Neal Stephenson wants to revolutionize sword fighting video games | Hacker News Reader

Neal Stephenson wants to revolutionize sword fighting video games

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Biggest problem with these games (I've found, anyway) is that your sword controller cannot magically stop in mid air when your virtual sword hits another sword or a wall or whatever. It really ruins the immersion.

It will also have to drastically downplay the importance of footwork. In a real swordfight, where to put your feet is nearly as important as where to put the sword.

This is also true for a plethora of sports games as well, specifically racquet based games. Swinging the racquet is less than half the battle -- footwork, in most physical types of activities, is much more important.

Omnidirectional treadmill? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omnidirectional_treadmill

These things are ridiculous. Researcher: "We need an omnidirectional treadmill, but how?" Engineer: "Oh, that's easy. We'll just make a gigantic TREADMILL OF TREADMILLS."

That engineer would make a good Haskell programmer.

or lisp, take your pick

> Omnidirectional treadmill?

About 3:50 into the video entitled "The weeds" Mr. Stepehnson says "We're going to start with an off-the-shelf controller that anyone can buy today. This eliminates the risk that we'll blow this by failing on some ambitious custom hardware project. From there we'll iterate based partly on your feedback. "

So no treadmills at first.

And intimately related, distance. In Kendo at least you win or lose by knowing where the cutting part (the forward 1/4 - 1/3) of your sword is going to be at the moment you make contact. This means thinking strategically about distance (e.g. I can feint a forearm strike and still have enough space to cut across the abdomen if she raises her sword to block.)

This is why I don't like games talking about how 'realistic' they will be. Firstly, because anything that runs on a standard computer will be far from reality anyway, and secondly because often users don't actually want reality (eg. most FPSs have far from realistic walking speeds - for good reason. Also stylised graphics etc.).

That said, the concept of different styles of swordplay is great - and having more 'realism' in that is something I think is pretty admirable.

Don't get bogged down in the pedantry of realism. When 'realism' is mentioned in gaming, it really means 'realism that assists immersion'. You'll occasionally see articles about balancing realism versus gameplay - if something is real enough to turn you off the game (like boredom from slow movement speed), then it's reducing your immersion.

Johan Andersson, the designer of historical strategy games (Europa Universalis), put it best: "When realism gets in the way of fun, fun wins."

Surely any game where you can respawn even once is already extremely realistic.

Would anyone want to play a war simulator FPS that starts with a cutscene of the Normandy landings and has a 50% chance of immediately being cut down by a machine gun whereupon the game quits and deletes itself off your hard drive?

Relevant PBF comic: http://pbfcomics.com/134/

Wow, there are a couple of new ones!

It's interesting to note that in GTA IV (not exactly an FPS, though) gameplay appears to be slowed down quite a bit compared to previous games in the series. Probably that's facilitated by more realistic graphics, with many little details to entertain our brain while the character gets out of the car.

> In a real swordfight, where to put your feet is nearly as important as where to put the sword.

Arguably more important. I fenced epee in university, and our coach was a little bit old school -- we went weeks just doing footwork before getting a weapon put in hand.

Well, in epee your opponent can score by stabbing you in the foot. That's naturally going to give where you put your place your feet a little importance to begin with.

That's premature optimization. That's the not the important reason for footwork.

This is really true. There are a lot of great stage combat clubs and groups around the country, after a certain point, it seems like it might just be more fun to go spar for real, or go learn some real choreography if you want the added 6 layers of safety (a must if you are using steel, IMO).

That was my thought as well. If I need to buy some fancy hardware and swing it around to play a game... I'll probably just go buy a practice foil and sign up for a class instead!

If it were a real [sword] fight most couldn't play. It's a game. Certain allowances have to made for ease of use.

I mean, do you really think COD is "real combat"?

i almost quit the cod4 single player campaign because it was a bit too ... maybe not realistic, but stressful. i thought to myself: war is hell, so why do i want to play a game that tries to capture a soldiers misery?

"most couldn't play" - but they could learn to play (as long as losing isn't fatal for the player). some games strive to be realistic above all else (some car racing games), because they are tailored for the ultra-enthusiasts.

This.

I took a not-for-credit intramural fencing and kendo classes back in college, and 3/4's of both classes was about learning footwork and movement.

Sword fighting also generally comes down to a few seconds of motion and whoever judged their opponents movements better. Neither of these would be present in a game that wasn't full motion capture.

I had a kendo instructor who said that footwork was 80% of the physical side of it. A fencing instructor said something similar. Boxers and boxing coaches also understand this.

Combine Kinect with the controller. I'm more concerned with haptic feedback.

Or you can use Kinect or Wii controllers on each limb like this guys do: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=erMi8kxYFIE

Yep, that and the controller has no weight. To make a realistic game you would then need to make the character have a max swing agility (slow than the player) and also give the character a stamina bar. Anyway that's not to say you can't have fun sword fighting motion games. It just means you can't approximate reality 1:1 in all dimensions.

