bullet time in a MMO

Its not possible to implement true bullet time effects in a multiplayer game. Simply because the fact that everything still happens in realtime and your actions will be too late to make a difference in the realtime world.

There are ways to fake it though.

No... if you slowed it down for one guy and he just looked really fast to everyone else, then they would still be playing at real-speed and he would therefore be defying the laws of time. To do bullettime in MMO you have to slow it down for everyone.

I played a Half-Life mod waaay back in the day where they had implemented bullettime, and it was awesome. Everyone had a recharging bullettime meter, and the mod allowed for various matrix dives and wall jumps. So you run around shooting, then someone initiates bullettime and everyone starts diving around/cartwheeling etc. It was really cool

(anyone know the name of that mod?)

I guess a way to do it would be to have it only effect players involved in a fight but could only be activated if they were being shot at. Or I might be able to just slow down all projectiles flying at the player using bullet time allowing them to dodge the bullets. Anyone let me know if you have some other ideas on how it could be done.

This isn't necessarily impossible. Time is not constants, as stated by Einstein's theories of relativity state. What you need to do is along with your game distribute chair on a big arm that spins around that the player sits in. When bullet time is activates by a player all the other players chairs accelerate them to velocities approaching the speed of light. Thus slowing time down for them. They will be moving really slow while the bullet time using player will be moving at normal speed.

Of course you'll have to find some way to combat the massive G forces they would experience.

Was the mod something like action halflife

The game Timeshift has something vaguely like this in multiplayer. If you chuck a 'time grenade', it will explode into an area in which everything moves *really* slowly. Chuck one at somebody, and they'll be easy targets, but your bullets will be moving slowly, too, so it will take a while for them to reach him. Or you could chuck one down a hall-way and it would effectively create a sheild (gives you enough time to run away from the slow bullets and it would be suicidal for someone to run into it).

Something like that might work.

I think it's possible, but it would be really annoying...

Slow down everyone remotely, except you (your targeting, bullets, whatever...). however that would really piss me off everytime someone starts using bullet-time and it slows my controls down.

I think a time capsule would work better though. When you trigger bullet time, it affects an area, and everything entering the area will slow down (bullets, players, ...). Everything leaving the area would speed up until normal speed.

Time travel could also be possible, for a few seconds back. You trigger your time travel, your body de-materialise, and your game state moves back to a few seconds in the past, even possibly going into a slight slow motion. When time travel ends, your body re-materialise and you carry on with the game's latest state.

If you kill someone in your time travel, they would die instantly. You could also get killed while time travelling if you are not careful :)

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Original post by oliii I think it's possible, but it would be really annoying... Slow down everyone remotely, except you (your targeting, bullets, whatever...). however that would really piss me off everytime someone starts using bullet-time and it slows my controls down. I think a time capsule would work better though. When you trigger bullet time, it affects an area, and everything entering the area will slow down (bullets, players, ...). Everything leaving the area would speed up until normal speed.

My idea wasn't to slow everyone down...

I've been thinking about multiplayer bullet-time effects. One solution what I came up with:

Player A wants to start bullet time.
In order to do so he has a device that needs to charge up (say5-10sec) to make the bullet time effect. During this charging up an expanding sphere is shown around player A, that apears to be standing still in the middle of the sphere.

During the charge up, the other players see the sphere growing and try to stay out(they are moving in real time).

For player A the sphere won't grow, but is at it's final size instantly.
Player A can freely move around in the sphere in real-time, possibly with a speed boost, but the other players actions are shown in 1/2time, or even slower. When the charge up time is over, Player A's actions(which have to be recorded in the charge up time) are executed in double (or faster) speed.

In the End player A has had its cool slow-mo effects, and the other players that stayed in the sphere have potentially been harmed or killed.

I'm probably forgetting something here, but thats the spirit of it :)
And as Symlinked pointed out, it's not real, but faked. Could be fun tough.

re: Fase
Sounds like your idea is analagous to some of the principals of relativity, however rather than propogating effect at the speed of light, you propogate at the speed of player motion.



