Fahrenheit / Indigo Prophecy played on Kinect Hack (FAAST) with GlovePIE

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With all that snow around Christmas I started thinking about this game again - and how awesomely it would work with Kinect.

Possibly one of the most underrated games of all time Fahrenheit (EU) / Indigo Prophecy (US) is the intellectual forefather to a little known PS3 title - Heavy Rain. As good as an interactive cinematic experience can get, Fahrenheit pioneered gesture based controls (all be it via a mouse) and quick time events.

The plot sees you trying to unravel a murder that you committed but have no relocation of carrying out. In tandem you are put into the bodies of two DI's who follow along behind you discovering clues based on what you did as the murderer. Combined with the multiple story paths, Fahrenheit is an almost Shakespearian title with such a pioneering interface that it works in perfect synergy with Kinect. If you haven't played it go and BUY it, you won't regret it.

Once again movement is done via a chuck, I thought maybe it would be possible to get away with walking in place and using hand gestures on this one - but still that seems to detract from the experience. The issue with walk cycles is calculating when you have stopped moving and the issue with hand gestures is that using button presses are not accurate enough even for slow paced 3rd person games.

Mouse control is executed via a GlovePIE script I wrote which takes the key binds from FAAST and converts them into mouse events. I've posted before that I don't rate basic mouse emulation via FAAST for much beyond roughly pushing your cursor around a desktop because you are doing just that - pushing a cursor. What is needed is 1:1 hand tracking, which Kinect is capable of but which hasn't been released on OpenNI/NITE/FAAST yet.

The advantage of using GlovePIE over a mouse emulator is that it's so damn flexible. Using it as a scripting engine means that it was possible to get the cursor to move faster based upon how far you moved your arm from 0, triggering 3 thresholds in each direction to get better control and speed at the same time. I'm going to re-write this in a slightly smarter way to give 9 threshold points in each direction and release it on kinecthacks.net - but I really don't suggest trying to play an FPS with it!

Quick time events are executed via FAAST key binds and are absolutely amazing fun. Forget about Fitness Evolved's gym games, become a ninja and work out at the same time!

Once again this is only possible because of Evan Suma's work on FAAST at USC http://projects.ict.usc.edu/mxr/faast/

And Carl Kenners long time project GolvePIE http://glovepie.org/

Carl hasn't asked me to, but I'm sure he would like me to add that all this stuff munches electricity like no bodies business so please consider your gaming carbon foot print.

Give 'em your support guys.

Also if you like interesting, unusual games check out "The Ship" from Outerlight. I used to work at Outerlight as Systems Manager and play tester before it tragically collapsed just before the release of "Bloody Good Time", published by Ubisoft. I'd love to see this company come back to life as the bunch at OL were just fabulous. http://store.steampowered.com/app/2400/?snr=1_7_7__150_1

Also if you like wargames check out a project I collaborate on http://warheadsthegame.com