linsivvi said:
I mentioned just a few objects and the interactions between them. Anyone can make a solution (like the one Nocebo used) to solve this.
Well, like, to take your fire examples:
It's not that simple, and it's anything but trivial. If there's a fireplace on the screen can I light a match with it? Can I then burn a tree with this match? Can I then write "fan" and fan the flames? Or write "water" and put out the fire?
If I were going to solve all of these, I'd probably start by making a status called "on fire," which had some properties:
- If something is On Fire, it has a Fire Area defined; scale the Fire picture and place it on that area. (For a tree, this would be the whole thing; for a torch or match, it'd be just the end.)
- When something On Fire touches something Flammable, that Flammable object also becomes On Fire (this works for pretty much everything.)
- When something Flammable has the Consumable property, it has a time associated with it; after that much time On Fire, it is destroyed (so a tree will burn up completely, but a torch will, for convenience, just stay burning at the end.)
- When something has the Extinguishing property, if it touches something with the On Fire property, the latter loses that property. (Or, more complex, if its mass is greater than the mass of the On Fire object or something.) This would cover fire extinguishers, mountains of dirt, etc. too.
- When something has the Fire-Increasing property, it has a time (either a number of seconds or "as long as they're touching"); as long as that time is still on, any On Fire object touching it has its Consumable time decreased and its Fire Area enlargened* (this would cover gasoline, lighter fluid, wood logs, etc. as well as fanning with air.)
*Yes not really a word
Now, it's true, that system only covers things being on fire, but if I had a well thought-out property system to work with that predefined the building blocks for me (areas, properties, objects touching, objects being destroyed, etc.) I could implement something like this in a couple hours. With a big enough team of people, a huge variety of properties could be implemented in not
that much time.
Can they also properly animate the results of these interactions?
The animation's all handled the same way it is in Drawn to Life, IIRC, which means it should look crappy (by a broad standard) but also "just work."
I am of the opinion that the limit is set at a lower bar while you believe it's set to very high.
My argument is mostly with what you consider a "really low bar." 500 objects that interact in a very believable set of ways really would be trivial; even a hypothetical Scribblenauts that doesn't really deliver will hit a mark much higher than that.
I think my real objection to the people who are like "yeah right" about this game is that it really
isn't comparable to something like Fable that overpromised and underdelivered. In a game like that, the problem is that someone is promising hundreds of completely different, distinct systems that probably haven't even been looked at for implementation yet at the time of the promise; here the promise is of a single universal system that just happens to have a really huge database connected to it, in a game that literally has
nothing else to it, pretty much. The latter is far easier to developmentally achieve than the former.