But you can still approximate reality if you just accept the control dimension will be abstract! Consider that Sim City uses an abstract interface to simulate city planning. Surely thats not the interface real city planners use (meetings, proposals) but it's still approximating a reality of city planning much more closely than other games.

Swords are a lot lighter than people think, even the heaviest armor in use (completely different from the ceremonial stuff) was much less restrictive than usually believed, and the average video gamer is significantly less fit than the average medieval soldier. I suspect that if you used a wiimote or a kinect-tracked stick things would all balance out. It would still require some abstraction, true, but not quite that much.

[1] European longswords weigh 1.5 kg on average: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longsword

[2] Guy doing gymnastics in armor: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xm11yAXeegg

> the average video gamer is significantly less fit than the average medieval soldier.

I am curious if this is just speculation or if you have evidence for this statement? At first it seems reasonable but I am not so confident after you factor in modern medicine and advances in nutrition/diet and discount for stereotyping.

Consider the draw weight of the longbow - "Although the draw weight of a typical English longbow is disputed, it was at least 360 newtons (81 pounds-force) and possibly more than 600 N (130 lbf), with some estimates as high as 900 N (200 lbf)". And they would loose approximately 6 arrows per minute in combat. And this was a weapon for the yeomanry, not the guys whose entire lives were devoted to maintaining military prowess.

Another quote: "Modern longbows have a useful range up to 180 m (200 yd). A 667 N (150 lbf) Mary Rose replica longbow was able to shoot a 53.6 g (1.9 oz) arrow 328 m (360 yd) and a 95.9 g (3.3 oz) a distance of 249.9 m (272 yd). A flight arrow of a professional archer of Edward III's time would reach 400 yds. It is also well known that no practice range was allowed to be less than 220 yds by order of Henry VIII"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welsh_longbow

> And this was a weapon for the yeomanry, not the guys whose entire lives were devoted to maintaining military prowess.

Yes in fact they did spend their whole lives practicing. (From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_longbow#Training):

"Longbows were very difficult to master because the force required to deliver an arrow through the improving armour of medieval Europe was very high by modern standards ... etons of longbow archers are recognisably deformed, with enlarged left arms and often bone spurs on left wrists, left shoulders and right fingers."

Further:

"It was the difficulty in using the longbow which led various monarchs of England to issue instructions encouraging their ownership and practice, including the Assize of Arms of 1252 and King Edward III's declaration of 1363."

The popularization of the crossbow, in part, was the reduceded need for training. In some areas it also paid better.

Perhaps I was a bit ambiguous - they were free farmers, not professional soldiers. Even if they spent a good deal of time practicing, it was not their primary pursuit.

Yes I understand the background, but the difference between the bow and the crossbow was that of both skill and strength. While not their primary pursuit the long-bow was still a skill that the State needed to motivate their citizens to practice between wars. As an aside, were average citizens allowed to hunt? From the little information I've read it seemed like it was considered poatching.

This is quite interesting. I did some archery a few years back (recurve bow) and picked up a second hand, 50lb bow, which, apparently, for a slender early 20s female would be "quite tough" to draw, but I managed it, and got quite good (and strong arms). I never really took it very seriously though, but it was lots of fun. I can only imagine how hard it would be to draw an 81+lb bow (though perhaps longbows distribute the force differently? Otherwise that's going to be some sore fingers!).

Your rate is low. A semi-decent archer (which most men were, practicing every Sunday after church) should be able to loose at least 12 arrows/minute. Most students (~80%) are able to do that, safely, after about 4 3-hour training sessions, 2 weeks apart. Admittedly, they're only using 30-40lb bows, and can only do it for 1 minute, but that's just lack of strength/stamina which comes from practice. A fair proportion can reach 15 arrows/minute, and a very few will eventually be able to get off 18/minute.

This is for shooting at a block of billmen, which does not require much in the way of aim. So long as you aim in roughly the right direction, and get your elevation and draw length mostly right, that's all that's really necessary.

For target shooting, most competent archers will be able to hit a 1m target at 20m >75% of the time, loosing in time with a 12/minute count.

At 12/minute your not going to be able fire again before someone 20m from you get's in range. Second 80lb is light on the light but useful end of a medieval bow. Also, their arrows where much heaver and less stable in flight than what most people use now days.

PS: There is something of an arms race with bows, if you use a 100lb bow and your opponents use 80lb bows you can slaughter them before they get into range. (Ignoring wind, and terrain issues.)

No, but that's why you aren't a lone archer on the field. You're in a block of dozens, and you're behind a block of billmen who stop anyone with a hand weapon (bill, sword) from getting anywhere near you.

