Dragon Age Forum News

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(Originally posted by chevalier)

Here are today's BioWare forum highlights, collected by NWVault. Please take into account that these are only single parts of various threads and should not be taken out of context. Bear in mind also that the posts presented here are copied as-is, and that any bad spelling and grammar does not get corrected on our end.

David Gaider, Designer

Pay to play?

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As for Bioware not making a toolset so other people could profit from it: you mean like the makers of various compilers, debuggers, 3D modeling tools, text editors, and the like not making their tools so companies like Bioware could make money writing games with them?
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Just to point something out, Yeti, we make many of our tools ourselves that we use. And for those we don't, like said compilers and programs such as Maya or 3dMax, we pay many thousands of dollars to acquire (often per copy).

Obviously the situation is not that different... if 3dMax can make a program that companies can use to make commercial products, why can't Bioware make a toolset which would allow the same? The answer is we probably could. There is, no doubt, a lot of legal rigamarole that we would need to go through, first, in order to set something like that up. And we also have a situation where we have publishing partners (whereas Discreet(sp?) and similar companies do not) who would also have to agree and take part in such a process, but it's not impossible. Would we charge many thousands, then, for such a toolset? Maybe not, but charging $50 for a tool that gives laissez faire to end-users to make commercial use of it would not be very smart.

Maybe there is a middle ground that could be found, legally, but in the end the question is where we choose to focus our time and effort. PW's, for instance, are not part of our focus... but there's also not a great deal we need to do to allow that as an unintended side-benefit. That's not the same with trying to arrange this kind of commercial-use situation... and especially considering that PW's do not fall officially without our design scope, bringing them up as a reason to include commercial-use will not get you far.

And as far as Dragon Age needing high-quality content from the community and that allowing them to make money on it is the only way to do so... perhaps. That's something that Bioware may wish to explore further, but it's not quite the same as pay-for-play. I wouldn't rule it out, though I would be leery of reaching a situation where any content actually worth playing/using required more money. That might get better content out there, perhaps, but would it be worth it to the players?

Anyhow, that's my take on it.

Is it still "We design the game with the same toolset we're giving to you" thing

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No other words about it. It's a different toolset:
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It's different only in that ours is constantly changing. The stuff that you eventually receive in a patch we are having added into our toolset on a daily basis... which means we have to debug those changes, as it often causes problems or crashes (nothing like having nothing to do all morning while you wait for the toolset to be rebuilt). Essentially, though, it's the same tool.

Merchant request for DA
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I liked the theft system in the Realms of Arkania games.
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In regards to a barter system, my only concern would be logic. If I want a valuable magic item from a merchant and I trade him some other valuable magic item for it, now he just had another magic item in stock that he can't sell.

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Why can't he sell it?
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Sell it to whom? Coin puts food on the table, not yet more stock.

I think the functionality that was added in HotU to cap gold or cap the amount he will offer for an item is realistic enough.

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Quote: That said, will magic items even be that common? Please say no.
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Maybe. Maybe there are magic items in every shop. Or nowhere to be found. Or maybe they're just "quality" items rather than magic per se. I'm just using NWN as an example and not talking about DA specifically.

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I'd love to see a RPG that drastically downplayed "stuff".
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I believe in Lionheart you could practically go through the game with the same equipment that you started with.

As far as bartering goes, I suppose those are good points. I'm not sure we'd really have a need for such a system in the OC, however, but perhaps something can be included for the builder's option.

Derek French, Technical Producer

About the implementation of LUA

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I have some questions about de implementation of LUA inside de DA Engine
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I have questions, too. Such as, "What implimentation of LUA?" We haven't used it since MDK2 days.

Installation types

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I would like to see several installation types, wchich i think were not included in nwn (or i must have missed something)
- Only single player game(for people without internet connection )
- Only multiplayer game (i have completed singleplayer game, and dont want to play it anymore)
- Both singleplayer and multiplayer game
In my oppinion it would give much flexibility to the game

English is not my native language so dont beat me if i made some mistakes...
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We could have done this, but it would have made a grand total of 200 Megs of difference in a 3700 Meg install. The short version is that it wouldn't have made much difference and would have been a PITA for us to allow for people to change their minds after the fact.

