It was during the autumn of 1999 that I fell in love. She was beautiful, complex, tremendously high maintenance, and from the land of the rising sun. Her name was Gran Turismo, and our relationship was tumultuous, fiery, and a constant struggle for performance and power. Horsepower, that is. In a few short weeks, I developed both admiration and awe for Japanese racing cars. The game gently goaded me into learning about real-world improvements that can be made to a vehicle in order to enhance its performance. I developed a working knowledge of drag coefficients and came to understand the delicate balance that had to be attained between torque and tire traction. Every single one of GT’s 500+ vehicles came with a detailed history of its design and manufacture process, and I soon garnered a deep admiration for the racing pedigrees behind the vehicles I saw on the street every day: Honda, Toyota, Nissan, Mitsubishi, and Mazda, to name but a few. My GT experience highlighted a fundamental principle of education to me: immersion is everything. Easily the most exciting part, though, were the lengthy discussions that would take place with friends also caught up in the world of Japanese touring car racing, bringing together the oddest groups of people. I recall an 11-year-old boy explaining to me how he managed to beat his father’s horrendously powerful Nissan Skyline GT in a less powerful Subaru WRX, simply because he stiffened up the rear suspension and invested heavily in racing tires. The result? A vehicle agile enough to corner at speeds that would cause Daddy to spin out in his horsepower-laden Goliath of a vehicle.

Game designers are constantly raising the bar for applying realism to their interactive digital experiences. Realism implies more that just photo-realistic environments. It implies the use of detailed mathematical algorithms to capture the realistic portrayal of sound, the collision of objects, the movement of a human being, etc. A favorite example of mine occurred to me while looking at a review of an old game I played on the Commodore 64 called Space Rogue. Essentially a space opera, you played a character who happened upon a derelict Scow-class space cruiser while on a routine reconnaissance mission. While exploring the craft, your own ship is destroyed by pirates, leaving you to start from scratch alone in a huge universe. Aside from its beautiful, open-ended game structure (you could choose your own adventures), the spaceflight sequences obeyed true physics principles, including that of gravity. While the rest of the world simply accepted the fact that Voyager Probes 1 and 2 were being slingshotted from planet to planet, I was actually experiencing it thanks to a few lines of code running on a processor with only 64K of random access memory. Vance Hill illustrates this beautifully in his review of Space Rogue:

“My fondest game play memory involved a binary star system where I was getting trashed by an alien, totally wrecked at the worst time. I couldn’t outrun it and I was far, far away from any help. I turned the nose of the ship to face between the two stars and hit full burn. As the gravity started sucking I started flying in faster than the ship could possibly go under its own power. I started to get pulled off course, towards one of the stars, and then… I shot between them and out to the other side, leaving the alien way back in nowheresville.”

What I’m interested in is the science behind the Medic and how the Medic heals the Marine on the battlefield. The lore behind the Medic is that the Medic uses a thin laser and an anesthetic to perform on-site surgery.  In Starcraft II, the aerial replacement for the Medic, the Medivac, operates in a similar fashion. The Medivac is an aerial dropship equipped with a healing laser beam that can fix wounded soldiers on the ground. The lore for the beam is that there are actually two beams at work: a laser-scalpel and an auto-suture, which, when combined, can patch-up all sorts of wounds. The main question, then, is “How do these things work?”. Additionally, if these fantastic elements are a little too bizarre to accept, I’d also like to explore alternative answers to the thought of battlefield healing through lasers.

The Medic uses an anesthetic and a super-hot laser beam that instantly cauterizes wounds. Okay, that makes some sense, since we have recently increased the usage of lasers in surgeries. So, in another couple thousand years, why wouldn’t lasers be able to instantly, deeply, and quickly cauterize a massive wound? What makes this a little hard to accept is the unit it targets most frequently: the Marine. A Marine is clad in thick metal armor, meant to protect the wielder from enemies and to allow them the ability to breathe and fight on foreign planets. They’re combat-geared space suits. How, then, can a laser penetrate armor meant to prevent enemy claws, guns, and lasers from getting though? Any opening the laser could get through to heal the Marine, the hole in the armor would already cause an air vacuum that would most likely suffocate and kill the Marine inside, let alone any physical damage that the vacuum would cause.

