Video game question

[FullForce]

In the digital world presented in a video game there are limits to the player's movement. Often there will be invisible walls and defined walls (hills, trees, etc visable to the naked eye). Sometimes it seems as if there might be something in the distance that the player might be able to reach if he tried hard. How often in a video game is there something to find beyond the defined realm of the normally explorable area? Do devs ever include far off areas that they don't really expect the player to reach but include anyways for various reasons? Finally, if you succeed in somehow escaping the developer's intended path for your character does he remain in any way functional beyond the boundary or do game psyhics immediately break down?

[ParentalAdvisory]

Grand Theft Auto is like that. There are objectives, but you can go of course for "exploration" anytime you want. Certain vehicle cracks can allow you to go to other cities, even when there are no active objectives occuring at all in the outer cities. Basically you can drive or fly around and accomplish nothing in the virtual cities, until you've completed your original missions.

[ParentalAdvisory]

There are objectives, but you can go off course for "exploration" anytime you want.

Bolded for correction.

[FullForce]

Grand Theft Auto is like that. There are objectives, but you can go of course for "exploration" anytime you want. Certain vehicle cracks can allow you to go to other cities, even when there are no active objectives occuring at all in the outer cities. Basically you can drive or fly around and accomplish nothing in the virtual cities, until you've completed your original missions.

Thanks for the answer. What I was getting at is at some point in every modern game you hit a "wall" if you move far enough in any given direction and can go no further. I wanted to know if a gamer managed to defeat the "wall" and enter the space beyond would his avatar keep working correctly, and what, if anything, do devs typically insert into these forbidden virutal voids.

[ParentalAdvisory]

IANADeveloper, and not sure of the technical terms for what you're asking. But I've been able to do this with the Halo series of games. Sometimes when the levels are created, there may be "gaps" in the "hard" walls that go unseen in the development process. Either by accident, or a bug (or on purpose!). Whenever I've fallen into the walls, one of two things will happen. I'll die. Or two, I'll live, and am able to walk within the walls. The insides is nothing spectactular. It was nothing but white, with grid outlines of the walls. Sometimes, if the gaps are wide enough, you can go through them all together, and cheat!

If that helps...

[FullForce]

That is exactly what I was looking for. Thank you.

[uglybeech]

World of Warcraft has a number of holes *inside* the world. One I got to was off a mountain and I ended up essentially in a perfectly rectangular crevice with no texturing or anything (flat bottom, flat sides though I could see tree tops way at the top). I could move around pretty normally but I couldn't get out.

Also in World of Warcraft I swam all the way to the South tip of one continent (I forget the continent names right now) which I clearly wasn't meant to do as it took me about 30 minutes IIRC and there were 100s of zone glitches as I did so (it kept toggling between two different zones). There's no land route there. At the very tip there was an empty dungeon (no mobs or anything but otherwise like a regular dungeon) and an empty house.

In Everquest if you can get your avatar to the top of some city walls you can "see" out past the city (which is outside the zone loaded into your computer) where there is just blue void. You can't go into that area though.

I like to explore the edges of game universes too, to see if there's anything there. But so far there've been no secret prizes or treasure or anything in any of the games I've played.

[FullForce]

I do know that in Grand Theft Auto 3 it is possible to view the scenery used for the opening cutscene where the bank is robbed. Nobody has ever sucessfully landed there, but have flown over it.

"The ghost town is a secret island behind Shoreside Vale that was
used in making the first part of the opening cinema of the game. Cool
huh? O well. Anyway... (Only the bank scenes from the opening cinema
are from the Ghost town, the rest with the bridge and everything was
done at like, the real Staunton Island.)," from http://psxcodez.dlh.net/chtdb/psxfaq.php?plain=24517

[engineer_comp_geek]

In many PC games there are ways to turn off "walls" so that you can walk through them. Sometimes this will get you into an area where the screen goes haywire. Sometimes it will get you into interesting places. In the original DOOM game, if you cheated you could get behind a big wall where you saw the game developer's head on a pike. Most of the time you find big uninteresting areas that are only there to make you feel like the level you are in is bigger.

In Unreal you can use a fly cheat code to get to the top of the canyon walls but there's nothing really there. There's also a cave with a waterfall on the other side of the canyon that you see from a distance. If you go up close and investigate it's just an empty cave and isn't even very deep.

I don't remember which game it was, but I know one time I went into some sort of cave and the words "how did you get here?" were written on the wall.