I was thinking that you Can do different time perspectives for different players, by taking advantage of the fact that due to network latency the players Don't see each other in realtime anyway. Thus maybe we can have a small amount of bullettime effects within this margin of uncertainty.

PlayerA activates his bullettime,

PlayerB recieves this notice, and his computer activates accelerated dead reckoning for his model of PlayerA-showing him moving at accelerated speed to extrapolated locations (and warping as updates increase accuracy)

PlayerA continues to recieve updates of what PlayB is doing, but rather than render PlayerB in realtime, his engine displays a slow-mo recording of PlayB's recent actions.

PlayA's interactions (shooting at) the recording is given priority over PlayB's interaction with the dead reckoner. Damages/dodges are resloved acording to what PlayA saw happen.

When PlayA deactivates bulletime, his recorded perspective of PlayB has not finished... there will be an accelerated 'catch up' time where everything needs to warp back to realtime locations.

Total bulletime will need to be limited to say, under 5 seconds. Otherwise the two 'realities' of PlayA's recording, and PlayB's dead reckoning will become too far apart to resolve/unplayable. Plus the recording will start to become obviously unsychronized...(aside from too large)




This system Should produce the effect desired- pA sees a slowmo pB. pB sees an accelerated (and jittery jumpy) pA. pA's shots hit pB and his percieved dodges take effect...
Of course, it will be kinda wierd looking from pB's view; soemthing akin to the 'standby' cheat often used on Halo2 Xbox Live (but you'll add a graphical blur extrapolation to pA to make it look nice)

yeah, action halflife!

I think the Matrix MMORPG handled this by making bullet time effects occur in a 'bubble'; characters nearby would be affected by it but nobody else.

Then again, that game was a pretty big financial disaster.

I like Anonymous/Haphazardlynamed's idea re: dead reckoning hacks. You could increase the speed at which you estimate they could have traveled, and render a blur effect as you move the character -- so that as you get corrections, you'll get very fast blurry motions (from the non-bullet time player's view) which are conducive to the effect seen in the Matrix movies. The "Time Grenade" idea also sounds like an innovative weapon idea that would be fun to play with. Of course (?) I don't see this idea working in an MMO so much as in a game with networks of a standard FPS scope (ie maybe up to 32 players in a single game).

A thought that I had was allowing players to be at differing points in time. Basically, you'd all start off at a synced clock time, but due to various actions (including invoking bullet time) you could throw your times out of sync. Playing on oliii's idea of limited time travel, it would be incredible if the game was automatically logging players' motions with timestamps, so that if you happened upon a player who was a few seconds ahead of you, your copy of the game would be playing their actions back, so you'd be able to get the drop on them. The game would notice the discrepency in the two players' current times, and might throw one player into bullet time to let the other one catch up. So what you'd get then is one player would have a moment of advantage on the other player (while the other's recorded motions are played), but then the advantage would be reversed as the formerly disadvantaged player now gets some bullet-time to catch up. This could add an element of strategy involved; do you want to keep your clock a bit ahead or a bit behind?

Still, it might seem that the player who's ahead might have the disadvantage -- if the player with the earlier clock can do enough damage in the time they're allowed, then the player with the later clock doesn't even have a chance to fight back. To give them a chance, the later player might see a "time disjoint" version of the earlier player, manifesting as a bullet-time-effected player, which might give them a chance to realize thay hey, this might be a time to go back a bit in time a bit to even things out. If they do this soon enough, they can even up the advantage sooner, so that they'd be on an even par again -- or they could go a little bit further back, causing a little bit of a crazy fourth-dimensional cat-and-mouse game (while energy lasts).

Hmm...What I'm seeing now is a game in which you can change your rate of time forward and backward, where deviations from standard time rate cost power, and achieving deviations that are further from standard time position cost exponentially more power, which will keep players fluctuating between a nice, controllable range. Aha, and perhaps when you move forward in time at an accelerated pace, you regenerate power a bit faster? This might give players an incentive to go a little bit ahead of time, so that they'll have more power, yet will be more susceptable to someone getting the drop on them. If they're really fast, they can use their power to reverse the drop -- they'll likely have more of it, so they could win a war of attrition...if they're skilled enough. Ha, I really like where this is going.

