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?
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.
Bolded for correction.
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.
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…
That is exactly what I was looking for. Thank you.
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.
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
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.
-
-
- 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.
~
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
-
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.
-
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.
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.
Good old Doom. I still remember idspispopd: smashing pumpkins into small pieces of putrid debris.
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.
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.