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Finally! Technology has caught up to Stephenson's books. While I'm not a gamer, I'm a huge Stephenson fan and I am excited to see Clang exist.

Ping time will be the killer.

With a shooter, you can fudge it. You see you hit, so you hit, and the other guy can't really argue, since the precise angle of the weapon isn't really perceptible from whatever distance you got shot from.

With swords, you NEED force feedback. You see you hit... you feel the hit... but there's a certain amount of time between you hitting and someone else getting hit, or you hitting the sword, and him feeling the sword hit. And all those near-miss physics problems. This will be the bane of their development process.

You could bring two guys together in the same room with controllers for zero ping time... but they may as well go at it with nerf swords.

Most of this has been done to a degree.
See: Warband.
http://www.mountandbladewarband.com

From my experience battling the 10 heroes of the ditch, the type and heft of the sword is critical. Don't use a two handed sword against a rapier. But this is a game, so realism is out from the start.

Okay, I watched the video with the re-enactments, and here's a pet peeve of mine; it seems as if no one gets it... Never parry with the edge of your blade, you will nick it and ruin it, and it will not cut properly anymore. Maintaining a sharp edge is important! Instead, parry with the flat part of the blade, thus maintaining a sharp edge... It really is commonsense.

wlahaie, on 11 June 2012 - 04:48 PM, said:

This can depend on which particular style of sword being used. For example, with a one-handed weapon (e.g. a sabre), your grip will be strongest in the cutting direction, with your thumb behind the cutting edge, and your fingers curled round the cutting side. From here, a parry with the flat of your blade will be extremely weak and strain the wrist joint. With larger, two-handed varieties, the off-hand can offset this, but you'll still find that the strongest angle is against that in which you intend to cut (for obvious reasons). Moreover, you should not be parrying with the part of the blade you intend to be cutting with anyway—cuts should be made with the front third of the blade (where your swing imparts most momentum, and where your opponent is likely to be standing), and you should be parrying with the back third of the blade, where your block will be solid. Beats, and other attacks on your opponent's blade should, however, be made with the flat or back edge.

Gabe Newell cameo FTW

crosswordbob, on 11 June 2012 - 05:14 PM, said:

As you point out, parrying and cutting with two different parts of the edge makes sense, however a parry with the edge constitutes a block, and I believe that it is much better to deflect than to block, as speed and fluidity are of the essence in a fight with bladed weapons. Beating or pushing the other blade aside allows to swiftly slide to the inside of the opponent's guard and attack a target in a single movement. Blocking causes a momentary pause that breaks the fluidity. Granted, I am speaking mostly from experience with a few styles of kenjutsu, however I highly recommend John Clements book "Medieval Swordsmanship: Illustrated Methods and Techniques" (Paladin Press) [ISBN 1-58160-004-6] in which he advocates a similar approach to the use of European swords. Also see "Renaissance Swordsmanship: The Illustrated Use of Rapiers and Cut-and-Thrust Swords" (Paladin Press) [ISBN 0-87364-919-2] by the same author.

wlahaie, on 11 June 2012 - 05:49 PM, said:

Aye—part of what I was trying to say was that the range of weapons—and so techniques—that fall under "sword-fighting" is so huge that it's hard to talk about "the" right way to do it. And in fact that's part of the reason I'm dubious about the project's goals of simulating the whole lot via existing controllers. The fighting style of a given weapon is a function of the size, weight and balance of the weapon, and of the armour being worn. Crudely speaking, you have a balancing act between the damage a blade can do against an armoured opponent, and the manoeuvrability afforded by your own weapon and armour (not to mention stamina). Boil all that to a one-size-fits-all controller, and it's hard to see how to convince players not to (say) employ rapier techniques with a bastard sword.

Unless, that is, they were to find a nice way to abandon the notion of a direct correlation between your controller position and your avatar's sword position, so that however quickly you shake the controller about, your avatar's sword remains bound by inertia. It's not easy to see how well that could work without experimenting, but it may turn out fine. I'll not back the project until then, though. I have horrible memories of Die by the Sword.

crosswordbob, on 11 June 2012 - 05:14 PM, said:

Another bit of 'common sense' is considering which is worth more to you: Your sword or your life.

A blade can be repaired, re-forged or replaced if it gets damaged. Your head can't be picked up and put back on if it's lopped off, nor can a gallon of blood be conveniently pumped back into you (in time), should you suffer a nick to an artery and bleed out. Arms and legs can be re-attached with modern techniques... very expensively and often with long-lasting, if not permanent disability.

Worrying about the sword should be way down on the list, somewhere way below 'keep opponent from injuring me'.

One of the later, nastier tactics with lighter swords in duels was to inflict lots of little injuries on your opponent's less vital (and less well guarded) areas, assuming a strong personal defense. You won't take him down with one fatal, glorious strike, but every bit of bleeding will hasten the moment when he's on his knees, shivering in a pool of his own blood.

