Hmm, no, see, while I and I imagine everyone else would like more behaviors and objects. What you're asking for is practically a "make me a game" button, and it just isn't that simple.
[quote:y21tqve8]People who write applications seem to be obsessed with allowing for EVERY possibility to take place, whether or not it ever will NEED to, and that is O.K. Unless you are trying to make a specific application for a specific group of people. In fact, I'll take my observation further: the same sorts of people find it difficult to even make an application for a specific group of people, (what about the ones we are leaving out?). In essence, you guys, (for lack of a better term), write applications for yourselves.
You're wrong. If Adobe had only produced Photoshop way back at the beginning, just for the use of photo retouching and prevented people like myself from being the earliest ones to use it as an actual painting tool and not just a retouching tool. Then things would be very different now. If the 3D applications only allowed basic primitives "because nobody would need to do anything more complicated than that", things would be very, very different.
And if Bill Gates had stuck to his "People will never need more than 640k" well.. none of us would be here now having this conversation, we'd be sat in front of DOS attempting to dial up a BBS.
My point is, not I or you or anyone else can possibly ever put a limit on what can be done with an open application. Just because you haven't thought of it, doesn't mean it can't happen.
[quote:y21tqve8]I hear, on all the game forums I visit, over and over again the phrase "cookie cutter code" or "cookie cutter behaviours" put forth in a negative manner. I've said it there, and I'll say it here: there is nothing whatsoever wrong with cookie cutter code or behaviours - in fact, the more of them there are, the better OUR world will be.
Cookie Cutter anything is bad. Just look at the pile of shite that gets churned out of that Poser Application on a daily basis. Everything looks, acts, behaves exactly the same. There's no creativity involved, no thinking outside the box. Just the same old tired model looking off with a blank stare into space and being lit badly while dressed in the same clothes all the other models from everyone else wear.. It's like bad porn!
Cookie Cutter anything - breeds laziness. Yes more objects would be nice, but you do realize that by making an object, behavior, effect or whatever for EVERYTHING that's possible, going to be possible or should be possible. You're pretty much making a scripting language with pictures instead of words. So really in the end you've achieved nothing except a much larger development time, a greater overhead, and a whole new set of problems that are very similar to the old ones.
[quote:y21tqve8]
You put enough and varied kinds of Lego blocks together and you can make a replica of nearly any kind of manufacturing facility.
But.. what if I didn't want to use Lego blocks? If everything is already predefined and cookie cutter. Then that limits me creatively. And I can dress it up however I want, but it's still the same Lego blocks you used.
[quote:y21tqve8]And, you don't need to know a stitch of math to do it - mostly things are put together in these ways by trial and error. Some of the best machines produced during the Industrial Revolution were produced by men with little theoretical or even working knowledge of advanced mathematical principles. Many were farmers, laborers and uneducated men.
Actually you DO need to know math to do that. You might not realize you're using mathematics, but you are.
[quote:y21tqve8]And what are games if not just a kind of SEEMINGLY complicated machine. It appears the game is making decisions, but it is not - everything is running according to some sort of predefined process - processes made up of a number of very similar "gates" and junctions and switches. Run them all together and it looks complicated - but everything can be broken down into very elementary functions.
Well you can say the same about the human brain, at it's essence it's not very complicated at all. But there's a bloody big difference between Manic Miner and the human brain!
[quote:y21tqve8]I believe I mentioned this application before, but some years ago there existed a 3D interactive "sandbox" called AxelEdge, by MindAvenue. It's approach to "games" was almost entirely visual, and even the "decision making" part of the toolset was visual in nature - 2 and 3 way switches and so forth. It didn't have every tool or component, but the ones it did have allowed for hundreds of thousands of eventualities.
From a review:
The mostly scriptless interface makes Axel Edge very easy and flexible to use in terms of building projects. For game developers, however, it's also its biggest drawback. The lack of any user-definable data structures means there are no variables, no dynamic or user-entry text capabilities, and no internal tools to query server-side data. Therefore, common game functions such as scorekeeping can't be accomplished practically with Axel. The built-in sensors and reactions address most of the basic tasks for projects such as an interactive product demonstration, and the basic scripting interface does allow for some customization, but they fall short for creating games of any serious depth.
[quote:y21tqve8]Incredibly entertaining 3D experiences were being produced without any real physics or "coding" at all. It was great fun to use and a great loss when their company sold out. There were so many things you could make just by connecting things together - like an advanced set of Legos. Realistic springs, hinges, fasteners, rotators could be "physically" connected together to produce interesting and engaging results - and very quickly, indeed.
You keep mentioning Lego, maybe you'd be happier with those Lego building applications?
[quote:y21tqve8]If you broke down the number of behaviours and events and processes contained in the best of all the existing "video games", you would find that they all make use of "cookie cutter code", or, at least they could - so similar are the things you see and experience in these games. You can write out the algorithms for these games in simple sentences of plain English. In fact, most of them are very linear in description. There is no magic going on at all.
Don't really need behaviors at all for them then if they're so simple.