you point in a shooter with your mouse, how can you select troops in a strategy games which all have 3D cameras? Don't blame mathematical reasons for this steering. Just think about the following. You fire with a mouse a rocket in a line in a moving world with moving targets in a shooter. The point of view moves, the objects in the world move, the rocket moves. And now think if a shooter designer would say: It's mathematical impossible to say where the mouse has pointed to and where the rocket will fly to (Okay, many shooters only shoot in line of sight, but even the 10 year old dogs of war could have handled mouse aiming).
Just say: We wanted some camera woblings which noone really noticed and wanted an easy solution (have you noticed that it is possible to point to an object in the game despite the mathematical impossibility to do the same for movement path?)
@Yare As a starter I wouldn't use the wiki entries. Tom Miller explained the entry level a ot easier in his "Managed DirectX" book. And why do give an article for raytracing? DirectX doesn't do raytracing, see rasterization instead. (Raytracing would make the gameplay today a bit slow i think).
You just can try a 3D programm, e.g. Blender and select something in a 3D view. And then explain again why this is impossible.
But since we're talking about movement, and there are no hotspots, is it bad if the interface assumes it's inbetween, like half a mile as the easiest estimate? And if it's not good enough, can a more complex function help it? And if it can't be done through maths only, how much work is it to define (and test) a "click-map" for each scene, that contains the most probable 3D position for each 2D pixel (or set of pixels)? Etc, etc.
Care to start an E-course on 3D navigation?
Yes. The frustum represents the camera/eye. The tip of the frustum is the camera's position, everything inside of the frustum is what will be drawn when projected into 2D.
It's easier to link people to a wikipedia article than a book. I also didn't say that the raytracing was used for rendering. Raytracing is a general algorithm used any time you want to get a 3D world intersection from a 2D screen position. For example clicking on an object or highlighting it with the mouse.
I never said that clicking on something in 3D when it's visible on screen is impossible. Now, open up blender. Rotate the camera so your 3D object is no longer on camera. Pray tell, where should you click if you wanted to select this object that is not visible on screen?
Thanks for recommending that beginning game programming book, though. I'll look right into it.
Thanks for taking the time to explain this, Yare - much appreciated.
In the Hierarchy Editor!
ok, so I cheated (and honestly, I have no clue if Blender uses higherarchy, I never did understand how it worked... but that's how I do it in Maya)