Does anyone think the amount of games a depth of games could be improved if they took a step back and added in 1 or 2 (depending on the game) wireless analog sticks (similar to the wii nunchuck analog stick but without a wire connecting to anything else). I mean, that would not only fix games movement problems but having 1 or 2 buttons per analog stick in your hand can make less intuitive actions much simpler.
Making the kinect suck less?
- Thread starter girzwald
- Start date
It probably would improve the experience but the whole point of Kinect is "YOUR BODY IS THE CONTROLLER".
Never played a Kinect by the way.
Never played a Kinect by the way.
The terrible thing about the Kinect is that there is no good way to give players control of movement or the camera in a 3D environment. This completely kills the possibility of many genres of games for the Kinect. Think about it, how do you effectively control movement or the camera of a 3D game with the Kinect?
There are 3 options:
1) Put the game on rails. This works but confines the experience and destroys both player agency and exploration. Players are forced to take part in a predetermined pacing.
2) Have the player make motions for moving their avatar that doesn't mimic the in-game movements the player's avatar is doing. Again this works, but if I'm waving my hand back and forth to move forward, a disconnect is created between what I'm doing and what my avatar is doing. The goal of any good UI or control scheme is to be as invisible as possible. Doing exaggerated motions to control an avatar that don't reflect what the avatar is doing isn't exactly invisible. It leads to breaking immersion.
3) Like the OP said, put some sort of controller in the player's hand. This could be the Xbox 360 controller, or some proprietary controller developed specifically for the game. This might solve the two issues above, but IF I HAVE A CONTROLLER IN MY HAND, WHAT THE FUCK IS THE POINT OF THE KINECT? It completely kills the entire idea of, "Your body is the controller."
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that almost nothing can be "better with the Kinect". It doesn't free us up from immersion-breaking control schemes; it limits what we can do in a game, and limits what games can become. It's a terrible piece of tech for games.
There are 3 options:
1) Put the game on rails. This works but confines the experience and destroys both player agency and exploration. Players are forced to take part in a predetermined pacing.
2) Have the player make motions for moving their avatar that doesn't mimic the in-game movements the player's avatar is doing. Again this works, but if I'm waving my hand back and forth to move forward, a disconnect is created between what I'm doing and what my avatar is doing. The goal of any good UI or control scheme is to be as invisible as possible. Doing exaggerated motions to control an avatar that don't reflect what the avatar is doing isn't exactly invisible. It leads to breaking immersion.
3) Like the OP said, put some sort of controller in the player's hand. This could be the Xbox 360 controller, or some proprietary controller developed specifically for the game. This might solve the two issues above, but IF I HAVE A CONTROLLER IN MY HAND, WHAT THE FUCK IS THE POINT OF THE KINECT? It completely kills the entire idea of, "Your body is the controller."
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that almost nothing can be "better with the Kinect". It doesn't free us up from immersion-breaking control schemes; it limits what we can do in a game, and limits what games can become. It's a terrible piece of tech for games.
I'm afraid that it isn't possible without a kinect 2.0, maybe placing markers on clothing. To be fair, as a development tool it can be great, example: i was at a company that builds prototypes with 3d printers, they used a kinect to scan models instead of a far more expensive solution. But in that case it's not used with fast motions or different lighting/ surroundings, as a gaming device it fails.
if there was some return of imput it would work better, it would be expensive as all hell but if it was a suit that let you feel, taste and smell the environments we see and hear it would be amazing...
I mean, its an odd thought but imagine all those movies and games with an alien, imagine what it feels like or the smell they have, things we dont think of but are base senses to us
I mean, its an odd thought but imagine all those movies and games with an alien, imagine what it feels like or the smell they have, things we dont think of but are base senses to us
Make games with Kinect in mind and not convert controller-input games into pure motion-input games. It's why you see all the really cool stuff it can do from people who aren't game studios.
Maybe we should stop considering the Kinect as a valid way of controlling games other then silly party games, and just concentrate on making it more efficient to use as a replacement for a TV remote? I mean voice control and hand signs are pretty simple, and no-one would ever have to look for the remote anymore!
Have some markers or something that you can stick on yourself and take off easily to make the recognition better. I feel like the majority of problems with the kinect is that the movement recognition is terrible.
I don't think it's salvageable, but they should never have dropped the Kinect doing its own processing on board. Ditching that and shoving all the number crunching to the 360 itself, thus sucking up %40 of the consoles processing power just to run it was the death knell of the whole concept. When you only have %60 of the 360's aging power to play with the only games you can develop are from the "Shit" genre. They don't so much have to pick up the style of game so much as the smell, consistency and texture of the shit.
Has anyone really been far even as decided to use even go want to do look more like?girzwald said:
Ways the Kinekt could be less shit:
Improve the tracking at close distances. Use a fish-eye lens, or multiple lenses, or something. I don't have the luxury of gaming in a warehouse with a cinema-size projector; anything I do gaming-wise will be within a metre or so of my TV and anything that doesn't cater for that just isn't for me.
Increase the per-digit fidelity, and I'm not talking noughts and ones, I mean fingers. I don't want to have to wave entire limbs when I play games, I want to be able to make a gun-gesture with my hand and have it control a gun onscreen. This is the reason deaf people use sign language to communicate, not friggin' semaphore.
This is the hard one: have games that use the Kinekt features in a meaningful way without resorting to gimmickiness. The bugger is that I can't think of a single way this could be done. Perhaps a FPS game that tracked your eyeballs so we could finally divorce "direction of movement" from "direction of looking", since in real life the two aren't synonymous. Perhaps there'll be some novel uses when voice recognition becomes reliable. But even then, lack of force feedback will still mean you're just waving your arms in the air with no sense of substance or weight.
I can see how hardware like the Kinekt can make dance-mats obsolete. Perhaps it could even give us an alternative to light-gun games. But for mainstream (non-peripheral) games I can't shake the feeling it'll remain a gimmick.
Ways to improve the kinect...
Throw it in the bath while your in it. Actually i shouldn't say that because people who bought kinect are probably mad enough to try it
Throw it in the bath while your in it. Actually i shouldn't say that because people who bought kinect are probably mad enough to try it
That sentence... I can't even guess at what you're trying to say.Batou667 said:
I never really had any high hopes for the Kinect. The problem with motion controls is that they always end up being used as a substitute for a controller, but with less precision and control. Instead of pressing a you wag your arm up and down. Instead of pushing the stick to move forward you awkwardly march in place. Until motion controls get to a level where you can actually replicate the movements people are making in game (instead of trying to match them to predetermined movement) and some means of walking around is discovered, motion controls just aren``t going to work