I'd heard some stuff about Hydrophobia: Prophecy, not that I could remember what any of that stuff was, but it was stuff! You know, stuff. It wasn't a game that I hadn't heard any stuff about, like Toki Tori was when I got it as part of the pre-Portal-2-Potato-Buntle. No sir, there was stuff that had been heard.
So anyway it was like three bucks as part of a Steam weekend sale, so I picked it up at some point. This weekend, I finally played it.
Here's a plot you may have heard before: a bunch of cultists attack during a big ceremony and steal an artifact that they plan to use for nefarious purposes. The unlikely protagonist at first just tries to survive the aftermath, but eventually decides to stop the cultists' evil plans. In the process, the protagonist is exposed to the artifact and gains mysterious powers that turn out to be necessary to save the world.
Despite using Fantasy RPG Template #2, it's a dystopian-future sci-fi set on a sinking boat.
Unresolved plot threads? Check.
Implausible final boss fight? Check.
Awkward controls that don't work correctly if you remap them? Check.
Total play time: 4 hours according to Steam, which admittedly runs on Valve Time but sounds about right.
Verdict: it's a decently competent tech demo for a watery physics engine. 5/10.
Him-Person
17 hours ago
2 comments:
I'm curious to know more about the physics engine, actually. Any observations you can make from actually playing it? Searching around for details for what it does (in any technical sense) turns up nada.
My guess is it's some sort of smoothed particle simulation (SPH), but that's just because I can't think of any other approach that can even potentially do realtime dynamic fluids, especially with such drastically moving interfaces.
Well, it wasn't proper 3d fluid physics for sure. Square grid, each square subdivided into two triangles, and the engine determines the height of each vertex. I'm guessing it was doing some kind of adjacent-cell calculation of the sort that graphics cards are already good at.
So given that, the main question is how advanced are the features it can do? 'cause so far it's fundamentally no different from, say, Dwarf Fortress.
I at least saw:
* No slowdown (DF's main problem)
* Waves (eg. from explosions)
* Floating objects being carried with flow
Normalizing water level between connected areas kind of worked and kind of didn't. What worked well was there were these mostly-dry hallways with small flooded side-rooms with glass doors. Shoot out the glass and there's a big disruptive gush of water out into the hallway. What worked less well was when there were two big rooms, one with an extra foot of water, connected by a narrow door. That caused a very visible discontinuity at the doorway, for whatever reason.
Air pressure was kind of a fail. You can totally flood a room all the way up to the ceiling through a low doorway if you have enough water in the adjacent room.
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