This conversation sucks. (Destiny)

by uberfoop , Seattle-ish, Thursday, April 03, 2014, 21:53 (3885 days ago) @ electricpirate

As far as I can tell, the only major point of contention at the moment in the definition of "simulation." In terms of your ideas beyond what you think the correct usage of the English language is, your views don't seem all that divergent.

In the case of a gun in Halo, no. The over-riding goal is to have a thing that works well within Halo's other systems. On the other hand, Halo's physics are designed to actually simulate how physics work, so they are a simulation.

Eh, this is a pretty garbage example. If you ignore the effects of stuff like wind and gravity, and observe time at a low resolution, even hitscan weapons in Halo can be considered an approximation to real-world gun behaviour. Obviously that's a lot of caveats, but vehicles in any Halo game aren't exactly close approximations to real-world behaviour either (and in Halo 1's case, I might go as far as to argue that the guns are a significantly closer approximation to real-world behaviour in most meaningful senses than the vehicles are).

Really, neither the guns nor the vehicles are trying all that hard to be realistic.