Kinect Games

[Arwin]

I just take it he means that in order to achieve the right kind of spin on a heavy ball means you'll need a large movement that will still be visible after you've released the ball.

What Kinect Bowling is doing however is just finding a way of dealing with the fact that it cannot read your wrist movement or your grip. It's a sacrifice to technical limitations and does not actually resemble real bowling, but you can get used to it easily enough I think. It just means that you cannot translate your real world knowledge of throwing a bowling ball directly to this game.

 

[BadTB25]

[With my skeptic hat on]
I suggest you contact some ESP group (I seem to recall a large cash reward) to anyone that can demonstrate ESP/telekinesis/whatever. What you're suggesting here is that you have telekinesis powers.
FACT - after the ball has left your hand whatever dance u do(*) afterwards will have no effect on how the ball will travel down the lane.
Of course you cant freeze your arms momentum after the ball's left + possibly will do yourself an injury if you try, but to suggest the followthrough in any way alters the balls movement is ludicrous

(*)well perhaps jumping up + down on the lane will

Watch some professional bowlers (PBA) on TV. There is a reason that the arm is lifted well up after the release of the ball--it's not that it can affect the ball after the release, it's because to throw a consistent and powerful throw follow through is key.

It's the same for basketball, tennis, golf, football, soccer, etc.

And as Arwin and Shifty has alluded to, it is a simulation and will not be exact. My guess is the problem is that there is no physical (button) for Kinect to know where you intend to release the ball, therefore it utilizes an estimation of where it thinks the ball should be released in addition to where your hand/arm ends up to determine the route of the ball. The only way for it to be exact is to actually throw a bowling ball which I will not be doing anytime soon at my TV.

 

[patsu]

Tetsuya Mizuguchi Interview Illuminates Child Of Eden:
http://www.siliconera.com/2010/08/20/tetsuya-mizuguchi-interview-illuminates-child-of-eden/

Q Entertainment’s Kinect compatible game Child of Eden grabbed our attention during Ubisoft’s press conference. The game has the essence of the cult hit Rez with hand gestures and music from the Genki Rockets. Does… Child of Eden have any connections to Rez? That’s one of the questions I asked Tetsuya Mizuguchi when we talked about Child of Eden.

...

 

[Silent_Buddha]

[With my skeptic hat on]
I suggest you contact some ESP group (I seem to recall a large cash reward) to anyone that can demonstrate ESP/telekinesis/whatever. What you're suggesting here is that you have telekinesis powers.
FACT - after the ball has left your hand whatever dance u do(*) afterwards will have no effect on how the ball will travel down the lane.
Of course you cant freeze your arms momentum after the ball's left + possibly will do yourself an injury if you try, but to suggest the followthrough in any way alters the balls movement is ludicrous

(*)well perhaps jumping up + down on the lane will

FACT - With bowling, golf, and many other solo professional sports follow through is as important if not more so then what you do before the ball is released/hit.

Take any bowling or golf instruction course, and they'll spend a significant amount of time working on your follow through.

If you do everything correctly up to the point of releasing a ball your follow through should naturally follow and continue in a motion consistent up until that time. If your follow through doesn't, then your mechanics will be off and your ball movement will be inconsistent and un-predictable. If you alter your follow through after releasing the ball, you've already changed the motion, trajectory, and spin of the ball. It sounds counterintuitive but that's the way it is. As any alteration of a follow through has to start while you're still throwing the ball, otherwise you're arm and body should just naturally go through the motions. A bad follow through is a big red (ALERT) sign of bad mechanics.

Regards,
SB

 

[Shifty Geezer]

FACT - With bowling, golf, and many other solo professional sports follow through is as important if not more so then what you do before the ball is released/hit.

I've already explained this, and how it's different to Kinect bowl's mechanic! Follow-through cannot affect the ball once it has left your hand. Example - you bowl a perfect ball and for the following second after release you maintain superb follow-through. The ball is heading down the middle for a strike. If then you move your arm left, is the ball going to inherit swerve left? Nope! You can't affect it once released. Kinect bowling does affect the ball after release this way (according to Patsu - I haven't tried it), because they couldn't track the fine adjustments mid swing. Basically the real follow-through doesn't work in Kinect bowling. Setting up a perfect path with your swing, that detail is lost in Kinect's sampling. The only way to add it back in is to provide some more input, which in this case is sampling motions after release.