Vacuums aside, let’s suppose the atmosphere is hospitable to human life and other carbon-based species, allowing them the ability to breathe. Here, the Medic shooting a laser through an opening in the armor makes sense: if a Marine is wounded and the armor shredded, the Medic can use that same opening to cauterize the wound. Brilliant!

Returning to the original theory, there is a way to make it plausible: the Medic doesn’t actually heal the Marine but instead uses nanomachines to quickly repair the Marine’s armor as it’s being damaged. This stretches the concept a little, but it also fills a conceptual gap in unit design. I’ll leave it to the reader to mull over the nanotech / laserbeam approaches as I still have another unit to talk about.

The Medivac does the job of a Medic, but from sky, away from the immediate dangers on the ground. Additionally, the Medivac offers surgical lasers that can pinpoint and remove anything left behind in a Marine after an enemy attack, e.g, a Hydralisk spine, a Zergling claw, or even a stray bullet.

The problem is that the method of a highly controlled set of twin laser beams being sent down from an aircraft hovering over allied units is very difficult to think about in a practical way. In the game, the Medivac hovers over your units and heals them, as if it were a Medic with engines. This engine-bound Medic, however, has a laser that is shot from 40-50 feet in the air.  Theoretically, a laser will not stop once emitted, unless interfered with by an opaque object. This logic would conclude that the Medivac would operate exactly as the Medic does, but from the sky. The same goes for the nanotech repair theory, though that may be weaker from the Medivac due to distance and speed of application. It’s still shaky in theory, but the fictitious elements have certainly taken care to include and utilize real technology and theories.

Both the Medic and the Medivac are interesting cases of science fiction and a potential future of warzone healing. Perhaps the Medivac will be a real thing later on, but instead of sending lasers down to heal units, the units would be picked up, treated in the air, and dropped back off to resume fighting. As for the Medic, we already have such brave heroes on the battlefield. Maybe some lasers could help them someday soon.

- M. B

Satisfied in my thirst for knowledge (and a growing fanboyism towards the Havok system), I continued my physics abuse. Though my next point may not directly refer to the physics, it was fascinating nonetheless: weight. The game has a weight system built in to punish the player for taking too much loot, forcing the player to make value-based decisions on what to hold and what to drop. For example, if I’m at max weight (starting base is 300 units of measurement), and I decide to pick something up and it puts me over, I have to drop something to bring me back down to an even max (exactly 300) or under. If I stay above the max weight, I receive a significant cut to my movement speed. As all gamers know, movement speed is crucial to all games, and being slow is usually a bad thing.

One time, I was at 300 weight because I’m brilliant and didn’t level up my carrying capacity. Or, at least I thought I was at 300. No, I was at 300.1. That one-tenth of a weight measurement (I’m guessing lbs, but I’m really not sure) was the deciding factor between running and waddling. So, I looked in my inventory and saw a potato that managed to sneak into my gear. After tossing the potato, I was back to maximum movespeed. I suppose this is the modern rendition of “the straw that broke the camel’s back”, referring to things piling up and being too much to manage, but in this case referring to a potato that encumbered the great hero of Skyrim.

Curse you, cumbersome potato. I hope some sabrecat ate you.

My point, though, isn’t to avoid potatoes. My point is that the game, regardless of your vast strength, has an entertaining quirk (a necessary one, at that) where a simple potato can hold your hulking hero back from sprinting along and saving some estranged NPC from a dragon or a bandit. Also, there are various renditions of my potato story, including, but not limited to: Butterfly wings, mushrooms, salt, carrots, troll skulls, and your spouse’s homecooked meals.