If that fails, and someone is anywhere near 20m, you drop your bow and a) draw your own hand weapon, or b) more likely - run. Because if you're up against someone whose primary weapon is a sword, they're likely to be better than you and have more/better armour, so your odds are low. On the other hand, if you're up against a billman, your odds are basically zero.

I only put the accuracy for a 20m target because a) that's what we shoot at for practice in my reenactment group, and b) to demonstrate that most people can aim moderately at that distance while shooting quickly - they're not just pinging arrows off in any direction in order to get the rate of fire up.

As a longbow archer, your primary job is to put as many arrows as possible into a large block of men 200m-300m(-400m?) away before they get to the billmen you're protecting (and who are protecting you.)

I can recommend the book "The Time-traveller's Guide to Medieval England" - it mentions the amount of military training that both knights and commoners were expected to perform. Basically a knight was trained from a very early age to fight - no way would an average 21st century male be able to compete in skill or strength.

Even for commeners they were still often legally required to spend a significant amount of time working on their marshal skills - mainly archery.

http://www.amazon.com/Time-Travelers-Guide-Medieval-England/...

e.g. Here in Scotland there was a time that games like golf and football were officially banned as they were seen to distract men away from military training for the wars with England.

Thanks for the book suggestion, I just purchased it. I had been looking to read a book about Medieval times but hadn't taken the time to find out what one to read. The reviews look promising.

Bit of a difference between overall health and sword-swinging fitness. I may be almost completely disease- and parasite-free, but the guy that's been training five hours a day since he was five will always lift more than me and run further than me.

Does “overall health” mean being disease- and parasite-free, though? There's at least one disease I heard of from which the case may actually benefit with increased lifespan[0]. That said, I tend to agree that to equate fitness with health probably isn't correct either.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celiac_disease#Screening

Look into the physical fitness of Amish and the less developed world in general. You will also find the answer in any researched history of medieval life.

The short answer is that a typical modern person (gamer or no) is much less fit than anybody from the age of melee weapons, let alone knights.

> The short answer is that a typical modern person (gamer or no) is much less fit than anybody from the age of melee weapons, let alone knights.

But I don't have smallpox. Or cholera. Or an iodine deficiency, because I live so far from the ocean.

That is another discussion since we are talking about fitness, specifically upper body strength and endurance, not rates of illness.

So if you had most of those things you'd be dead and therefor not factor into this discussion. The ones who didn't die were much stronger than the average person today. They had to be.

14th century knights had the physiques of professional rugby players:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10138060

http://www.stirlingcastle.gov.uk/home/newsevents/bbc2history...

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1279306/Face-mystery...

On the other hand, that long sword has more rotational inertia than the slightly heavier roman gladius, let alone a much smaller and lighter controller.

Having fenced a wee bit in high school I was shocked to get to waive a claymore around - a ~1.5m long two-handed broadsword has a lot of inertia.

I remember Gaston Phoebus' war armour displayed in Foix castle. It's made of relatively thin plates but reinforced with 5 mm thick iron bars and weigh at least 60 kilos. Of course the guy was a hell of a beast but... It doesn't look anything like the sort of tournament armour such as the one in the video or those most currently shown in museums (hint: if it's beautifully engraved, it's probably not war equipment).

Using a stick won't work because a typical living room doesn't have enough space to swing it around withoud damaging the furniture.

Perhaps use a gyroscope to simulate the inertia of moving a larger weight?

Fortunately, human apathy does not yet rule all of reality.

I wonder if it is possible in some way with gyroscopes. Not going all the time, but spun up quickly, to provide counter resistance for a specific direction of rotation. You could spin up two, in opposite directions, to counter the torque from acceleration. Difficult to spin them up fast enough, but perhaps just the sensation of some resistance would be enough feedback.

Interesting idea. However, would that create an unnatural, 'valley of the uncanny', type feel? Approaching realism but falling short and ultimately distracting?

I believe this is what Blade of Honor (Tsurugi) did, though I can't find any deeper reference to the controller.

http://www.arcade-museum.com/game_detail.php?game_id=10210

More ambitious idea: Make the controller a grip on the end of a robot arm.

I bet you could come up with something passable between 2 off-axis gyroscopes, 2 large induction motors (magnet suspended in a coil that vibrates back and forth – can achieve below 1hz - ~300hz vibration) and some more standard vibrators.

This only helps with angular momentum, not with linear momentum.

Is that really a problem? If something hits your sword it's going to make you rotate your wrist, not stop your hand, because it will be blocking the blade and not the handle.

Not if you're using a sword intended for cutting strokes and strike correctly. Distal to the "sweet spot", your hand will continue while the blade is rotated; proximal, and the distal end of the sword will tend to continue while your hand is levered backwards. Just as when using a tennis racket or a baseball bat, though, the moment is balanced around the point of contact when you strike correctly (the proximal part of the blade has more mass but less velocity; the distal has more velocity but less mass) and the blade, as a unit, stops (or is at least slowed by a uniform scale when the target can be cut through). Transitioning from a "chop" to a "slice" requires additional input from the swordsman.

