: Ping an empty vehicle, and one of your squad gets in it.

Ah but which member of your squad? And which seat does he/she get into?

Would you allow NPCs to decide for themselves when and what they drive? Are the orders an addition or a requirement?

This is where I worry that you-can-do morphs into you-must-do. I have spent too much time trying to get the NPC with the Rocket Launcher on the correct location on the Scorpion. If I had willpower then I would just let the NPCs do what ever they wanted but I try for the optimum result and end up frittering away the fun.

If I had voice control then I could say, "You with the RL take the front right seat." then we all hop into the vehicle.

I would like to know what other people think: do you do the vehicle position dance or do you think it's a waste of time? Is this a feature of the game that you don't use? Or do you think that it's a waste of time but you still do it? ;-)

I know that RC Master has done it in some of his speed runs. He kicks Buck out of the gunner position and then takes the wheel to get him into the passenger seat of the hog and he gets into the passenger seat, momentarily, to make Buck take the gun.

: Ping an enemy, and
: they attack. Ping a ground location and they defend. I don't think there's
: any real need for voice control.

Again, how many units attack? How do you tell the snipers to hang back but everybody else push forward?

In h2 the mere fact that you gave a marine a sniper rifle made the marine hang back and snipe. But the AI was changed from 2 to 3 to add squad behavior - the AI assigned work to squads to reduce scripting burden on designers. This broke sniper behavior because the marines were still assigned to a squad that was pushing forward into close combat. Snipers would 'snipe' from close quarters.

The AI could be modified to allow units to leave squads and restore h2-like, intelligent, behavior. (Until Damien (SP?) explained why they did what they did - I had assumed that Bungie read all our posts, bragging about how easy it is to give marine beam rifles and let them decimate the enemy. They read those posts and deliberately put an end to the behavior. I was wrong.)

If a semblance of h2 behavior was restored then you need only give them the weapon and you would get exactly the desired behavior without the need for any order. That would be the best possible outcome.

But the PROCESS of giving someone a weapon does need improving. The default NPC behavior is to run about like a loon to make them look busy and purposeful. Sometimes you have to chase them around for a bit, trying to get in front of them, to initiate a swap.

If I say, "someone take this SR" then the nearby units could vote and the one with the puniest weapon could come forward to take it. If I say, "you take this weapon" then the one that I am looking at or the nearest unit could come over and ask, "who me?" or some such.

If we had infinite buttons then voice isn't needed but the action button is very overloaded in Halo (reload, board vehicle, swap weapon, eject NPC from vehicle and initiate position change for him/her). The programmer has to be a mind reader. Voice lets the player specify his/her intent and I think that this could make the game more pleasant to play.

PS

In the past I have suggested that the console makers get together and define a standard for voice commands. Separate hardware would do the speech recognition to save hitting the CPU, system memory or the bus(es) so that there is no perceived performance hit for using voice commands.

The voice command standard would recognize that many genres have a shared set of concepts and objects. For example: weapon swapping and weapon types (rifle, sniper, RL). If a game has unique requirements then they would present the system with tagged command/names/verbs. Each time the system recognizes a tagged thing then it calls back into the game with that tag.

hopefully that would encourage devs to take advantage of voice recognition.