ninjabee.com

I agree, the price is a little high considering the current economic situation around the world but people are gonna buy it anyway. I did. Its pre-ordered along with Kinectamals.

I would have prefered it being in the $100 price range though. Packaging it with a console only a moron would buy (the 4gig 360 arcade) was stupid as well.



Late, true perhaps. It would have been far better for both to hit the market 2 years ago when Wii was growing. If they had, the Wii would be deader than it is now.

Wrong approach? No, only Sony is taking the wrong approach. Microsoft got his one right. Sony's version requires additional devices to purchase if you want multiplayer. You have a silly wand to wave around and play with. On the other hand, Microsoft went the right direction. Once you purchase the kinect, you don't need to buy anything else. No silly hand wands etc, even for multi-player games. One thing to buy. Thats a win in my book.

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"Its what you do in a heard, you help each other." - Manny from Ice Age.
"Understanding women isn't about knowing what button to push, its knowing when not to push them" - Me

Bizzy Bee, Find Teddy, avatar drop and the alphabet blocks all appealed to my younger two and hell, at a buck a game (80 points) when they get tired of them, so what. They wear out crap from the dollar store in less than a weekend.[/quote] OH OO 12 years old Alert!!! LOL games there all 1 dollars. Get GTA 4 and Dynasty Warriors 6 or Dynasty Warriors Strike Force and we can play. Also ask your parents to get you Sub for Gamefly.com so you can rent before you buy.

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Try to get the 15$ mic so we can talk it's easier.
or e-bay one for 4$.

Sorry, neither GTA nor Dynasty are appropriate for my 4-12 yr old granddaughters.

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"Its what you do in a heard, you help each other." - Manny from Ice Age.
"Understanding women isn't about knowing what button to push, its knowing when not to push them" - Me

After buying my daughter the kinect ... I would love to kick my keflings please ... Yes ... Please support this as I would love to stand and pick up keflings do the movements for this game ... If done great it would be the Best Kinect game on the market ...

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AKFK - 200/200 as of 04May09

OK, so here's the hard part of doing a game like Keflings with Kinect...

How do you move around the world? I've seen some projects that attempt to do navigation in space with Kinect (and I've worked on some prototypes myself) and they all suck. Leaning, in particular, is a weak solution.

The thing I'm most interested in so far (if we DID someday add Kinect support to a Keflings game) would be to let players in Live games do their own custom emotes on the fly and kick keflings who walk by, but no avatar movement. And that's just me talking about one idea I had - I'm NOT saying we're doing Kinect support in AWOK.

I sort of don't want this game to have anything with the Kinect either. Nothing against it, but it is totally unfair for those of us in tiny apartments who love our Xbox. I don't even have 6 feet to dedicate, much less 8. I want to play thins game, so no Kinect please.

I agree, the world movement would be the hardest to implement. Picking up and moving objects would be fairly easy with a simple hold and wait selector ring. Picking up moving Keflings would have to be dealt with though. The options I can immediately think of for world movement:

• Mock walking in place moving side-side to steer/rotate the angle
• Swing arms in a waling manner without need to move legs (less work) but prevents doing anything with arms while moving. side-side still steers/rotate the angle
• Using outstretched hand to indicate place to walk to which is similar to moving the mouse on the PC version while holding the mouse button down. Probably easy to implement and easiest for users to use and is least physical for the user. Could be done with the player in a seated position for long play sessions (thats a win in my book).
• Grab & drag map and then hold hand (ring fill up) to set waypoint to move to. This is probably the easiest to implement but takes longer for users to move as they have to wait for the confirmation ring to fill for every move. Could be rather putzy to move for the user but could accommodate seated players.

Physically mimicking kicking a Kefling. Priceless! Kefling Soccer mini-game anyone Seriously, that could be more fun than Avatar Drop!

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"Its what you do in a heard, you help each other." - Manny from Ice Age.
"Understanding women isn't about knowing what button to push, its knowing when not to push them" - Me

Again not saying we have kinect support in AWOK, but:

Thanks for the suggestions! Other people (ATC in particular) have suggested other navigation ideas to me, as well. I've actually spent a lot of time working on this problem* directly, and it's surprisingly annoying.

I've personally experimented with all of these ideas and more, except I haven't ever tried the grabbing-the-map idea. That's kinda interesting! Maybe it'd be like AKFK PC in that respect... I'll have to think about it. It'd have to not be too PC-like.

I'm not a huge fan of the hold-and-wait selector mechanic in general. I'm sad that that idea has proliferated, and is used in the dashboard.

(* We do contract work in addition to making our own games, and from time to time I've had the opportunity to do Kinect work for other companies, which has been educational and fun.)

Rofl, that gonna be your sig now


No prob. Sometimes its nice to see something from an outside viewer's aspect.