They addressed this in an update:

>In general, if you drill down deep enough on the actual sword techniques, the tree of possible outcomes gets pruned way down. It turns out that you rarely have to solve the fully general problem of one sword stopping another sword traveling at top speed at an arbitrary location in space. Which is a hard problem!

There's a longer explanation here: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/260688528/clang/posts/24...

Next biggest problem is that, in reality, Medieval duels rarely lasted more than a minute before one side was fatally injured. Not nearly long enough for a video game.

It doesn't seem like many video game battles last more than a minute. If you're still fighting somebody after a minute, that's either a very slow game or one or both of you are playing very conservatively.

Disagree, no harm in being short as you can have many duels.

I'm curious; do you have a source for this?

I was one seeing an olympic fencing event on TV. The duels were incredibly short.

Ogami Itto can slice up 15 people in 2.3 seconds. Does that count?

A minute is a long time for a single fight in a video game.

Are you not familiar with rounds?

A lot of fighting game rounds are over in under 10 seconds.

I'm surprised no one has mentioned haptics in this thread. Novint for example produces commercial haptic controllers. Haptics are what can get your controller to magically stop mid-air.

This is why haptics is so important. About 15 years ago I did a virtual reality race car simulator at SAIC. The steering wheel was controlled to simulate the feel of hitting a curb, the smooth feeling during a spin out, etc. Good for suspension of disbelief.

Two years later I did a ritual reality raft simulator for Disney. The paddles had no feedback mechanism and it hurt the experience (paddling with no feel for paddle going through the water). At the same time someone I worked with did a sword fighting simulation that was very cool, but also did not had force feedback effects.

Most shooters don't bother making you deal with recoil either though, or the weight of the gun.

But in shooters, opposing weapons don't regularly make physical contact with each other. In sword fighting, that's a necessity.

Non-physics geek here. Would it be possible to embed some gyroscopes on servos or something so that the game engine can deflect the controller? It wouldn't be ideal but it could provide some directional feedback.

I agree. Maybe the best way to approach a sword-fighting game would be to make a cheap sort of sword-fighting robot/dummy thing. Maybe like a mannequin on wheels that could quickly extend and retract one of several plastic rods and spin around and whack you with them or something...

I googled "sword fighting robot" and found this: http://www.bit-tech.net/news/bits/2011/07/20/kinect-used-in-...

I agree. A robotic arm (even a weighted stand with a hard plastic arm and thin plastic sword) seems pretty much required to get realistic sword fighting in. A good camera on the base that keeps an eye of where the "sword" is could do a reasonable job of keeping it from hitting most things, yeah?

And I think people wouldn't have a problem with it. They made room for the entire Rock Band ensemble. Just make it fold flat-ish to stow under a couch or in a closet.

Indeed, and Kinect requires enough clear space for a simulated duel to take place (especially for two players).

(Time to ramp up my iaido skills)

my approach to realistic fighting is: go to kendo keiko as often as possible. even the bruises seem real.

Kendo's pretty far from realistic fighting. The fact that it's a contact sport is cool, though.

I think it is more realistic than a game will ever be. You can block and have your strikes blocked. That seems pretty impossible to do with a controller.

Given that the project is called "Clang!", they'll probably want to incorporate that!

wonder if you can use a gyroscope to add some of this effect....

Cameo by Gabe Newell http://i.imgur.com/6vDza.png, who is swordsmithing a crowbar :)

  Neal: "Hey is that about ready?"
  Gabe: "These things, they take time..."

I think Gabe's soul purpose in life now is to just troll Half Life fans.

Doesn't necessarily mean anything, but noticed the prototypes they're showing in the video seem to be running on the Source engine...

They're using Unity. Check the jobs page.

He's so dreamy.

"I'm the greatest sword fighter in the world."

"And you wrote the software."

"Yeah. That, too," Hiro says.

―Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash

I was most surprised that his new company isn't called Corporation 9592.

I don't mind putting a bit of cash towards projects where those involved really don't have the resources to pull it off otherwise, but does Neal Stephenson really not have enough cash to bootstrap this himself?

There are tons of things I would like to do, that I could afford to do, but that I still won't do if I have to bear the whole financial risk myself. I'm sure that's true for a lot of people.

If I had to bear your financial risk, I would expect a return: if I'm an investor give me shares, if I'm loaning you money give me interest. Why do I not deserve the same rewards as any other investor? I find the entire proposition offensive.

Giving $25 is not bearing financial risk! It's an optimistic pre-order, it's a statement of support, it's a donation to The Arts, it's patronage. And it's less money than it costs out for dinner in San Francisco.

