Let me go off-topic for a moment and describe a weird dream I had last night.
So I load up Silent Hunter 6 for the first time. The big selling-point of this sim is that the player can control any crew member from a first-person perspective. So, the first thing I do is walk down to the engine room (which is the size of a cathedral and has a stone texture in the overhead, but never mind) and click on one of my mechanics. For some reason the screen starts flashing red, my guy starts groaning in pain, and my hit points are rapidly declining. He drops dead right there, so I select the other mechanic, and the exact same thing happens.
Right after the second mechanic dies, my boat loses all of it's diesel fuel in about 10 seconds, and a screen pops up saying that my submarine is stranded at sea and everyone onboard has died. What happened is that part of my mechanic's character models were colliding with the diesel engines, which only affected them when I was in their first-person view. The diesels ground up their hands when I selected them, causing enormous amounts of damage to the engines themselves. When the second mechanic was killed, my diesel hit points dropped to zero, and both exploded, making all the fuel leak out of the boat.
I think my dream was telling me that in the future, game developers need to be cautious during play-testing. Or that somebody besides Ubisoft should make subsims. Something like that.
|