So where follow-through is essential in real sports due to human mechanics and an inability of us to fine-tune motions sufficiently to the point of impact (and release, as your changing the ball's trajectory during contact until it leaves the area of influence with the bat, racquet, hand etc.) without having to care about what happens afterwards, in Kinect bowling it's a two-separate control scheme that has a coarse initial throw and then post-release control which does (magically!) affect the ball at a distance. Without this post-release control, the game would be dumbed down to release-trajectory only with no spin.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

I've already explained this, and how it's different to Kinect bowl's mechanic! Follow-through cannot affect the ball once it has left your hand. Example - you bowl a perfect ball and for the following second after release you maintain superb follow-through. The ball is heading down the middle for a strike. If then you move your arm left, is the ball going to inherit swerve left? Nope! You can't affect it once released. Kinect bowling does affect the ball after release this way (according to Patsu - I haven't tried it), because they couldn't track the fine adjustments mid swing. Basically the real follow-through doesn't work in Kinect bowling. Setting up a perfect path with your swing, that detail is lost in Kinect's sampling. The only way to add it back in is to provide some more input, which in this case is sampling motions after release.

So where follow-through is essential in real sports due to human mechanics and an inability of us to fine-tune motions sufficiently to the point of impact (and release, as your changing the ball's trajectory during contact until it leaves the area of influence with the bat, racquet, hand etc.) without having to care about what happens afterwards, in Kinect bowling it's a two-separate control scheme that has a coarse initial throw and then post-release control which does (magically!) affect the ball at a distance. Without this post-release control, the game would be dumbed down to release-trajectory only with no spin.

That's where we start getting into situations discussed by some of the Kinect devs where it's sometimes beneficial to have programmed game lag. In this case it would allow the observation of follow through motions prior to and durring release of the ball in game. I'm pretty sure 1-2 seconds aren't required. But for Patsu when he tried it, purposely trying to hold a follow through pose for 1-2 seconds means that he was then consciously following through on each throw.

As well users experiencing the system (amateur bowlers) have noted and been confirmed by devs that things such as spin, for example, are controlled by the players follow through motion. It's universal and easily predicated on those motions.

Although, casual people unfamiliar with bowling that might try short abbreviated motions might have trouble. But then, that'd be the case in a bowling alley anyways, even the if the results wouldn't match between bowling alley and game.

Regards,
SB

 

[Mindfury]

http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/gaming/news/a265673/kinect-xbox-live-plans-close-to-launch.html

"We might have a schedule like that [for Live Arcade]," he told DS.

"We're not too much talking about it much right now, just because we're talking about the Kinect launch games, but you know that's all news that you're going to be seeing just as we get closer and closer to launch, you'll start seeing a lot more about what we're doing with XBLA and what we're doing with other parts of the platform as well."

 

[patsu]

That's where we start getting into situations discussed by some of the Kinect devs where it's sometimes beneficial to have programmed game lag. In this case it would allow the observation of follow through motions prior to and durring release of the ball in game. I'm pretty sure 1-2 seconds aren't required. But for Patsu when he tried it, purposely trying to hold a follow through pose for 1-2 seconds means that he was then consciously following through on each throw.

If they are *really* into bowling instructions. They got it backwards. Focusing on the follow through is putting the cart in front of the horse. The trick is in the aiming and spinning while the ball is still in your hand. The follow through is a side effect partly because the ball is heavy.

Focusing on the follow through is misleading/silly because all I need to do is to "throw" my hand out and point in the direction I want the ball to go (I did something like this) and I can get a strike. I don't have to learn any control skills which needs me to tweak my action while holding the ball. Changing the ball path after the fact doesn't make me realize follow through is important. It actually shocked and ticked me off right away.

If I'm an expert bowler, I am pretty sure I'd tune my follow through based on the ball weight. If the ball is feather-light or rather non-existent, the execution should be faster.

The game is not for instruction purpose, but for entertainment (coz the pins are light). It's easy to get a strike as long as you can get the ball to go straight.

IMHO, implementing Heavenly Sword's "after touch" in the game is not wrong. If they package it properly instead of trying to shoehorn the design in, then it can be deeper and fun, instead of confusing first time players. It is very common to drop your hand naturally after throwing an imaginery ball (and the ball is well on its way to the target). Even if they want to use the follow through to gauge the ball path, its effect should be turned off immediately once it detects that my throwing hand is going down (after an upswing). Track the upswing only.