Don Moar, Tools Programmer

Is it still "We design the game with the same toolset we're giving to you" thing
Hey, There is no significant difference in functionality between the debug version of the NWN Toolset used internally and the release version used externally.

The only exception would likely be any new features that have been implemented for an update that hasn't been released yet. That would be like the Plot Wizard we added post-ship of the original NWN; it was available internally for several weeks before it hit the community. As with NWN, the DA team will be using the same toolset that will ship with the game. What this means, in terms of specific functionality, hasn't been locked down yet as the game and, consequently, the tools are still in development at this point.

Georg Zoeller, Designer

Visual realism vs story depth

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Different zots. Pointless 'vs.' argument.

Visual realism is strictly art department, and last I checked the graphics guys tend not to write the story of the game.
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Exactly. The question just doesn't work that way. It's not "either art or design" as completely different people work on different content and a writer will not suddenly start to model creatures and an animator will not suddenly write dialog.

If you want a "vs." question, you need to ask them department specific like "either horses or cloaks" or "either 6 background stories and 3 romances or 6 romances and 3 background stories" or something like that.

Sure, making a creature takes stuff from all departments (art to model, texture and animate), Design for AI, description, placement and backstory and programming to make the creature actually show up in the game and perform actions, but most of those tasks are pretty general - all creatures need to perform actions, show or have AI, so a new creature is mainly a question of art as animating and modelling consumes more time than popping it into the game.

Pay to play?

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with them?

It is in Bioware's best interest to have amazing content available, so that everybody wants to buy the game. The best way to produce amazing content is to recruit professionals, not teenagers with extra time. That's only going to happen if there's a business model, which may or may not include Bioware getting a license fee for each copy of a module sold.
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Wrong.

We got amazing content by the community available already, more than anybody here dreamed off. Some of the modules on the Vault have BioWare quality, granted not a lot, but thats what happens when you release an entry level toolset.

Adding cash will *not* suddenly increase the quality of content available nor will it make "professionals" suddenly jump over to NWN/DA because they can make cash. "Professionals" don't need to create NWN modules to make money, they make enough cash at their job to treat stuff like this as their hobby.

Frankly, many of the really talented modmakers/content creators out I remember are far away from being classified as teenagers with extra time:

- Adam/PipBoy3000 (Dream Catcher, Demon Cards) is beyond his teens
Click Here

- The DLA team (around 20-30 people?) requires you to be 18 to join, and some of their stuff is en par with of BioWare's content, if not better.
Click Here

- Tseramed is a former Origin employee who worked on Ultima 7
Click Here

- Papermonk isn't really a teen anymore, nor are most of the CODI team
Click Here

(Not that there is something wrong being a teenager with spare time in the first place. There are a couple of really bright people in their teens working in the community and their stuff is amazing)

No, I think we are pretty happy with the community we attracted with the non commercial approach for NWN, I don't see any good reason why we should suddenly switch that off.

You are proposing changing the whole structure of our community to a pay for play environment - because, as I explained above, adding cash radically alters the custom content experience for anyone involved:

Throwing "pay for the module" randomly into the community will alienate most of our valued customers as they will potentially buy a bad module and regret it. It will inspire all the grief associated with cash into our community, people stealing content/modules, people switching teams and take code with them, etc, etc.

Want an idea what cash will do to your community?
Take Diablo II - People were willing to pay money for items in this game. The potential for quick cash attracts shady people that try to trick other people into giving up their items, hack the game in order to dupe items or otherwise cause disruption and cause guilds/clans to turn on each other.

There are no valuable items in NWN (through I heard some idiots tried to sell some when NWN was released), but the whole point is extendable to anything - add cash and you attract people you don't want in your community and they will alter it or even destroy it.

I don't think I want that for the BioWare community.

Also I do not see any hard evidence from other game communities that adding cash would significantly increase the quality or availablity of content. I can just find examples why adding real world cash to your community causes distrust and fraud (take MMORPGs and "gold auctions").