It offends and infuriates me that you don't see any value in the creation of new technology other than "give me interest". Your species of cynical profiteering is the reason we have freewheeling boom and bust cycles with no significant social benefit.

It's none of these things. We're talking about financing a commercial enterprise by people far wealthier than myself. What we have here are rich people trying to set up a system where they are rewarded for their part of the investment, but the little guys are not. That is cynical profiteering. I'm saving my $25 donation for a worthy non-profit cause, thank you very much.

Given Mr Stephenson's extremely solid knowledge of the foundations of capitalism (e.g. the System of the World trilogy) it seems especially rich. Or maybe he learned a thing or two while writing that.

The reward is a successful project. Would you chip in $50 bucks to help someone build some interesting widget that otherwise wouldn't get built?

That question is not germane to this kickstarter. Considering their level of funding and the large amount of time and money that they have already sunk into the project, it's patently obvious that it's going to get made anyway. They're just trying to collect some free money from suckers because hey, why not?

Kickstarter is being used a lot for preorders rather than fundraising. There are a lot of obvious reasons someone might want to do this despite technically not needing financing.

Stephenson is no doubt an extremely successful writer, but that doesn't confer the type of resources that being an extremely successful entrepreneur does. And game development doesn't come cheap either, especially not innovative game development.

He already has wealthy game entrepreneurs on board. Did you notice the big guy smithing a crowbar? That's Gabe Newell, with a personal net worth of 1.5 billion dollars. His company, Valve, is thanked on the Kickstarter page, as well as Bungie.

These people already have the resources and industry support to do what they want to do (the exquisitely produced videos are themselves a testament to their resources!), but for some reason, they're asking the man on the street to carry a share of the financial risk in exchange for no share of the returns.

As interesting as the idea is, if you contribute to this Kickstarter you're a chump.

I thought it might be to gauge demand. Why spend a million dollars on an unannounced project only to find out no-one wants it? And if people really want it, they'll put up a few dollars, perhaps.

Especially as the future development of decent controllers will mean players paying out for specialised hardware.

Looks like a PR stunt to me. Not that that's a bad thing.

The production alone on that video

$$$

It also helps to establish your market and discover what the audience really wants. It's great market research where you can have your potential customers give you feedback throughout the process.

Interesting how Kickstarter can be used both for PR and actual fundraising.

I always thought PR was a component of fund-raising.

Sounds like they're not looking to bootstrap a business that would produce a return on investment. Instead of making a commercially viable game, they're talking about founding a platform and cultivating a market for sword fighting games.

Anyone remember Die by the Sword? Admittedly it was more sword flailing than sword fighting, but it's the only game I've played that had a semblance of direct control. It was also the first game to use IK for everything from sword fighting to rope swinging and ladder climbing. Even nowadays it's rare to see IK used in games for anything except relatively minor pose fix-ups (blending canned poses offers better control, and IK fix-ups can then be applied on top to get perfect alignment for aiming, etc).

You should try out Mount & Blade series then.

+1 on this, M&B with the difficulty settings cranked is the best you can get atm.

+2, and even the highest difficulty singleplayer is nothing compared to multiplayer. Beware, though, it has an extremely steep learning curve.

While Mount and Blade is one of my favorite games of all time, its sword fighting is pretty different to the simulation in Die by the Sword. DbtS didn't really have pre-programmed motions like M&B, it instead attempted to map 2D mouse position to 3D hand position using a physical model of the player's skeleton (which generally resulted in flailing madly with your arm contorted into bonkers positions for the first week of play).

Also there is Dark Messiah of Might and Magic in the First Person Sworder(?) range.

Not a very realistic game, but very enjoyable.

Indeed; incredibly difficult to master keyboard controls though. For those interested, gog.com sells it still:

  http://www.gog.com/en/gamecard/die_by_the_sword_expansion

Thief 1/2 gave you a bit of a feel for it.

Real swordfighting is not about the sword, it's about the footwork. Just physically do not be where the opponent's sword is heading.

See: relatively little blade contact in extremely high level fencing.

Of course fencing, especially at the higher levels, is much more a sport than a form of combat. I'm only intimately familiar with saber, but there the rules play a very important role. Having the right of way changes everything, and a lot of blade contact is about getting the right of way rather than actually preventing your opponent from doing something. If you have the right of way, you don't care about being hit as long as you hit your opponent sufficiently quickly after that--I don't think real sword fights work that way :).

All this makes fencing more fun and interesting, but also more of a game. This really affects the tactics people use.

Also, foil works the same way with a very similar set of rules about the right of way. There are some minor variations, but the basic idea is the same--if you have the right of way, you get the point even if you hit after your opponent. Epee is different, with no right of way, but I never really liked it so can't comment much. If anything, it seems epee is less focused on footwork than saber, but it could just be my inner saber biases showing.

