I don't know if this has been suggested or discussed here before, I'm sure it's been thought up somewhere by someone...it's too easy a concept to come up with to not have been discussed in some way shape or form, but I was playing COD4 and as a weapon I planned to use disappeared before me I began thinking about how awesome it would be if the bodies didn't go away. If they piled up and had real physics, not just ragdoll. I mean if you die on top of where someone else has died your body lays right on top of them, and your next body (I'm talking about multiplayer...) and everyone else has to step over and walk around these dead bodies. Allowing them to even pile up. This would be an awesome mechanic methinks, I want to have to crawl over a pile of my comrades an enemies in order to get across a hallway. (A hallway would probably be the top of place where a lot of people die in relatively the same place)

Thoughts, opinions?

There is an indie fighting game that came out a couple of years ago that used this mechanic.  You had to fight your way out of a cage, basically using the bodies of fallen foes to climb over and out. 

The reason they don't do that in games is because of performance issues.  The more bodies on screen the more processing power it takes to render.  So they could have lower detailed graphics with a bunch of dead bodies if they wanted.  But they want their games to look as good as possible so they just have them dissapear.

Understandable, but I think I would rather play a game that looked moderately good and I had to climb over the bodies of the slain...that just sounds like so much fun.

I'd rather have a large pile of say, rubber ducks, maybe fish.

Bodies would be fair enough though.

well you could play dead rising.
It might make a cool mod to fool around with once and a while, but it would just be an annoyane after a while.  

This could get annoying but it introduce some new game mechanics, the only way i could see this being implemented is in a more realistic game, the biggest problem i could see is that the physics would take up so much processing that the respawns would have to be quite low.  Also how would they react and how do you balance it so that you cant just make a hallway completely blocked and make a game unfair.

Id say how do you handle the geometry part,  god knows gettign stuck on silly geometry can be bad, what would it be like if all bodies had to be accounted for as well

This would be really difficult to code and in the same vein as crysis it would require alien monolith computers that won't be out for like fifty years to play it smoothly, the realistic physics would be difficult but Half Life had decently realistic physics. I suppose you could move the bodies by picking them up or crawl through them or something.

uh, actually it would be extremely easy to code.  All you would do is turn off the decay time on corpses.  And it isn't that hard on performance, you could easily make a mod to do this in just about any FPS out there.

You might have to clean up the physics system though.