[DougC]

....How often in a video game is there something to find beyond the defined realm of the normally explorable area? Do devs ever include far off areas that they don't really expect the player to reach but include anyways for various reasons?...
- - - If you want to show something far-off in a videogame, normally you just use a flat image and place it on a flat surface, and make it huge and place it far outside of the world. This way the perspective of it never seems to change much, even though the player moves around, and it appears as something very large in the far distance.... because it is really.
- Alternately, if it is something that the player will have to see from different angles, you can use a 3-D model of it, often a much-simplified model, because the player is never expected to get up close to it. The citadel in Half-Life-2 is done this way. And pieces of the Citadel actually move around at certain points in the game. But normally you "fake" as much far-off 3-D stuff as you can with 2-D stuff, just because there's no real difference in what the player will see and (as far as that particular detail goes) 2-D processing is faster for the computer to do. They want everything to appear as if it is being projected in 3-D, but everything that appears to be 3-D is usually not.
- What happens when you leave the intended area is usually the physics continue to work normally, but the surfaces don't have any textures placed on them and so you get various odd transparent effects. Normally in a videogame you define a primitive such as a square, and then you attach a texture to it. Like if you want a brick wall, you make a rectangle and then attach a brick-wall image texture to it. The program tracks which side the image was affixed to, and the image is only displayed when you view the primitive from the proper side. You can attach images to both sides, it will work and then the texture will be visible from both sides, but this usually isn't done for technical reasons relating to how game programs work. You would normally create two surfaces very close to each other, and attach textures only to their outward-facing sides.
----------
- In most games, there is a smaller "physics boundary box" you are "trapped" in during normal play, and that is contained in the center of a larger "visual boundary" box that is used for projecting sky and background scenery on. To see what happens yourself, get a videogame (preferrably for the PC, as the dev cheats are easiest to access on them) and search for how to use the "fly" and "noclip" modes. These are used during game and map development and are usually left in the final game for modding reasons. "Fly" allows you to move upwards and downwards but prevents you from crossing solid surfaces; "noclip" is like "fly" but also allows you to pass right through everything, so you can view anything from any angle you want.
~

[BraheSilver]

If the player manages to make it beyond the collision of level, it's usually called being "out of world," where there aren't any more well-defined surroundings. Depending on the game, there can be all kinds of effects, from falling forever or just walking around in a void with only the background in sight. If you turn back to the defined area, you might see the backsides of polygons (if they have two-sided textures) or see right through them.

In GTA3 there's a spot that has a sign reading "You weren't supposed to get here!" It's quite possible to reach it normally (without cheating) by climbing on a large truck, then hopping over a wall into a little courtyard.

In the game Metroid Prime, there are some interesting glitches that occur when the player slips between the cracks of defined space. This has led to the exploration of "secret worlds." (http://www.classicgaming.com/mdb/mp/glitches.htm#secretworld1)

Like engineer_comp_geek said, sometimes developers put secret things in inaccessible places just because they want to. In the CS:Source level de_piranesi there's a statue of a giraffe in an area inaccessible to players. Dead people ghosting around can find it easily, though.

[FullForce]

Thanks for the replies. Very interesting. Right now I'm playing Medal of Honor Rising Sun. Maybe later I'll ty to burst through the walls.

[TheLoadedDog]

In GTA3, I used the flying tank chear, and I'd crash it deliberately into the stadium on Staunton Island. You crash through the grass, and that can get pretty weird.

Occasionally I've accidently done some similar weird shit in the subway tunnels, falling into other places.

[GuanoLad]

In Uru, the (first) fully 3D roaming game from the Myst series, there were places that you could go to if you found the crack. Most of the places were unfinsihed or empty areas not intended for exploration, but one place was beyond a boundary fence where there was a special version of a vehicle that you could drive around (http://www.uruobsession.com/forum/index.php?act=ST&f=31&t=8586).

[Reply]

Getting outta the world is fun!

In EverQuest, getting beneath/outside the world (either on purpose or due to bugs) happens quite often, and you get to see your character futilely flapping his arms amidst a gray background as he falls into the infinite void. Sometimes there would be special rooms floating around in the void -- they were used as "prisons" to hold misbehaving players. Heh heh.

In Starsiege: Tribes, the situation was interesting because the terrain wasn't made as a standard 3D mesh; instead, a grayscale bitmap was used to generate the terrain and it gave you an extremely large area to play in. The landscape seemed almost endless (and some people thought it was), but if you had a fast enough plane and travelled straight in one direction for a few minutes... eventually you'd reach the End of the World. The land just stopped and you could walk right to the edge, look down, and dive into oblivion. Whee!

