Re: [GD-Design] gesturing

[Evan R. <ev...@en...>]

At 11:10 PM 2004.01.05, Brett Bibby wrote:
>Tom, I like the idea you proposed about the bars because you got it back 
>to hand-eye coordination, but as you say FPS players may not like it. 
>Perhaps it can be packaged in a different way. As Chris Crawford (it was 
>him wasn't it?) pointed out in his design book that the basic golf 
>interface hasn't changed in years, certainly there's something better that 
>can be done.

There's a reason that golf interface hasn't change in years -- because it's 
good :-)  When we developed World Tour Golf for EA in ... 1985?, none of 
the three of us had any golf experience.  So we took lessons, and the basic 
mechanic was actually described by our golf pro at the course in 
Novato.  He pointed out that the basics of the golf swing are very simple: 
alignment (which determines the basic direction of club head travel at the 
moment of impact), backswing (and percentage of backswing relates to power 
-- to hit half a wedge you backswing less than your normal full swing), 
pause, downswing, turn the hands over (the timing of turning your hands 
over is critical to hitting a straight shot, slicing or hooking the ball), 
and follow through.  Paul Reiche parsed that into a pre-shot alignment 
(deciding your initial direction of shot), a click to start the backswing, 
a click to end the backswing and start the downswing (and set power), and a 
click to represent turning the hands over.  Paul was the first designer 
that I know of to put this system onto a circular track that mirrored the 
actual clubhead travel.

Is this interface "realistic"?  Not particularly, in that it does not give 
you nearly the level of control over the clubhead travel and therefore the 
shot that a golfer has in real life.  In particular, it completely ignores 
the factor of "in-to-out" or "out-to-in" clubhead travel (which allows a 
golfer to start the ball traveling either to the right or left of the 
alignment track, allowing for deliberate curving around obstacles).  Does 
it relate directly to the motion of a golfer?  Not really.  In particular, 
Paul chose to put the "hands turning over" click essentially at the point 
of impact (it actually starts considerably further back in the downswing) 
because it aligned nicely and gave better feedback to the user for a hook, 
slice, or straight hit.  Does it feel "realistic"?  Damn Skippy, it 
does.  If you provided a speed control that varied the clubhead travel (and 
thus the amount of time the player had to make decisions, effectively 
increasing player precision at low speed and decreasing it at high speed), 
you'd have a huge play balance variation, without changing the mechanic or 
the complexity of the system at all.

If you compare Paul's design to that of previous golf games -- in 
particular Henry's design in ... was it Pebble Beach Championship Golf? A 
game produce with Brian Fargo, IIRC -- Henry's design was very "sim-like" 
in that it gave a huge degree of control through various keystrokes and 
settings, and used a model of Ben Hogan for animation, and it didn't feel 
nearly as much like swinging a golf club.  Activision's game (Links?) used 
a very similar system to Pauls, but it was modelled on a straight line 
(like a progress bar) instead of the clubhead-travel circle.  IIRC, the 
original Nintendo golf game on the 8 bit console was similar.

I'm not trying to say that Paul's design was or is perfect, but I am saying 
that it was at conception and remains an excellent design, and the fact 
that no one has come up with a better one (at least according to Brett's 
recollection of Chris Crawford's comment) suggests that there's more to it 
than just simplicity -- there's also elegance.  Which is hard to beat.

         Evan