Again - add cash and it's no longer a game. We primarily make games, not small business startup kits. If you want NWN/DA to be more than just a game, you got some options:

a) Go professional, join the industry (that's what I and several other NWN builders did - apply for a job at BioWare)

b) Create a damn good module and potentially get contracted by BioWare to create a DD module (which is a lot of work, it's really no longer a hobby at this point).

c) Create content and use it to get hired at another company.

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I'm a disappointed consumer willing to SPEND a buck. And, potentially, an investor willing to back a group that was selling 3rd party modules.
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In that case, we might have something for you in the future. You can read more about our Digital Distribution Project in the Witch's Wake forum.

And, by the way, you are correct about the writing part. Writing is among the most difficult things on the design side, you can be a scripting god and your module will still suck if your writing is bad. Only few people have the talent to do both, writing and scripting, so it's not surprising that there is only a small number of really good modules out there. NWN has an entry level toolset so everyone who "wants-to-be-a-game-designer" can get started with it - but as an individual, it's not easy.

Here at BioWare we have writers and technical designers and people do what they can do best - an individual module builder in the community needs either a lot of skill on both sides, or join a team.

More: Hey, don't move this into a PW supported / PW unsupported thread. This thread is about "pay for play", not about the significance of PWs and if they should be supported, there have been other threads about that and I think they have been reasonably clear on what you can expect from DA (through nothing is final). We know a part of the community likes then, we are not going to hinder PWs and it might (nobody knows yet) actually be easier to run them with DA - but they won't be officially supported and pretty sure you won't be able to charge money for the service.

You are right, if we would officially support them, there would be more PWs and they would be more popular, but the point is - we are not making a PW construction kit, we make Dragon Age, a story driven CRPG with multiplayer and toolset. We are not interested in creating a PW construction kit at this point, and that's not just because of we think it's not a sizeable market, it's also because we are not interested in creating one at this point.

Those 80% were made up to demonstrate the problem, they would also include normal modules people would run and ask money for. If we would allow people to charge money for their modules or servers (PW or not), I would imagine that up to 80% of the people would do so. Probably a too high number, but it was a worst case scenario anyway.

More: I think the reasons why I think pay for play for PWs is bad and why I don't think it will be wildly successful but instead harmful to our community can be found earlier in this thread.

The moment you enter a pay for service relationship with your players it is no longer a game.

You can be sued for your server not being available enough, your character vault getting hacked, investigated for not paying taxes on the income from the whole thing and people below 18 would be barred from running servers and playing on them as they are not able to make legally binding contracts. Add in it the joys of country specific laws affecting the cyberspace (Oh, you got a casino in your PW? Too bad you can now be sued in Utah for violating their anti-online-gambling act - Oh, some griefer made fun of a poor texan kid on your server - Sure the "Puritan Texan Mothers against RPGs league" will sue for the mental damages their kid got while watching that demon summoning ritual on your server ).

Believe me, you don't WANT to charge money for your hobby and most players don't want to pay for it - they bought their game for 50$ and don't want hidden side fees to play on most servers (because once you allow to charge for it, most people will do it).

I understand people are willing to pay for good modules they can play - we plan to deliver that with DD - but PWs that charge for the right to play on their servers are something I would rate very unlikely for DA.

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Just provide the tools not pre-fabricated parts!
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That's the point - we are not interested in creating a PW toolkit. If you use NWN or DA to do it, fine, we won't hinder you and every once in a while a feature that is added will be useful for it, but it's not the scope of the game. To make this clear: at this point we don't even know ourselves for sure what our engine will be capable of handling, so we won't promise you that you will be able to create your own PW using DA - The only thing I can tell you is that we don't have plans to artificially prevent people from creating their PWs and that the plan is to make the overall game more open to modding.

If you are looking for a supported PW Toolkit that allows you to make your own PWs and make money of them, I would suggest starting to look elsewhere - or create your own, by either licensing an engine or creating your own from the scratch.

Is it still "We design the game with the same toolset we're giving to you" thing

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Just like the NWN toolset the DA toolset does not allow rules editing. The toolset is for the creation of adventures not rules.

Internally it is useful for us to use 2da files. Currently all rules information is in a database that we periodically "export" to update the 2da files. The database lets us do analyzing/modification of the rules without us wasting zots developing a tool that would do the same thing.

