Clang has reached its funding.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/260688528/clang Clang is an attempt at creating a proper sword fighting game. The current crop are flawed in many, many ways and mo-cap/Kinect stuff probably isn't up to it without a paradigm shift. (especially for 'net gaming- the processing delay adding to the transmission delay, at best it would be like a slow motion non-cooperative drill). I'm cautiously excited about this project. The fact is, this isn't going to be simple. The idea behind it is to create an entirely new concept on computer sword fighting with a long term aim to allow others to create plug in systems. Tentatively, I think this is going to work. The FAQs and technical updates are promising. Addressing questions that I would ask, some which I wouldn't think of but are very important. The sword sync issue is one that I consider the biggest danger to suspension of disbelief. I like the way they're addressing that rather than looking at physical feedback to force a solution. The short explanation is that if your sword is roughly in the right position, your character is in the correct stance. If you're flailing about like a twat, your character is going to be less responsive and more vulnerable. This forces you to adopt an approach closer to cutting out of one guard and into another. They're slowing down things a little as well- this is an essential part if you're lacking physical feedback, since you get to see if you need to halt your blow to block something that's incoming. By turning this kind of control into a psychological, context driven, necessity you end up relegating the nightmare of proper force feedback to an "if we can" feature. It's a really clever way of negating an issue. The fighting tree looks interesting- basically, it's a context dependent list of moves based on what's happened before. It's more-or-less a transcription of the plays and converted into a gaming context. So it doesn't let you do something from a guard that won't work. It looks like you're going to have to go to trainers to unlock the more advanced moves. Which some people may complain about given the possible freedom of movement, but again- that's authentic to the books I've studied. Swetnam basically teaches from true guard and then introduces the others as eventual asides or to counter specific problems. If a good paradigm (and I don't use that word lightly) for computer sword fighting games can be created with our current systems, then Clang has a very good chance of doing it. It will, however, be a hard road.