Hello again!
I thought of two arcade games that could fit well either on the board walk or in the arcade. One of them is a Crane game, you know the ones. They are the totally rigged games were you use a claw to try and pick up stuffed toys or any other item of fun or value. The prizes would involve all the plush toys, some smaller things from Robs Imports (like the mushroom light, cassettes tapes, and just some random things like a coffee pot or the paper towels.) There could also be rare prizes, ones that you can’t buy at the shops and can only win from the machine. I don’t know what it could be but I’m sure the amazing dev team can come up with something great!
The other game is a basic coin pusher if you don’t know what it is here is a link (https://youtu.be/xJ_lH0hqP0E?t=1m43s). It could be called a Unit pusher and it would work the same way the one in the video did. Unit coins could be a value of 1 unit up to 25 units. There could be small stacks of unit bills of a value up to 250 units that over time gets pushed to the front and for one lucky winner to win. Coin pushers are like gambling, you see them all hanging over the edge and you keep thinking that one more coin will push them over and you will be rolling in money. Its simple and addictive.
Unfortunately, IIRC, the devs can’t really put in physics-based games in the arcade because of server stress (though that was only for pool; if it was something simpler, it might work). Coin pusher seems a bit too much, and although the crane game could work because it’s a lot simpler, the arcade is probably going to run on a ticket system (like Chuck E Cheese).
I thought that was for GMT, they’ve got a new engine now that’s much much better than source. It might be possible.
Also, I love both crane games and coin pushers, my two favorite arcade games ever. I’d love to see either, but I don’t know how we’d actually make a crane game. Maybe use the one where a little vaccum comes down and sucks the plushie to the crane? I’ve seen those before… The coin pusher is wonderful and I actually know a no-fail way to win those, I used to be the fear of Chuck-e-cheeses everywhere.
They could have them away from other items behind a wall or something, there draw distance could be only a few feet. If they mush it in the corner then you cant see it rendering out. Or another option could be the fact that only the person at the machine can see whats going on, that would suck for others who want to watch and have a group experience but it would help on the stress. Either way, if the super talented devs like the idea they will come up with an awesome plan to execute it.
Well, even though the engine is better, the server still has to do all the physics calculations. I don’t think there would be much of a difference in having to calculate dozens of coins falling with Havok physics and having to calculate dozens of coins falling with PhysX physics; the server strain would probably be about the same. I think UE4’s physics would be more resource-intensive given that it’s (apparently) more accurate, but this is completely baseless.
Mac already addressed this about pool anyway:
Given that you have to do all the calculations for all of the coin pushers, plus all of the players on the server, plus all of their pets, plus bowling (in the future), plus skee-ball (also in the future), etc., that’s a lot of load on the server.
It could be likely that they could just make a coin pusher using “fake” physics (basically just coding in how the coins should move without doing actual physics calculations), but I don’t think that would play too well.
Then again, they could just swap the coins out for something else (like capsules containing tickets), so there would be less things to calculate.