Fencing, while awesome, is a poor proxy for actual sword fighting. If you were actually facing something sharp, you would be much more worried about getting hit at all and so would probably parry more.

Parry with a sword was actually really uncommon last resort for the most of history. Viking blades for example dented really bad if they clashed. There is a saga about combatants beating several wooden shields to splinters until the blades clashed and both swords broke.

For samurai, the same is true. For heavily armored knight's, well they tried to poke each other in the eye mostly.

Me and my little brother with boffer-swords? Same story again. I found first hand experience that usually it's lot more usable to dodge the blow while simultaneously trying a counter blow than to parry. And the more you need footwork the more you have opponents.

Parrying only works with heavy, slow weapons. The unfortunate reality is that with a light, fast weapon, you do not have the time or reaction speed to actually parry. "Parrying" doesn't really happen. Getting the f* away with your feet is the only option.

So yes I suppose it does matter what you mean by "real swordfighting." If you mean standing there decked out in 50lbs++ of metal armor with a giant sword & shield, footwork is less important. If you mean the kind of swordfighting that took off from 17th century on - dueling with rapiers, not mass combat, then it's footwork all the way down.

And yes, for the record, I think that realistic dueling would make for a very boring video game. I would be 100% behind more realistic sword & shield combat though, that could be incredibly awesome.

I don't know. As I said earlier, I only really have experience with fencing (and mostly with saber), but real parrying does happen there. And sabers are extremely light and fast. (It feels a little silly to bring fencing up as the example when I just talked about how it isn't entirely applicable to the real world, but I think this part is.)

It isn't just parrying in a vacuum--it also involves good timing, footwork and some forethought. It's definitely not based entirely on reaction time. For example, if you're moving backwards while parrying, you get significantly more time. Also, having a good idea of where somebody will attack (for example, you feign an opening) helps. And, of course, you do a ton of drills about how to parry so the different parries are burned into your mind.

It still isn't anything like the movies, of course, but it is still significant. It also affects the right of way, but only if the opponent does not get through your parry, so parrying well is important even in the framework of the rules.

Usually parry is done with a return attack. It's more like knocking the opponent sword off balance and thrust mine in. There are much more control with light weapons like foil or sabers to do parry and return than heavy sword.

The same goes for Katanas (which are about as much as I can handle for more than a few minute, so for me they're heavy). You sort of 'catch' the opponent's blade and you can flick it to the side by turning your blade, leaving your opponent open.

The unfortunate reality is that with a light, fast weapon, you do not have the time or reaction speed to actually parry. "Parrying" doesn't really happen. Getting the f away with your feet is the only option.*

I don't agree with this. I practice eskrima and we block/parry a lot. It's a lot easier to move a 0.2kg stick than your whole body (50-100kg).

But blocking/parrying is not a substitute for footwork, it's a complement to it. If your footwork is good, your opponent might only be able to attack you from 1-2 directions. Blocking 2 directions is far easier than blocking 12 (8 in competition [1]).

[1] For safety reasons, thrusting and knee strikes are not allowed. Nor are strikes to the back of the head.

I get the feeling that a swordfighting game as described in the article is going to pander more towards "be a medieval knight/brigand/samurai" than "be an Enlightenment dandy/fop"

Fencing raises another good point: realistic swordfighting is actually pretty boring compared to movie swordfighting. (If it weren't, then movie swordfighting wouldn't need to be so unrealistic).

If I'm gonna play a swordfighting video game I wanna be Errol Flynn, not Benjamin Kleibrink. [Who? 2008 Olympic foil champion. Yes, I had to look that up, that's the point.]

Competitive fencing is also a far cry from realistic swordfighting.

(There's a whole bit in Snow Crash about that, actually.)

> (There's a whole bit in Snow Crash about that, actually.)

Admittedly it was katanas in Snow Crash.

Boring? I think you mean "not visually appealing". Sword fighting is not boring. There wouldn't be so many people doing it a hobby otherwise.

If it were as fun as it looks in the movies, then there'd be a lot more people doing it.

Heck, planespotting is a hobby for a lot of people, but that doesn't make it interesting.

Fencing has only a few moves so people don't know the game won't enjoy it as much as a spectator. But it's an extreme competitive sport. As with any competitive sport, it's lots of fun for the participants.

As far as entertaining Kickstarter videos go, this one is certainly off to an auspicious start.

I found the second video further down even more impressive in its more serious tone.

As someone who just finished reading Snow Crash today (great stuff btw, can't wait for another Stephenson's book) I'd be thrilled to see this and try it in action.

As someone who's been into martial arts for some time I'm very sceptic about this. There's a lot more to realistic fighting than just swinging and clashing swords: footwork, body movement, weight transfer...

Nevertheles, even if it won't turn out to be perfect it could stil be a lots of fun. I'll be watching their progress.

> There's a lot more to realistic fighting than just swinging and clashing swords: footwork, body movement, weight transfer...