And bleeding brings me to one of the important, poorly modeled things in most games. Trauma, shock and bleeding. Many do a decent enough job of modeling 'head shot'. But they mostly do static damage. Literally counting hits. 1, 2, 3, you're dead. But someone who's 99% riddled with injuries in a game will keep fighting forever (and usually never run out of bullets, either), disregarding the affects of injuries. One peripheral wound can be fatal, or at least disabling, if you give it a minute. And of course, even a small wound has the potential to break their morale and take the fight out of them.

Take a limb off, and nobody will carry on at 100%, like 'The Black Knight' in Monty Python's Holy Grail. Well, not for more than tens of seconds. Seconds if they keep moving around. Severing the arteries and veins that serve those limbs is just about as effective as severing the limbs, and usually vein, artery and nerve are routed pretty close together.

A map of artery+vein locations, and the concept of bleeding+shock needs to be in the game. Yeah, you got 'em in the heart or brain, they go down right away, but these are well protected organs. But anywhere in a major artery will take them down almost as fast. Straight down the middle of the whole abdomen, near the back is the descending aorta and vena cava. A nice slash deep into the middle of someone's guts will hit that, and lights out in seconds. Again, you have to get the sword all the way in, practically to the spine. Various spots on arms and legs (and neck), major arteries are accessible with not so deep a cut. Stabbing in any number of places will cause debilitating pain. Poke 'em in the lung, but fail to bleed them, and they will go down... in time... and every breath will begin to really suck.

Evildave, on 11 June 2012 - 08:53 PM, said:

All correct but I'm compelled to point out that the phrase "common sense" tends to be synonymous with "wrong". Just my opinion, though.

There are exceptions to every rule, but taking care of the weapons is something to do between battles, as is investing in new ones long before they begin to wear out.

A notched blade could probably get caught on something like armor, which could be a fatal delay in some sort of extended free for all melee. But its a smaller concern than preventing someone else's sword from connecting with your own flesh.

In a battle, "OMG! I think I nicked my sword!" is as useful a worry as "My nail polish! Oh, no!"

If you're going to worry over every nick and ding, at least consider how much more it will hurt when you jam that scuffed up meat cleaver into his guts.

I'm not a sword nut. Or really a gun not. I at least know how to operate a gun. Either way, knowing what to shoot/stab is important, but safety is even more important. I know better than to wield a sword. I'd be about as likely to injure myself with it, without some basic training in handling something 'sword-like', but with various face and body protection, and little chance of doing much more than bruising. I have severe 'hammer and thumb disease', and I at least know it. If there is a soldering iron, I will reach for the hot end. If there is an edge, it will have my blood on it, sooner or later. Power tools like chainsaws and reciprocating saws and various other things bring out a terror in me that focus my concentration very keenly. I know exactly what they can do to unprotected flesh, and I like my fingers where they are.

I used to own guns, but I got tired of taking care of them. Even the stainless steel ones need to be broken down and cleaned and inspected, whether you use them or not, at least annually.

A real sword would be even more labor intensive. Too much bother.

Wii Remote support via Bluetooth.

Now.

Savataba, on 11 June 2012 - 03:33 PM, said:

Ugh i hate mount&blade, its like just another excuse for everyone to develop only fantasy titles.

Evildave, on 11 June 2012 - 08:53 PM, said:

Alright, of course a fighter's own life should be his primary concern, not his weapon. However that is not an excuse for using poor technique that results in unnecessary damage to the weapon, which might cost upwards of twelve cows at the local farmer's market. Blocking edge-on-edge is used often in choreographed stage fighting for the safety of the actors and for dramatic effect, not because it is an effective technique. I did stage fighting with hand-and-a-half swords (aka bastard swords) for a year, and when I started kenjutsu practice (katori shinto-ryu), I realized the difference between an acting technique, and a fighting technique, and a lot of my previous assumptions about swordsmanship were challenged. A real swordfight ends in three seconds, not three minutes, unlike what is often portrayed in dramatized Hollywood productions. The swiftest way to dispatch an opponent is economy of movement. The parry and the counter-attack have to be combined in a smooth, single movement, which cannot be accomplished by parrying edge-on-edge, but rather by parrying with the flat of the blade, making sure to always keep the cutting edge pointed at the adversary.

Of course, we do not live in an age where men-at-arms live and die by the sword, so to settle the question once and for all, we would have to resort to experimentation by training two different groups of fighters of similar physical attributes and ability levels. One group would be taught edge-on-edge parrying, and the other flat-on-edge parrying. Then fighters from both groups would be paired with one another, and we could statistically analyze the survival rates of fighters of each group. This would probably give us the best possible answer, but is impractical for obvious medical and insurance reason.

So, our next best option would be to build a computerized simulation and try it out virtually. As you brilliantly mention, we should take into account veinous and arterial location on a body map of each fighter, but also VO2 MAX (to assess aerobic capacity), bone density (to assess the risk of fractures), as well as muscle glycogen, ATP and lactic acid content to determine the precise moment when the fighter experiences fatigue.

We could go one step further and take into account quantum physics and string theory also, if the results still prove inconclusive