Consistency of player experience is also important, when players jump from server to server, module to module, they should not have to relearn a rules system with each adventure -- as would happen if the toolset allowed custom rules modification. The good news is that for those who are really dedicated to modifying the rules there will be less hardcoding this time around. Most of the rules information will be in the 2das.
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That's actually the first time I hear brent use the word "zot"

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if you think about it, the things I referred to as "modular" in a RPG rule system are not many.

Classes
Races
Subraces
Skills/Abilities
Spells
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The interesting question is, even if we can't make NEW versions of the above, will there be capabilities to modify the existing ones?

It was possible to make new spells for BG2 using modding tools but it required the skill to make new BAMs or spell animations. Seeing as I lacked said talent, I certainly did tweak the existing spells and make them behave different ways.

I could be wrong, but AFAIK not only can you not make new spells for NWN, you can't even modify what the existing ones do.

Making things more modular and putting more in the 2DA files gets us off on the ground. That means that even if Bio doesn't provide in the Toolset proper, SOMEBODY will write a kick-arse 2DA editor with some wizards to give you the guidance to make the tweaks you want.

Or so we hope.

I'm with you -- I hope if nothing else the CAPABILITY to make new classes, races, spells, abilities, and rules is in there -- maybe even monsters and placeables and not just magic items -- moving as much as possible out of hardcoding and into 2DAs opens the door -- I'm ok if Bio doesn't provide the tools but opens the door for the capability, as the community will step in and provide the tools.

As is, on the Mac side, we're waiting for basic functionality viz. Aurora, but we digress.
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What Brent said -

New Spells - The Spellman Project (awesome stuff, including VFX): http://smp.digitaldreamscapes.org/main.php

New Spells, PRCs - Click Here

Editing spells in NWN is really easy. Just open the spellscript in the toolset and change what it does

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Quote: What Brent said -

New Spells - The Spellman Project (awesome stuff, including VFX): http://smp.digitaldreamscapes.org/main.php

New Spells, PRCs - Click Here

Editing spells in NWN is really easy. Just open the spellscript in the toolset and change what it does
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I dislike how it was touted that you could create a game simply and easily with the toolset, and then I have to edit all thes 2das and use thises and thats'ses. The game should come packaged with one of the bioware developers to help me with that conflabbed contraption.
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Actually NWN was advertised as "create your own D&D forgotten realms module", not "create your own rules system" The 2da editing part is unsupported and not recommended for the average user (hence the warning when you associate a hakpak with your module).

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Some questions, Brent and George (or any non-Bio folks who want to jump in):
(and forgive my ignorance, as you're dealing with a person who hasn't used the NWN toolset, only read about it and observed its products)

1. When you say you can modify classes, well, I know you can do things like adjust the BAB 2DA tables, or increase the frequency of gaining feats, but ....
a. can you make NEW feats for that class?
b. could you change (for example) Rangers so that they gain Arcane instead of Divine spells (I'm not saying this makes sense, I'm just asking if you can do it).

In other words, are the changes you can make to classes superficial or fundamental?

2. When you say you can MAKE classes, I notice the PRC Consortium has made several new prestige classes, but I don't see anybody making non-prestige/base classes. Is that even possible - i.e. making an entirely new base class that is not a prestige layer on some other base class?

3. I guess I'm surprised to hear you say you can make spells, because I peek at NWVault once in a while, and I've never seen too many new spells posted there. I also never saw too many modified versions of existing spells there, either. Whereas folks using the TeamBG tools seem to have made a whole bunch of spells in the BG2 mods like Darkest Day...

Anyway, as I say, I'm glad you're moving even more features into 2DAs, may I humbly suggest you put a decent 2DA editor into the Toolset, have a bright red warning scream "TOUCH THESE FILES AND YOU'RE ON YOUR OWN, JACK", and then get out of the way?
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You should really ask these questions in the NWN Custom Content Forum.

You can indeed change feat gains, add new feats or spells to a class, etc.

Adding new spells is easy really easy, but only since Hordes of the Underdark which added custom talktables.