I agree. I'm pretty sure he's not aiming at making something totally immersive and realistic, but just a good game that has better sword play than anything else.

Many games do one thing pretty well, and are good enough for everything else. Black had nice gun play; Burnout had nice crashing. Hopefully this will have sword play that is better than just button mashing.

> Nevertheles, even if it won't turn out to be perfect it could stil be a lots of fun. I'll be watching their progress.

Yes, I'd settle for lots of fun.

I'm surprised there was no mention of the Mount and Blade[1] series, which took a serious look at this sort of combat through the use of contextual mouse movements for parries and attacks. I wonder if he's unaware of the franchise, or just didn't feel the need to mention it.

I'm also not convinced that today's odometry based controllers will give you high enough fidelity to model swords convincingly. Any sort of wiimote or kinect based sword/lightsaber game has always seemed very waggle centric without any deliberate movement. Also, I'm not really thrilled about the thought of having to buy plastic swords to swing in my room.

[1]:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=psLA87SgZcw

Have you tried using 2 PS3 move controllers in the gladiator mode in Sports Champions? It's not great but it's not bad either.

Skyward Sword has some pretty nice swordplay, and it uses the Wii Motion Plus attachment to get more accurate movement data. If you just waggle you'll get killed easy.

One of the most interesting games I've ever played was Bushido Blade 2. The best thing about it was realistic vulnerability: get stabbed once and you die (or maybe lose use of an arm). The disappointment was made up for by lots of quick rounds.

I always thought it was silly to have games where you'd get shot 20 times and keep fighting exactly the same, just lose some of your energy meter, then suddenly flop over and die when it reached zero.

Yeah, my immediate reaction to this is that I just want a real Bushido Blade sequel. The most underrated fighting game of all time IMO.

I think a friend showed me either that game, or one that was very similar. You were in any given map - which was effectively a field - and you would charge each other, and the player with the quicker reflexes lived, and the other one died.

It was interesting, but not at all fun - to me, it seemed like the equivalent of playing five card stud.

He's been wanting this since the mid-90's - not downplaying or being snarky, just making a point. This reminds me of Hero in Snow Crash.

Hiro.

My first thought was "okay so it looks like Neal is pretending to be Hiro or something"

...I'm okay with this.

I wish him luck. Various projects have come along with backing from people outside the video game industry with the goal of being more realistic, more revolutionary and so on. But it's a lot harder to make a playable fun game. Realism often isn't fun. Modern Warfare 3 is the culmination of 20 years of evolution from Wolfenstein, and still is nothing like being a real soldier.

Oh man, I can't wait to yell "big board" to pull up the cheat mode screen.

I'm more of a minesweeper guy. Can they make a game that makes blowing up mines more realistic? How much would a Kickstarter campaign for that cost?

Why is it named clang? So very very confusing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clang

Presumably it's an allusion to the sound of swords clashing. I bet most people haven't heard of the other Clang (C lang, really)

Entertaining video, but the production value was so high that it made me wonder whether this project really needs my money...

I'm in from the headline alone.

I'm curious how they plan to implement actual medieval / early Renaissance combat tactics with a controller like the one in the video - how would you do half-swording or something like the Mordhau?

For people who aren't medieval geeks - half-sword is when you hold the sword halfway up the blade with your left hand, in order to deliver a more accurate, powerful thrust; perhaps after trapping your opponent's sword between your arm and body. Mordhau ("murder-strike") is when you invert the sword and use it as a mace. These things came about because swinging a sword into an armored opponent isn't actually going to do much to him.

It seems like the kind of combat you could simulate might potentially be fun, but wouldn't actually simulate a real fight from the period - not enough grappling / bashing.

It looks as though they're pursuing the unarmored combat of Liechtenauer than the armored knight combat of later period, where swords basically stopped being useful against breastplates and the like and folks went in more for maces and war hammers. Liechtenauer does, IIRC, have halfswording in the basic form but mostly it is about geometry and footwork.

I'm amazed at how many HN readers have turned out to also be sword fighting experts! :)

Don't be. What, 20 out of 20,000? Even my daughters have had fencing in Jr. High.

As a former kendoka, this is a wet dream. I can finally put all that kata to good use!

It's going to be difficult to get right. They seem to emphasize on the hand work, the swing, parry, thrust. Sword fighting is as much foot work as hand work, as I've learned in my fencing days way back. There are only a few hand actions, the lounge, parry/return, and indirect attack, on different zones, but the foot work is the major part of the game. Keeping and judging the distance is a tough skill. Close in suddenly, retreat and lounge, counter lounge, lounge and crouch, .etc. All these will be difficult to replicate in the game.

I wish them luck.