Potatoes aside, there are some really neat mass interactions in Skyrim. My personal favorite is with the spell Telekinesis. Telekinesis lets you pick up an object within a set range and pull it towards you. However, you can also throw the object and watch the physics engine freak out in ways akin to the murderous mule cart. You see, the Havok engine, to the extent of my knowledge, registers velocity in a very sensitive fashion. If I were to pick up a goblet with Telekinesis and drop it, it would bounce a little, roll on the ground, and eventually come to a halt. If I were to throw that goblet into a pile of baskets, however, the baskets would register no resistance and scatter across the room as if a grenade were tossed at them. For those of you who have the game, I thoroughly recommend abusing this, as it is extremely entertaining and is a good way to grind levels. It’s worth mentioning that baskets are not the only potential victims, making me think that these collisions and their hilarity is fully intended by the Bethesda crew.

So far, we have a murderous mule cart, plump potatoes, and goblet grenades. What’s next? Being clubbed by a Giant.

When a Giant attacks you at early levels, it will instantly kill you and send your body hurdling hundreds of feet into the air. This is a pretty amazing collision interaction: The Giant, which is about four or five times larger than you are, slams its club onto your head, causing the force to course through you. Instead of diffusing into the ground, the force comes back skywards, sending our hero on a quest to the moon. There isn’t much more to it than that the physics engine only accounts for terrain when the Giant misses, at which time a temporary crater is formed. Otherwise, the terrain about as absorbent as a tissue in a pool.

I think that about wraps it up for the majority of Skyrim physics. However, there are more interactions that are worth noting, but the gameplay experience itself is much more gratifying than explaining them. For example, when a dragon lands, the controller and camera shake. Makes sense, considering the dragons are massive. Another interaction is with instant-kills with a bow and arrow, which propel the enemy backwards. It’s really more gratifying to do than to explain, as you get a great sensation of power and success by plowing some poor villain back into last Tuesday with a well-placed arrow.

- M. B

The answer is to continue along the path the game allotted to you, since the sequence of these dungeons is linear. However, there is one great obstacle in your path, the one thing that is truly the source of your dread: The mule cart. A simple cart meant to be drawn by a beast with the intention of delivering goods is the greatest threat in this damp dungeon of horror, but why is that? Well, there is (or at least, was. It’s probably been fixed by now) a physics issue with the mule carts of Skyrim.

Upon walking over an upturned mule cart, the cart will sporadically fly across the room and bounce off of whatever surfaces are available. Worst of all, this mule cart is deadly. That’s right, it’s a murderous mule cart with a dark past and an angry heart. I ventured down the very same dark path that you did, but my journey was abruptly cut short by this devilish fiend. However, I was apparently not the last of his victims…

Unlucky Man Attacked by Mule Cart!

Though very frightening, we must consider this incident and use it as a springboard moving forward. We must learn from this and be cautious of other “Mule Carts” in games, as they serve as constant reminders that physics aren’t always on our side. With the cart in mind, let us be thankful that our world doesn’t have flying mule carts. Or fire-breathing dragons, for that matter.

- M.B

I think it’s the combination of tight, disciplined art style, unbelievable soundtrack and gradually challenging gameplay that keeps me coming back. And if that isn’t nerdcore enough for you – how about this: the game starts off with a quote from Darwin, and then labels its chapters with concepts from molecular biology, allowing you to choose your progression evolution by way of a branching tree. The above link runs through the majority of the gameplay features. My only gripe though is that for all its awesomeness, the marketing department looks like they kinda phoned in the trailer – why, I mean why!!? Why would you ruin your little indie game’s chances of blowing up by producing a poor trailer? Taito needs to take a page from the book of Bizarre Creations. This is how you present your (admittedly awesome) game to the world. . .

In parallel to the beastiary development lies the task of creating a compelling universe for these creatures to reside in. Furthermore, we are also looking at the process of developing inter-relationships between the Apothecary mage families that closely tie to the familial structures of the spells or antibiotics they wield.

And LASTLY, we are working on a overarching story that narrates the epic struggle between the forces of Pestilence and the Apothecaries. Perhaps most intriguing of all is the role that the player takes within this story, traveling through both worlds prior to being able to claim mastery of the art. Dude, this is about the most exhilarating project we’ve ever worked on!