About .2da editor - Notepad is fine for most situations, for larger .2das it's trivial (with a small bit of programming knowledge of course) to import .2da files into Excel or Access. If you need documentation for NWN, I suggest digging here: http://ccg.dladventures.com. DA will have far better documentation for content creators than NWN.

As Brent said, things like adding new classes or races or whatever will require .2da editing and more indepth knowledge of the game, it's not really a priority for us to include wizards to do this stuff as it's not something the average user should do without understanding how the system works. The primary scope of the DA tools will likely be "create your own story in the world of DA" through it will probably be easier to create completely new content for the game than it was for NWN.

Mac Support?!?!

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That's the rub. BioWare is not a publisher AT ALL. They are a developer and will need to come to an agreement with a publisher (Atari, et al). Whether that publisher wants to deal with a Mac release or PC/Mac co-release cannot be known at this time.
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As always, accurate and totally true.

About the implementation of LUA
I think the Witcher Team is using LUA in their modified version of Aurora. This however has nothing to do with Dragon Age.

Merchant request for DA
That throws up an interesting question: What relation do you think is a healthy one in terms of the impact equipment and spells should have on your overall character "power"

character : equipment
90:10 - You kill almost anything with your characters special abilities and fighting power - only for bosses you need to resort to special items

75:25 - You can tackle most creatures without your equipment on, however lieutentants will hurt you somewhat damage, and bosses will likely to kill you.

50:50 - You will be able to fight easy and some medium monsters without equipment, but lieutenants and bosses can't be killed without decent equipment

20:80 - Like diablo. You are unable to beat anyone but the weakest enemies if your equipment is lost

Your thoughts?

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(Aside: I assume that when you say 'with/without your equipment on' you are referring to with/without magic items, not literally naked characters.)
Carl
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Basic equipment (rusty shortsword and such )

Keep in mind that if you go 90:10, your are dramatically decreasing the value and impact items have on gameplay and the variations they can have, in fact, you the difference between a high and a low magic item would be neglegtible and you would have to offset the need for constant advancement/reward of the player by rapidly gaining abilities/levels (adding lots of exploration and other reward moments (i.e. fighting a new monster for the first time) might help as well, but is far more expensive).

Will there be a physics System?
The point is - you don't need a physics system for most of that. Today, having a "physics system" is new and cool and people will hype your game for it, but you can fake most of the stuff using traditional triggers or scripting quite well. Your barrel got hit by a weapon - get the position of the attacking object and move it 5' away from it, playing a movement animation - or just destroy it and play a "debris fly around" animation.

I lately played Deus Ex and Farcry and I was not too impressed with what the physics engine actually adds to gameplay. Sure, it's fun for the first 5 minutes to throw garbage cans onto the basketball field but after that. Those 5 situations in the game where you shoot on the beam that holds the roof over the enemies and make it crash can easily be scripted - at a much lesser cost.

I agree that stuff like deformable terrain can add to your experience by reinforcing the immersion and sense that your character has actually impact on the gameworld, but whether or not a corpse "behaves" realisticly under the impact of bullets or a rope swings into the correct direction when you hit it with your gun is irrelevant for your gameplay experience after 5 minutes, especially in an RPG where you don't control your avatar in first person view.

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Problems with scripting:
1) Each situation has to be scripted independantly, unless it is exactly the same... and if it is then what's the point?

2) Lacks consistancy if one developer scripts an object (barrel, boat) to do something (catch fire, explode) in one area, and another one doesn't in a different area.

3) Extra work for builders to script functionality into each object. Even just selecting the "roll down a hill" script for every barrel in an area would be damn tedious.
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I somewhat disagree:

1) If there are only a handful of situations where you would make use of the physics engine for major game impact (like in recent games) - shoot the beam, bring the roof down on the enemies, etc, you can easily script them and the player will notice no difference. In fact, I have the strong feeling that those situations in some of the recent "physics engine" games were scripted (i.e. roof collapesed the same way, regardless from where you hit hit.

2) That would be an unprofessional approach. You would have one designer responsibe for scripting interactive placeables, not every designer cook their own soup. Blessed be templates.

3) Same here, you rather write a generic script for that, add some terrain checking scripting functions and make it default for all barrels. Long live templates.

