Randy: Another comment concerns the ability to sneak around. A spiderman-esque walking-on-walls-and-ceilings power-up was suggested, which seems like a fine idea on one side and a monstrous can-o-worms on the other. More realistically, it was suggested that we could get the invisibility potion working which seems much simpler to implement and perhaps can demonstrate the visibility elements in the demo in some powerful ways. But without AI's having the ability to hear, this seems a bit rocky as well.

Tim: I agree, though for "monstrous can-o-worms," read "total madness." An obvious idea to consider, but only until you think about it a bit more. Extra physics and biped animation work for a power-up that destroys our ability to keep the player in the mission area, extra work to keep him from walking on the sky, etc. Consider the restrictions we put on the rope arrow precisely to control where the player could and could not use it, then think how much worse Spider Climb would be.

One cool thing that this would get us is cool, odd perspectives, which brings us back to Doug and my idea to let you hang upside-down from ropes, maybe as a way of freeing your hands while climbing. The main fly in this ointment being complicating the problem of sorting the rope and the PC together during climbing.

While we're on the subject though, it seems like a good time to advance Tom's Shrinking Potion idea. Potentially relatively lightweight work to implement (feasibility comments anyone?) but it profoundly affects your visibility and access to certain spaces in a straightforward and constrained way.

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Chris: Another problem with being tiny is object interactions. I know that if I suddenly became a foot tall (in the game, not in real life) one of the first things I would try to is is hide under a table, or under other such things...which won't work with the table's current physics model.

One of the reasons we can get away with using sphere or bouding-box physics representations is that most of the objects are relatively small compared to the player. If we suddenly cut the size of the player by a factor of 3 or 4, we've decreased the apparent fidelity by which we physically model objects by the same amount.

Overall, I'm not too keen on the shrinking potion...it seems like a neat idea, but the more I think about it the more I'm unsure about the interactions (both technically and gameplay-wise) that it will cause to become problematic. Does it really fit into our stealth gameplay? Are you effectively both invisible and inaudible while shrunk (or just nearly so)? If guards can detect you, can they step on you?