But anyway, for many games, here are two general methods you can use to try and break the boundaries:

1. Suddenly increase/decrease your size. For example: Suddenly jump while you're stuck in a small crawl space; shapeshift into a larger creature while in a small area.

2. Use something that "teleports" your player. Sometimes it's an obvious effect (i.e. a portal spell in Diablo) which, due to imperfections in the spell, may place you just a tiny distance away from where you originally cast it -- but that might be enough if you were standing right next to a wall or other boundary. Once you teleport back, you might just find yourself on the other side.

Other times, you may be getting repositioned without knowing it. For example, in some games with driveable vehicles (Battlefield, Tribes, Planetside, etc.), your character is instantly teleported a tiny distance whenever he leaves a vehicle (like, say, one foot to the left of vehicle's center point). So if you park with a wall to your left and exit, you might just find yourself inside the wall or even through it.

[Scott Plaid]

<snip>Sometimes it will get you into interesting places. In the original DOOM game, if you cheated you could get behind a big wall where you saw the game developer's head on a pike.<snip>To the best of my memory, The final boss was simply an illusion. In fact, you were shooting the still living severed head of one of the game's developers. You could only find this out, however, if you turned off clipping, and entered the wall behind the final boss.

[Jake4]

Good old Doom. I still remember idspispopd: smashing pumpkins into small pieces of putrid debris.

[RandomLetters]

I know that in many Counterstrike, credits for the creators of the map are placed on textures on the outside of the boundry walls - you can see these in between rounds, as you get a free floating camera to look around while you are dead.

[Sgt.Pepper]

I know that in many Counterstrike, credits for the creators of the map are placed on textures on the outside of the boundry walls - you can see these in between rounds, as you get a free floating camera to look around while you are dead.

That's the same in Medal of Honor Allied Assualt. There's a few maps where you can see a dev's same behind some textures, or under hills. It's just written there with a texture in what would normally be a blank area.

[Gorsnak]

TESII:Daggerfall (ridiculously buggy game, that one) was extremely prone to allowing you to slip through the cracks, so to speak. It was very easy to do, and one way around exploring the annoyingly huge randomly generated dungeons was to pop outside the walls and levitate around till you found where you wanted to be, then pop back in.

[Gorsnak]

Daggerfall, that should read. Stupid vCode.

[Alien]

As DougC said, the backgrounds are usually 2D textures. If you manage to get close to them I imagine it would be like walking up to the screen at the cinema. What's 2D and what's 3D is often quite easy to spot, as the houses/trees/mountains making up the background look very flat, even from a normal gaming distance. Earlier games often used skies as background. I don't know of any game where you can get close to far-away background textures. You can reach close background 'textures' in many games, like a street adjacent to a street on the inside of the game world, and these areas are usually done in 3D and you can explore.

If you're really interested in seeing what's "outside the game world" you should get the original Deus Ex game. It's a dated game, but still one of the best action games ever released. In this game there are items you can use to upgrade your character. If you choose super-strength and super-jump you can places crates on top of each other, jump on top of the crates, then jump over walls and other boundaries. When you get to the other side you'll see that the game world (cities) seems to be placed on a big rock floating through space. It's quite spectacular. Often, you can walk along the wall on the outside, observing unfinshed buildings, finding forgotten items and, on one or two occasions, even a left behind enemy. You can do this in nearly every outdoor level in this game, as opposed to just a few places as with most games.

[Electronic Chaos]

In one of the levels on Duke Nukem 3D if you turn on the no clipping and fly around with your jetpack, you can get into a crevass that has a message scrawled into the wall.

You're not supposed to be here!

[DarrenS]

This is one of my favorite things to do with video games, once I've completed them. (It tends to spoil the illusion and ruin the fun of actually playing the game if you go noclip-ping around. You tend to lose respect for puzzles and obstacles in the game.)

Almost all PC games nowadays have the 'noclip' and 'fly' cheats mentioned above. In "Half Life: Opposing Force", you could fly up into one of the buildings that was meant to be a 'facade' only (as they're known in the movie industry) and meet the "man in black".

I also saw a video of "Half Life done quick" where the guy had figured out how to stack the Claymore mines, and climb up them to get to inaccessible parts of the map. With this technique he was able to "walk on top of the world" and complete the game much more quickly. As mentioned in previous posts, often the rendering engine wasn't quite designed to deal with these "out of band" cases and you'll get weird effects. I've seen some games where you're supposed to fall into a "bottomless pit" at some point, but if you go in with god + fly, you find the depth is only actually about 15 feet (in game scale) and you can happily stand on the bottom !