One reason why I believe that you are better off with scripting than a generic physics engine for many things is that the physics engine opens a whole new level of uncertainty for QA. It sure would suck if you shot the truck with the barrels with your sniper rifle from 500 meters away and the explosion would position the wreck in front of a vital door ... and when you finally reach the point where that happened after 5 savegames and 20 minutes later, you realize that you are stuck...

I think a lot of the fascination for simulated real world systems, physics engines, etc is that they make people think they are in a limitless world where they can do things in ways the developers never thought off - endless fun, the game plays different every time. In reality the impact of a physics engine in small in that regard, especially when you think of a traditional, story driven BioWare role playing game - because the story has a finite number of branches and endings and there is a finite number of subquests you can do. Yes, you have nonlinearity in some parts of the game and a lot of different choices you can make, but still, they are finite.

Selected systems, like Jade's cloths physics system add something to the game because they make the character - which you are close up with for the whole game - feel more natural and allow you to convey some more atmosphere (i.e. strong wind brushing aside hair and cloth) - and make for cool screenshots, but there is no real need to track velocity, height and movement of any object in the game to make it fall or roll down the hill realisticly if it doesn't really impact the gameplay (like the logs that smash down the hill and kill the attackers) - and those key situations can easily be scripted with a custom art placeable - no need to waste valuable CPU cycles during the 90% of the time players are not even close to triggering such a key event.

Merchant request for DA
It's actually an interesting observation that you can use this system to describe the impact of "equipment" through human history.

While a caveman was nearly independent from equipment (take that rock or stick to bash the food - you just need to be strong and smarter than the food, not too hard), the importance of equipment would increase as time progresses - major inventions like armor, ranged weapons or gunpowder would significantly shift the impact of equipment on the outcome of a particular fight (bad idea to show up with a knife to a shootout).

So to speak, todays world would probably be something that's more like 40:60 to 50:50 in terms of personal skill : equipment.

There's also one thing that's kind of blurring the lines is skill with equipment (i.e. weapon skill). And, btw, there will be no "Master Work Items" in DA, that is D&D stuff.

Brenon Holmes, Programmer

Will there be a physics System?

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all that aside, it just seems that having one (phys engine) is better than not simply for the convenience of having a unified function with consistent behaviour. apply it to whatever specific situations or objects you want, dont for everything else.
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It really depends on what kind of behaviour you want the engine to exhibit. Generally you look at physics engines if you want the whole package and if it's going to be a part of gameplay... objects bouncing, colliding, reflecting, tumbling, rolling... etc.

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for predefined behaviour such as with weapons and combat, i would think that arbitrary effect numbers (damage or damage absorbtion) would be applied independant of the phys and only have some force vector applied to simulate the impact. games like wolfenstein or battlefield seem to get away with such shortcuts just fine...
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In most Multiplayer FPS games, if you pay really close attention... you'll probably notice that they cheat. Most of the 'physics' are either specific scripted sequences with animations or they're things that don't affect gameplay (ragdoll physics on dead guys).

For example, when you're shot your character doesn't actually react to the bullet... you don't spin around and fall down from the impact of getting shot. That sort of thing doesn't add appreciably to the gameplay experience as it's more likely to annoy the player ('specially in an FPS game ).

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balancing the thing between simulation and game would be difficult, i'm sure... dying all the time isn't fun but being able to manipulate the environment is... and honestly, who ever thought a 3 ft halfling could tank a 50 ft dragon...
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I'm curious, what kind of environment manipulation did you have in mind? Normally when I hear people talking about these sorts of things, they seem to be thinking of knocking over crates, pushing chairs, flipping tables... etc.

Assuming that you had the option of doing things like that... how would you interface with that sort of thing? Generally it works well in an FPS style view, but in a 3rd person BG-style view?

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if the arrow's behaviour is self contained or something, wouldn't it be a bigger hassle to have to code for every situation? where having a phys engine results in unintended consequences, the lack of having one results in chasing unforseen situations?
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Again it depends... calculating arrow trajectories is rather simple and while the end result may not be absolutely realistic the results generally look good enough that you can't tell the difference.

If we needed to apply physics simulations to a large number of situations then yes there is some potential application for a physics engine. But, that said, there is not.