Ok. So a famous author decides to make a sword fighting video game. Awesome. But.... I feel from the video that what they are really trying to create is a sword fighting simulator. Big difference, playability is incredibly important, we're all familiar with 'arcade modes' where realism is suspended to create an engaging, fun game. So I'm wondering how successful this 'game' will actually be.

I'm probably only moderately interested in the sword fighting game, but this is easily the most entertaining kick starter video I've seen so far.

Reminds me of that Incantor wand controller

http://incantor.com/

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/moveablecode/incantor-ma...

Maybe you'd want a difference in heftiness of the controller, but a similar swinging/waving api?

Don't know about a sword fighting game, but I would gladly part with $20 to see Snow Crash rewritten in the past tense :)

Clang getting some The Verge coverage http://www.theverge.com/2012/6/10/3076307/neal-stephenson-cl... - I hope these guys hit mainstream. I would love it if Neal could pull this off in a big way.

When the Wii appeared, sword games was the first thing that came to my mind, but I don't there have been too many of them on the Wii. I was also hoping we'd see some martial arts fighting (or training) games for the Kinect by now, although the Kinect needs to dramatically increase its accuracy for that.

Yes, that came to everyone's mind. But what was the big title game involving a sword for Wii? Zelda Twilight Princess.

Originally designed for the Gamecube, it was ported to Wii with few changes. Basically, you wave the Wiimote left and right to simulate button 'A' and poke it forward to simulate a different button combination from the conventional Gamecube controller.

Having been a big fan of the game on Gamecube, I didn't like the Wii version very much. Most of the time your sword is used to cut grass or break pottery or something else mundane, so it felt like a lot of waving around just for show. Maybe even a little bit like having a TV remote with loose batteries that you have to shake a bit to get it to work.

Years ago I practiced a little martial arts and took 3 or 4 classes dedicated to practice swords. What I can relate from that is that picking up a sword-like object and waving it around purposefully for an hour is going to use muscles that you are not used to using. Even someone in good shape is going to feel it the next day.

This sounds like good fun exercise, but it seems like the market for a video game you can play from the couch will always be much larger than for a game that presents a realistic physical challenge.

Wii and Kinect games may provide interesting counterexamples; we should look up the sales stats for physical vs. sedentary games.

If you want to sword fight "realistically", go out, buy a sword and join a sword-fighting club.

Darn, why do people try to solve everything with technology when there is a simple solution in the physical world!?

No matter how they dice it or slice it (ah ah), it's not going to end up "realistic" for anyone who has used a sword before.

I think this game and controller is targeted at the superset of people who was to sword fight "realistically" while playing a fun game, without all the bruises and sore muscles and years of training that accompany using a real sword.

So once I learn how to realistically fight with a sword in your club I'll be able to go out and fight a dragon? And if I'm not as good as I thought and get killed by the dragon will it just end the.... oh wait, there's no game. Seems like your solution isn't as flexible as the technological one.

>in a much more intuitive way than pulling a plastic trigger or pounding a key on a keyboard

A bit unfair to make that comparison. At the very least, the Wii Motion Plus in games such as Sports Resort fencing offers a better experience than that.

Thinking about comparative advantage, and being the selfish sort, I think I'd rather see him do something closer to home. I don't play video games, and even a Neal Stephenson game isn't going to change that, but I love his writing.

What are the technical challenges involved with building a high quality, low-latency bit of hardware? Even small lags in response are really annoying and kill enjoyment of the game for me.

Rune! Was awesome. The way you could make your sword move with the mouse was amazing. Accuracy is what it is about. If this game could capture that feeling I am aboard.

Everybody needs a hobby but I thought Reamde was Stephenson's break from revolutionizing historical / science fiction.

An update has just been posted, only for backers though. Anyone mind sharing?

It's been incorporated into the front page. The only thing missing is that they want to use Razer Hydra as the controller.

Video games? What happened to building the space needle with Google? :-)

I absolutely adore the video, but the video should CLEARLY explain what the money is going to be used for. There is no mention (only allusion) to hardware development in the video at all.

Also, it's not clear from the video if the game will be playable _without_ the special hardware...

There is no special hardware. It's going to use an off-the-shelf motion controller to start.

There's a second video a bit further down with a bit more info.

he copied my realization! http://www.riturajsatpute.com/2010/08/where-are-real-role-pl...

I have to say; sword fighting is perhaps the least interesting subject I could imagine, but since it's Neil Stephenson, he can have my money. I also enjoyed the part where he threw the cookbook at Sir Dumbass.

If CLANG stood for something ridiculous then I'd be in.

Clean licked armor. 'N gore.

Loved the Gaben cameo!

TLDR: In a parallel thread ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4086805 ) multiple posters note how Pixar's 22 tips for storytelling apply to computer programming. Obviously AAPL took note, because Neal Stephenson is working on Clang now. The enterprise became the hot topic of yet another front-page thread ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4090845 ). They soon might find this handy: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4085318

;)

Gotta have that TFU

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