Phenological/Behavioral Variation Algorithm?

[Guest CRiZ]

Sorry for the pompous title, but that's exactly what I mean.

Basically, I think that at Doom3's new level of detail it will be annoying to see Imps that look EXACTLY the same. We are going to want to see some personality, some variation in the classes. A large imp would be stronger, and a thin imp may be faster. The point of this is to make things more realistic by making everything about the monsters less predictable.

Imagine if you were an alien (like an imp or something) and the hell portals opened up or whatever and you found yourself having to battle against all humanity. The variation you would see among all the humans trying to kill you would be extensive. It would pretty scary to not have a single enemy prototype. You could only assume/guess at the characteristics and personailty of each human coming at you. They may be fast, slow, smart, dumb, weak, or strong.

Doom3 would be truly robust if an algorithm existed to do this job, and differently every time. I just mean slightly altering height, thickness(apparent weight), and details like size of horns, teeth. These differences could correspond to slight behavioral differences. It would give the monsters so much character, so much life, thus making them more fun to kill! :-)

These differences could be connected to their stats or they could not. A height difference suggests greater strength and so an imp fireball could be thrown a bit harder and do 1 or 2 points more damage than a normal imp. Or they could keep it simple and just use the differences to make the game more visually scary and not effect these traits at all.

What do you all think? Would this be possible to implement realistically? Would we even want it? What about the fact that there would be unique bodies and non-unique skin? Would it add too much unpredictability to replay value?

[deadnail]

Hmm, haven't heard this one in a while, yet, we've still covered this in great detail about three, maybe four months back.

Did you know that there are some models in Q3A that don't use all the mesh detail? That's dependant on the skin. Like the Tank Girl one, same model... with one skin she has the missle tits and another skin she does not. It's up to the modeller.

So think of a very detailed zombie... now, with proper skin work, one model can be convincingly five different zombies. Two or three models and... well, you get my point. And that's not even including randomizing height, build, hair color, scars, tattoos, and whatnot.

I don't want to get into this one again, but perhaps some of the guys that started this would like to reiterate what they first said.

[Lord FlatHead]

If you're talking about differences than can't be 'faked' with just different skins (like deady suggests), that probably won't happen. The modellers are still doing a lot of frame-by-frame manual modelling stuff, so dramatically increasing the number of models (even just head models) would not be very feasible.