 

[zed]

FACT - With bowling, golf, and many other solo professional sports follow through is as important if not more so then what you do before the ball is released/hit.

More important Hmmm, So you also believe u can alter the balls movement with how your arm moves after it leaves your hand
Sure you cant suddenly stop your hand if its moving at 10m/sec just before the point of release (thats why there is follow through, so we dont harm ourselves)

To test my theory is simple

get a machine that throws a ball, do 100x throws measure where the ball comes to rest (should be similar place, though air etc will be different each time)
now program the machine to after the ball is thrown to drastically alter the follow through eg move up or left or reverse, do this 100x
what happens?
the balls end up roughly the same spot in all cases!!
Thus we have logically proven, that followthrough in no way alters a balls trajectory (*)

(*)the only possible alteration is with a air cuschion after the ball

 

[Shifty Geezer]

More important Hmmm, So you also believe u can alter the balls movement with how your arm moves after it leaves your hand...

Important, but going OT, plot point here is that follow-through can't be measured from an exact point in time of the ball leaving the hand, because there's an extremely short period of progressively less contact with the hand, but contact none-the-less. Thus what constitutes the start of the follow-through will be hard to pinpoint, as coaches are just talking about an overall movement. I think it's better to consider the ball has a trajectory that follows the arm exactly until 'releasd', where finger pressure is gradually lessened and the ball is allowed to slide from the fingers, all the while in contact and receiving forces which will impart rotational and linear velocities. The ball's trajectory deviates from the arm's trajectory, and at some point it's clearly not associated, but there's a period of deviation which no doubt is considered by coaches as part of the follow-through action but is neither with the ball held nor the ball far enough from the hand to no longer be in contact.

This is very OT though, and the subject has been covered in enough detail to explain Patsu's review of the Bowling game. Further discussion on sports mechanics and terminology belongs in the General Discussion forum.

 

[AzBat]

If you had high hopes for Fighters Uncaged, then you might want to drop them a little bit. In fact, you might rather want to skip it and wait for the 2.0 version instead...

Joystiq Hands On with Video
http://www.joystiq.com/2010/08/22/preview-fighters-uncaged

Tommy McClain

 

[MrFloopy]

More important Hmmm, So you also believe u can alter the balls movement with how your arm moves after it leaves your hand

I'm sure you don't really think anyone said that any movement after the release of the ball affects the ball at all. It is however very standard practice to use the movement of the follow through as a target for what you do before the ball is released / hit / kicked. In fact using motion capture technology in the biomechanics field, the follow through is often used to assist in the analysis of what has happened through the initial movements leading up to the kick / hit / release.

So why is it not valid in this case to measure the follow through to attempt to make assumptions about what the player was doing / intending before hand?

Of course this is all irrelevant as it's a casual game for fun and in no way trying to be an accurate sports sim, So this discussion smacks of argument for arguments sake.

 

[bkilian]

If they are *really* into bowling instructions. They got it backwards. Focusing on the follow through is putting the cart in front of the horse. The trick is in the aiming and spinning while the ball is still in your hand. The follow through is a side effect partly because the ball is heavy.

Focusing on the follow through is misleading/silly because all I need to do is to "throw" my hand out and point in the direction I want the ball to go (I did something like this) and I can get a strike. I don't have to learn any control skills which needs me to tweak my action while holding the ball. Changing the ball path after the fact doesn't make me realize follow through is important. It actually shocked and ticked me off right away.

If I'm an expert bowler, I am pretty sure I'd tune my follow through based on the ball weight. If the ball is feather-light or rather non-existent, the execution should be faster.

The game is not for instruction purpose, but for entertainment (coz the pins are light). It's easy to get a strike as long as you can get the ball to go straight.

IMHO, implementing Heavenly Sword's "after touch" in the game is not wrong. If they package it properly instead of trying to shoehorn the design in, then it can be deeper and fun, instead of confusing first time players. It is very common to drop your hand naturally after throwing an imaginery ball (and the ball is well on its way to the target). Even if they want to use the follow through to gauge the ball path, its effect should be turned off immediately once it detects that my throwing hand is going down (after an upswing). Track the upswing only.