Another fun one to play with was the "bomber" scene in "Call of Duty: Allied Assault". The script has you trapped inside a bomber, flying at altitude, but with 'noclip' you can walk outside and look around, in the sky. In that same game, if you "bust out" of one of the scripted vehicle chase scenes, you'll find that the vehicle happily takes off into the distance without you, but you can still "remotely" control the mounted gun, and fire it.

[DarrenS]

I know, I know - "Call of Duty : United Offensive." :smack:

[Incubus]

World of Warcraft had a couple of fun ones.

Sometimes, like in EQ, you would fall through the ground and just plummet helplessly for an indefinite amount of time. There was (might still be) a bug in the game where you would then 'drown', and if you tried to recover your body, your ghost would 'drown' as well! :eek:

In World of Warcraft, there were 'instanced dungeons'. Basically if you go in there, you get your own dungeon to run through, without any non-party/raid members around. This is a separate zone and you can tell where the entrance is by a whirling portal. Normally you 'teleport' to the instance zone, but when the game lags, sometimes you can walk clear through the thing and wander around the other side! (as it turns out, it is identical to the instance, albeit wtihout mobs).

In Planetside aircraft would get very buggy if you landed on uneven ground. Sometimes if a VTOL was parked on a very slight grade, it would start sliding like it was on ice, and plunge right underwater. Normally going in the water destroys vehicles like aircraft, but sometimes if you were still 'parked' the game wouldn't recognize it being underwater, and you'd have your own little submarine. Another amusing thing was a clipping bug that could send aircraft underground. A flying troop carrier was trying to evade several aircraft once, veered into a mountain and went clear through the ground (one of the attackers crashed trying to chase him :D ). It was then completely underneath the ground, and when it reached the enemy base crashed into the underground rooms which were totally visible, depositing the troops smack in the middle of the heart of the base.

[HPL]

I was just playing X-Wing Alliance last night. During the final mission of the game, when escaping the exploding Death Star II, I took a wrong turn and ended up in a dark place that I couldn't escape from. Evetually the explosion killed me.

And during the battle of Endor, if you look hard enough, you'll notice that some of those many star destroyers don't actually exist in the game, but are rather painted on the walls.

[KGS]

Do devs ever include far off areas that they don't really expect the player to reach but include anyways for various reasons?
Yes, they are called "easter eggs", and several examples have already been given. The quintessential easter egg, believed to be the first ever created, was in the old console game Atari Adventure. You had to find a secret, invisible "dot" which you then carry to a room where the wall, normally impassable, begins blinking. Beyond the wall is a secret room with the game designer's signature. Here's a page (http://www.dieterkoenig.at/ccc/26/s_26_t_adventure.htm) with directions how to get there (German only, but it's got pictures.)

if you succeed in somehow escaping the developer's intended path for your character does he remain in any way functional beyond the boundary or do game psyhics immediately break down?
Sometimes. In DOOM, for example, if you use the walk-thru-walls cheat code, you can crash the game by viewing too many objects at once, more than what the game was designed for. Normally though, the only real danger is getting your character stuck, or dying in some hideously spectactular fashion. :)

[Queen Bruin]

In True Crime: Streets of LA, we were constantly trying to get onto the UCLA campus. It's blocked off by concrete barriers IIRC, but we managed to get the car over it at one point on Royce Drive. We got perma-stuck and had to restart the game.

And so many nasty EQ bugs with the clip! At one point you could stick your face through the wall in Grieg's End and see into the other room. Also, I've many times been sitting against the wall and fooling around with the zoom, only to zoom inside my avatar's skull. I should take a screenshot. . .

[Lumpy]

A very old game I played once upon a time was on a B.B.S., and used ANSI graphics to create a 2-D world your little smiley face character could wander about. Some areas were impenatrable (they represented walls, rock faces, etc.), but it was possible to get a teleportation object that allowed you to "jump" anywhere onscreen. On one particular screen, if you jumped to the otherwise inaccessible top left corner, and then took a step (allowable since you were leaving the screen), you found yourself on a boat at sea that was otherwise completely cut off from the rest of the game. A good place to park your character overnight where you couldn't be mugged by other players. :)

[rjung]

You all are a bunch of whippersnappers. ;)

The earliest known recorded instance of "fake distant scenery" is from the atari arcade game Battlezone. The 3D vector landscape had a horizon that included several mountains and an erupting volcano, and arcade legend had it that anyone who could drive (and survive) long enough could actually reach said volcano. They couldn't, but it sure suckered a number of players.

