Flying in a 3D game?

Question

I'm wondering why so few 3d games have a mechanism that allows the player to fly over the map and land down when he likes. Is this very hard to accomplish in a 3d game, or otherwise technically unfeasible?

Answer 1

I doubt that this would a difficult thing to accomplish from a technical point of view, however games which use short draw distance for objects may look bad because only the immediate area around the player has been drawn.

My guess as to why it's not done more is that is really makes the level design hard from a game play point of view if the player can start anywhere and go anywhere.

Answer 2

Well ... No. There's no technical reason, of course depending a bit on how closely you want to simulate real flight. It might be that for gameplay reasons, the designers of the game have chosen to limit the player's movement over the map.

Many team/tactical-based games (shooters) depend on the interplay between players during ground-based combat, and would just not be the same if players could fly freely.

EDIT: Thinking a bit further, there might be a case against flying from a technical point of view, since the higher altitude of the viewpoint, and quicker overall movement, might make higher demands on the rendering subsystem. Consider landscape rendering for instance, it's easy to imagine that there are optimizations you can do if you know that the viewpoint will always be reasonably close to the surface, that break if you can fly hundreds of meters up.

Answer 3

Two reasons:

• For most games, a significant portion of the game's difficulty (and fun) hinges on the fact that in order to get from a start point to a level's exit, you have to overcome certain obstacles. If you could fly, the game would be much easier / less fun, and it would be pointlessly hard to design levels where this isn't the case.
• Most 3D games concentrate on making the landscape detailed and pretty, and that's a LOT of work. So in order to make the release date, the 3D artists leave out everything that the player can't see from inside the level. If you hack in a "flying mode", you'll suddenly see that the hills have no rear side, the far-off mountains are just flat planes floating in the air nearby, and the sea has an obviously repeating texture. To make the landscape pretty both from near and far away would be a lot more work (and a later release date).