So I got a chance to try the bowling, and as far as I can tell, it behaves pretty accurately. Nothing I did after I finished my follow through affected the ball, and the follow through I was using was exactly what I would use in a real bowling alley, assuming I was using my normal weight ball. I could get the ball to go straight or curve as I needed and I rolled 7 strikes in a row.
The pins do go down pretty easy though, a couple of times when I figured I should get a 7/10 split because I rolled a straight down the middle, it still knocked down the edge pins.

I didn't notice any of the issues you describe. Of course, as in real bowling, the ball will only start curving halfway to 2/3rds down the lane, maybe that's what you were seeing?

More important Hmmm, So you also believe u can alter the balls movement with how your arm moves after it leaves your hand
Sure you cant suddenly stop your hand if its moving at 10m/sec just before the point of release (thats why there is follow through, so we dont harm ourselves)

Exactly, and the trajectory of your follow through is dictated by the motions you made up to releasing the ball. That's why trainers sometimes focus on it, since it's something simple to see and measure, and getting you to modify it requires changing how you throw, thus changing how the ball behaves. It's all simple mechanical physics involving levers and weights
It's not the motions after you release the ball that affects the ball, the the motions before you release the ball that affects your motions after you release.

 

[patsu]

I didn't notice any of the issues you describe. Of course, as in real bowling, the ball will only start curving halfway to 2/3rds down the lane, maybe that's what you were seeing?

Nope, the only difference was whether I hold my posture longer (until the ball hit the pins). If I did, the ball went straight. If not, the ball went straight, then veered off course -- as I dropped my hand.

The Kinect staff spun his ball, so the curve is noticeable (towards the end). My path looked different.

I think my swing is also faster than his. I'll have to try it again to see it behaves any more differently.

 

[AzBat]

Ever wanted to know how Dance Cental handles multiple people? Well here you go...

According to project director Kasson Crooker, Dance Central treats dancing "a lot like Karaoke," in that people can be "intimidated by the experience and want to do it for the first time with a group of friends." As such, Dance Central only scores one player at a time, whoever happens to be closest to the Kinect unit. While other players are recognized as infrared outlines -- something we witnessed during our own preview -- they aren't actually scored by the game (though the game will switch the player being scored if someone else moves closest to the camera).

Crooker says the decision to not score additional players was to simplify the process, removing "rigid game requirements" like profile management and "complicated joining screens" -- something that probably sounds familiar to anyone who's hosted a Rock Band party. "This allows our game to be very forgiving, while still indicating to the player who is being tracked and scored," says Crooker, "and allows us to encourage two-plus people to get up and dance together."

Crooker adds that while Kinect can track two players simultaneously, Harmonix chose to focus on a single player so as not to "degrade or diminish the quality of the choreography" and so that players won't run into one another or block the camera. "So it was really a creative decision for us," says Crooker, "and not a technical one."

http://www.joystiq.com/2010/08/27/tsunoda-harmonix-address-kinect-player-limit

Tommy McClain

 

[AzBat]

Evidently Konami's Adrenalin Misfits will be known as Crossboard7 outside the US. Check the 2 different trailers at Joystiq...

http://www.joystiq.com/2010/08/31/adrenalin-misfits-brings-body-waggle-to-kinect/

EDIT:

GamersHell got some screenshots & a downloadable video of DanceMasters & Adrenalin Misfits at New York Gamers' Day 2010...

http://www.gamershell.com/news_101688.html

http://www.gamershell.com/news_101704.html

Tommy McClain

 

[AzBat]

Microsoft showed Kinect at PAX this year. Games showcased were Dance Central, Joy Ride & for the first time boxing on Kinect Sports. There's a short video of it on Inside Xbox on the dashboard. I searched YouTube and found this one & only video...

Tommy McClain

 

[AzBat]

Who says a Spartan can't dance?

Haven't laughed that hard in awhile.

Tommy McClain

 

[Arwin]

Ubisoft's Kinect Motion Sports:

http://www.eurogamer.net/videos/kinect-motion-sports-trailer-6

 

[dragonelite]

Who says a Spartan can't dance?

AvJGQRYOYmg

Haven't laughed that hard in awhile.

Tommy McClain

Hey its Ai favorite noble team member.