I kinda had a mental image of Google Maps drag around then select mechanism. When you select, then the camera would zoom back to your giant and do a chase cam as you walked to the selected spot.


Me either but it kinda makes sense to give the user a chance to change their minds when selecting things or if the Kinect falsely tracks you (or someone else walking by). As far as the wait thing, I think it was most prominent in Fable/Fable 2 and not associated with Kinect at all. I like the way DC does the drag to select menu items though. Its a nice alternative.

Don't know if you played or remember the PC game Black & White. It used mouse gestures instead of keyboard keys. I think this system would be an outstanding thing to develop for the Kinect. I am really surprised no games have picked up on this idea. The recent Harry Potter Kinect enabled game would have been a perfect opportunity to go to gestures to select spells.

I would love to see a Kinect keyboard that used the old Palm Pilot hand writing gestures. They were simple and easy to learn.

Sorry, I just realized I was drifting off topic.

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"Its what you do in a heard, you help each other." - Manny from Ice Age.
"Understanding women isn't about knowing what button to push, its knowing when not to push them" - Me

Yeah, I played B&W. Remember how half the time it misinterpreted your mouse gestures?

I'm quite surprised to hear that Harry Potter didn't use gestures for spells. "Swish and flick!" How odd... I admit to not having played it.

I guarantee people are not only thinking about gesture games, not only experimenting with gesture code, but are already implementing gestures in games. Actually, that's basically what Dance Central is. Gesture recognition for each dance move.

I think the basic UI mechanics in DC (swipe to select) are extremely well done. I wish more people were thinking along those lines...

I don't see why everyone want to mimic the exact move with the Kinect, instead of having to stand up and pretend that your walking, why not just point in the direction you want to walk, allowing people to sit down and play also, as standing around for hours on end will eventually tire your legs out, and I am sure you would want the players to enjoy it over longer periods of time instead of just at the start of the session.

So if anything I would suggest a type of minority report style control scheme where you just flick your hand in a direction to open menus, do actions and point in a direction to walk around, instead of jumping and running around the living room.

Its as allot of the critics of the Kinect are saying, controlling looks silly because you are standing around flailing your arms and legs to do things, but with what I have played around with the Kinect connected to my computer there should be no issues with small movements at all.

If you think about games on other consoles like the DS/Wii that have been using a alternate control system for a while, it started out being very weird and usually require lots of movement, but now its more of the point and drag a little instead of swing and fling.

So to summary up:
Do Kinect support by all means, its neat and fun.
Do not require it as not everyone wants one.
Small movements instead of jumping around like a monkey to do things.
And as most developers already try to do, think outside the box with it.

oh, and HI Everyone!

Well, the problem is that the Kinect isn't sensitive enough to track actual hand movements down to the finger level and I am not sure even about down to the palm level. Because of that it can't distinguish if you are pointing to the upper right or are reaching to the upper right to pick something up. At least I have not seen that level of tracking in any app/game yet.

From what I have read, the original Natal units had a much higher resolution camera and there was even talk of it reading american sign language. They downgraded the camera system (and some internal hardware) to bring manufacture costs down.

I do agree with the optional status of Kinect
I do agree with the ability to facilitate people sitting to play.

How practical either is, I don't know, I am not a developer nor have access to the SDK or API.

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"Its what you do in a heard, you help each other." - Manny from Ice Age.
"Understanding women isn't about knowing what button to push, its knowing when not to push them" - Me

Hi, and welcome!



In my experience this is simply not the case. The data we get from the camera is fairly noisy, as you can feel for yourself in some of the games currently out there. It requires a lot of filtering, and small motions just get lost.

hehe, my B&W worked fine. I used (still do) a trackball. I din't have issues with the gesture system. Took a bit of getting used to but once you did it worked pretty well.

Since then, almost a decade has passed and gesture mechanics and recognition have gotten far better. Remember the early Pilots and how exact you had to be with the handwriting, now PDAs with writing recognition are hella lot better and don't require the special lettering Palms did. I can see a game like B&W working quite well with today's software/hardware and especially with the Kinect.

Yea, DC is overall gesture controlled but I really meant hand gestures, not whole body. Circling your left hand clockwise does one thing, circling it counterclockwise does something else. Waving it up like you are lifting a balloon could be something different, etc. That sort of gestures. Kinectimals does something similar with the left and right swipe motion to scroll through toy box items. Its that sort of gesture I was thinking about for map scrolling. Swish up, Swish down, Swish left and right. Reach out and tap to select. But it all requires good hand tracking and I simply don't know if the Kinect hardware can do it with the reduced resolution camera it now sports. You would know better as a Dev (I assume you have access to a dev kinect and sdk that the public does not).

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"Its what you do in a heard, you help each other." - Manny from Ice Age.
"Understanding women isn't about knowing what button to push, its knowing when not to push them" - Me