In short though, when things get out of whack, you could basically fudge it a bit and let things get a bit crazy and as long as it's awesome and there's some sort of internal consistency that players can become adept at exploiting, there will be devout fans who love it. If someone were to run with the disjoint time idea, the bullet-time effect can be used as a good cover for fudging correcting discrepencies in general.

I've been following this topic with great interest - it is funny to see that with all laws of nature that can be toyed around with in games, time is still a 'natural' barrier. I am not such a scientist as I would like to be, but the idea of bullet time still interests me enough to give it some thought :P

The way I see it is that bullet time would only be for pretty short moments ( <= 10 seconds ). At the time a player hits his 'bullet-time' button the game would slow down for him, whereas for other players his motions would appear blurred (to fake a speed effect, as really speeding the player up makes things pretty complicated). The game state is then sort of buffered for the player in bullet time and by the end of the bullet time, the events that have been buffered are rendered accelerated to let the bullet-time player catch up with the gamestate.

I would imagine that sound is a very important attribute to this affect, especially in the time that the player is catching up (accelerated animation) I imagine this 'matrix-like' 'back to normal' sound which I can't express in words. The way it would look to 'normal time' players is that the blurring slowly disappears while the player catches up with the current game state.

This might be an odd idea. After all, the idea of bullet time is that you're in a different time-frame and turning back shouldn't be like accelerating. However, in The Matrix it almost looks as though bullet time is followed by an acceleration because your eyes first got used to the slow movements. Then, when everything returned to 'normal' it would seem as though there was a sudden 'acceleration'. The way I see it, this effect could be matched pretty accurately in a video game...

Anyway, I don't know what I'm talking about so don't take it too serious :P

i found this by searching gamedev site: http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=333833&PageSize=25&WhichPage=1
if i remember right FEAR multiplayer uses bullet time effect, you can also check FEAR Combat which is the game multiplayer without single, i'm not sure but i heard it's free.

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Original post by Anonymous Poster A simple implementation for the propsal above would be to slow down the time for the player who starts its bullet time and let him act upon the saved state of the game. After some determined time the player's time has to be accelerate to catch up with current game state. This would allow the player to aim with more precision because other players are moving slower. The other players would see this as damage coming from the player even when they are already moved past his line of fire. (can also be seen during ping spikes, some older fps games can be tricked by forcing packet drops to make everyone stand still for a brief moment) The end result would be: -nice effects and easy targeting for the player involved -bad movement artifacts and lag like hits for others

That still sounds pretty bad for the non-bullet time player; they see the bullet time player shooting in a different direction, yet they get hit? This would come off as a buggy lag-induced experience -- which is true enough, as we're inducing a lag in gameplay for them to produce this effect. However, we can still bend the bullet time player's aim so that they do in fact shoot and hit the non-bullet time player. We can pass this off as relativistic phenomena. If executed well enough, it would simply seem that the bullet time player aimed well and hit them.

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Original post by Shuger i found this by searching gamedev site: http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=333833&PageSize=25&WhichPage=1 if i remember right FEAR multiplayer uses bullet time effect, you can also check FEAR Combat which is the game multiplayer without single, i'm not sure but i heard it's free.

This is an interesting paper so far (I'm about halfway through) and I recommend it for all interested in this thread. I like their idea of dealing straightforwardly in terms of space-time, and expressing game events in terms of communication between active (non-deterministic) entities through use of passive (deterministic) entities that travel over contours in space-time. These contours can be shaped as is most convenient to fit your lag and timewarping situation. Of course you very much need to distinguish between what actually happens (game state) and what you see (mere visualization). If we feel the need to visually indicate signs of discrepency between the two representations, we can do so via relativistic effects, such as the bullet-time blur effect and possibly through use of brightness or color to give more information as to the nature of the discrepency.