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even without a pe, nwn has displayed emergent behaviour. corner sneaking. kd avoidance. dc 127. bows of see invis. 254 stats. 10k+ skill points. bugs... bugs... bugs... it happens... of course, increased complexity adds to that, but the writing's on the wall...
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Heh, well... I'm not sure I would call that emergent behaviour... some of that is simply a nasty manipulation of the rules (some refer to that as exploiting). The rest are bugs. Bugs are errors, whereas I'd argue that emergent behaviour plays by the 'rules' but is simply not predicted or forseen.

Take Black & White for example... you could teach your monkey to go to the bathroom on rocks, then set them on fire and throw the rock into the ocean... I'm fairly certain the devs at Lionhead didn't think that that sort of thing would occur when they were working on the system. However it isn't violating any rules (except maybe some health codes ).

Oh, one last thing before I go pass out in the corner. We are going to be using physics for certain things... (as I mentioned before) just not an engine, there hasn't been a demonstrated need for one (again, ignoring the technical issues).

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The interface would not be that huge problem I would say. You could click on an object and chose push, grab etc... and if you wanted to throw it you could chose the target with the mouse (or the force that you throw the object with can be detremined depending on how you move your mouse).

Im not so sure that it would be the brandwith hit of doom but it would not exactly help... one can simply transmit the objects cordinates and rotations to the players in the area.
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Say I wanted to push something at an angle, like lifting one end of a table to lean it up against a door? Or tilt a chair back?

Also, there's no way to communicate the amout of force you want to apply in your suggestion... what if I only want to move the table 0.2 meters instead of the default 1.0 meters?

Essentially what you're talking about there is constraining interaction of objects to a 2D environment, and in that case you could probably just as easily do it with animations instead of going with a full blown physics engine.

As to the last part... no. You couldn't do that. What you're talking about (from what I understand) is a few things.

1) Running the simulation on the server, which means that the server instead of simply knowing some basic information about objects would need a full view of the world including models/animations. Something it does not currently do. As well as being computationally expensive when you take into account all the things the server is already doing...

2) Sending down snapshots of the current worldview for physics objects. This *would* be a 'bandwidth hit of doom'. To put it into perspective... a complex animation (without keyframe reduction) runs around 20-24 keyframes a second (average number). Even assuming we reduced that number down quite a bit, that's a crazy number of updates per object per second even with an interpolation system of the gods. That's also not even going into the data we'd have to send... position, orientation, velocity as well as a host of other miscellaneous data. What you end up with is 'prohibitive'.

3) Clients don't always show the same picture, lag, packet loss... etc. All these things can cause the client to go out of synch. If you're simply forcing the client to show the server's simulation there are cases where it will look (possibly drastically) wrong.

I'll poke my head back in here later if there are more replies. But please take a moment to carefully read over what I've written. Just saying that you don't think it would be hard doesn't make it so...

I'm sure that someday, someone will include a full physics engine into a MP game with all the bells and whistles... if that happens, you can bet that it will figure quite prominently into that game's gameplay.

More:
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Half-Life 2 is shipping with MP using a full physics engine, but since it is a FPS it is probubly less brandwith intensive then an RPG (they are also making the small objects (like soda cans) to be purly client side).

You are right about the model thing. But some box kina thingy might be a way to work around it.

How about sending the position information to the client just once a second? Leaving it up to the client "fill in" the missing data, might not make the server and the client perfectly in synch but it should be close enough.

What I really want is fully interactible enviroment actually, I would not give a jack about physics if physics did not help that.
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Regarding upcoming games (FPS) with physics in them... I'm guessing that most likely the SP game will feature all sorts of nifty physics bound things you can do... however in the multiplayer component? Most likely scripted situational with animations... and physics fluff (like shooting the leg off a table, getting tossed back by grenade blasts, etc...). That said though, I'll happily chew thoughtfully on my words if/when I'm wrong.

Interactivity I can definetly understand... but as I said before it has to be specifically intended interactivity. Unforseen behaviour breaks plots.

You'll also note that in FPS physics style games you normally run missions... you have specific objectives that are based around the player and usually only peripherally involves NPC's.

So, interactivity == good. Gotcha.