[Pushkin]

I remember the SFX chip SNES games had quite a few glitches like this, possibly because they were properly 3D and perhaps the first games produced for a console in such a way. Enough people must have mailed the official Nintendo magazine about this that it was put on their cheat page as if this was something the player was meant to do :dubious:

And, apparantly, if you have a cheat gadget for your N64, you can walk over to a small island in the first level (in the dam's reservoir) that has a inactive mini-gun and small building. They were supposed to be part of the actual level but were switched off as it were when the developers ran short of time and didn't bother including the boat ride out to it.

[Pushkin]

Adding of course after preview ( :smack: ) that the N64 game you could do that in was, of course, Goldeneye.

[Queen Bruin]

You all are a bunch of whippersnappers. ;)


And now I suppose you're going to come out and yell at us to stop playing the PSP on your lawn? ;)

[Ranchoth]

The old Nightmare Creatures game for either the N64 or the Playstation had an fun little one—I don't think I even cheated to get there. In the last level...

You're battling with a demon/mutant on top the Palace of Westminster as it burns in the great fire of 1834. Over the side of the roof, you can see the rest of the Houses of Parliament burning, quite some distance away.

I somehow either jumped, walked, or got thrown off the roof...and landed in a little courtyard, where little 30ft high "buildings," including the clock tower, were being consumed by cute little flames, maybe 40 feet away from rooftop where I was supposed to be fighting.

I think I ended up getting burned to death by the special effect fire, but I always liked that one. :cool:

"Return to Castle Wolfenstein" has a neat one, too. In one level, if you use "noclip," you'll discover a B-25 bomber, engines running, suspended in space somewhere below the level proper—it's a set for a cutscene at the end of the level, when your character is being airlifted out. You only see the aircraft from a pan shot, then a closeup reaction shot of your character's face when he's onboard, but examining the aircraft with noclip revealed that a fair amount of detail went into building it. There's a cockpit with a legible panel and controls; seats; bulkheads, and even gunports and a rear turret with WORKING machine guns. Double :cool:

[jayjay]

There was (might still be) a bug in the game where you would then 'drown', and if you tried to recover your body, your ghost would 'drown' as well! :eek:

There still is, and it's supposedly not a bug. Blizzard has stated that they implemented this because in beta, when fatigue didn't affect your ghost, people were crossing the oceans by leapfrogging their corpses. For some reason, this was deemed unacceptable and fixed by making fatigue affect ghosts.

[Mathochist]

In the digital world presented in a video game there are limits to the player's movement. Often there will be invisible walls and defined walls (hills, trees, etc visable to the naked eye). Sometimes it seems as if there might be something in the distance that the player might be able to reach if he tried hard. How often in a video game is there something to find beyond the defined realm of the normally explorable area? Do devs ever include far off areas that they don't really expect the player to reach but include anyways for various reasons? Finally, if you succeed in somehow escaping the developer's intended path for your character does he remain in any way functional beyond the boundary or do game psyhics immediately break down?

SSX Tricky had certain places where the walls weren't quite tight and if you went off a jump or ran into a building exactly right you'd get off the track. Game physics worked perfectly, though, and you started falling faster and faster until you hit terminal velocity. Eventually, you hit the bottom of the space the track sits in and get "reset" somewhere on the track, just like if you had normally gone out-of-bounds.

[ArrMatey!]

Fun moment-

I was a playtester for a *really* bad monster truck game for the PS2. Every day I'd come in, get the list of bugs, and try to duplicate them, then mark if they were fixed or not, and get screenshots to bring to the programmers.

Anyway, a week before gold, I'm told to just go around and find if there's anything that's broken with the new speed-boost charms on the map. I find one pretty quickly (Speed boost, go up the ramp, explode for no reason). The rest of the day I'm doing all the different maps.

My immediate supervisor comes into my office as I'm doing the vegas map, where I grab two speed charms and high-tail it towards a ramp, launching myself off a ramp towards the roof of a building. I can never -quite- make it. It's close, though.

My supervisor holds his breath, and realizes I can't quite make it. He sighs in relief, "You know, if you -could- make that, I'd have to kill you, hide the body, and fake the reports."

[CandidGamera]

Playing some forgotten PC racing game on a friend's computer, we were astonished when, after zooming up a particular incline, we found ourselves floating - about a mile up, it seemed.

Took several minutes to fall back to the ground.

[DarrenS]

I guess this is headed towards Cafe Society, interesting thread that it is.

I read an interview with the HL 2 designers. One odd thing about that game is that there are no cut scenes; everything is interactive. They said they had trouble making sure during the semi-scripted parts that the player couldn't "bust out" of the script.