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The State of Video Game Physics
The Guardian's games blog convened a panel of engineers and other experts to talk about the current state of video game physics. A great deal of research is currently going on to make better use of multiple cores so that advanced physics tools and engines can take advantage of all the processing power available in modern computers. Many of those tools are being put to work these days to find more realistic ways of breaking things, and game developers are trying to wrap their heads around destructible environments. Mike Enoch, lead coder at Ruffian Games, said, "This idea of simulating interactions and constructing the game world similar to how you would construct the real world generates more emergent gameplay, where the game plays out in a unique way for each player, and the player can come up with solutions to problems that the designer might not have thought of." Another area that still sees a lot of attention is making game characters more human, in terms of moving and looking as realistic as possible, as well as how a game's AI perceives what's happening. "The problem is not necessarily in having the most advanced path-finding technique with large-scale awareness; we need to have more micro behaviors, with a proper physics awareness of the environment," said software engineer George Torres.
Yeah, that's nice and everything, but you can't trust the client.
Oh, come, come, come. Without a monster or two, it's hardly a quest... merely a gaggle of friends wandering about. - Owl
GTA MMORPG
there's your 'WoW' killer.
figure out how to do that and it will have far more impact than having physics a little more realistic in some situations.
This generation of students is just damned lucky to have access to such computing power. In the old days, the most readily accessible computing power was an 8080 hobbyist board. Simulating the universe on that is impossible. The students of that era were stuck with just manipulating integrals and derivatives.
Life is unfair. I hate it.
When it comes down to it even a truly realistic game where even high explosives have difficulty rearranging the landscape I'm still going to find a way, one way or another, to do something that was either unexpected or unwanted.
So you've either got arbitrary restrictions or arbitrary game ending scenarios because I just happened to collapse a skyscraper or fourty that the plot needs.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
This is why games like Garry's Mod have become so popular. You can run (basic) physics simulations on your home computers without needing to shell out too much cash to do so.
-FB
Designing a game around elements being destructible is critical for this reason. Arbitrary restrictions aren't always necessary to prevent required elements from being destroyed. Things like "bomb dogs" or unavoidable "security checkpoints" provide a canon approach to restricting destruction of key locations.
Maybe I'm just old-fashioned, but I preferred the simpler games, the ones that didn't have as rigid physics and things of the nature. Compare modern first-person/third-person shooters and compare them to the classics like Perfect Dark, The Legend of Zelda or Goldeneye. They were so much fun because handling was so easy, you could move, you could strafe, etc. It was so much better! And yet, as games become more realistic, all that happens is that your character becomes more sluggish and less powerful, harder to manipulate. All for the sake of reality, and graphics which will always get old. But the gameplay never gets old. That's why classics are what they are - they're acceptable graphically and a hell of a lot of fun to play.
Want proof? They still have Street Fighter tournaments, Melee tournaments, etc. if you look around in the right places. On the other hand, who cares anymore about Metal Gear Solid 4? Man, even playing Super Mario World is much more fun than the New Super Mario Bros. on the DS, simply by virtue of the fact that the older one is simpler, freer, gives you more control, more imagination, more room to enjoy it.
Seriously? It's gameplay that makes you come back, not reality. I wish we'd drop the reality of things and just make games fun. But I guess now I'm old enough to just make my own games. Sigh. It had to come down to this, didn't it?
I have left slashdot and am now on Soylent News. FUCK YOU DICE.
A common work around for that problem is to initiate a plot sequence at the beginning of a scene change. This method is more common for large world and 3rd person. Another approach is a penalty system where the player is punished for destroying a plot sequence. This method is used frequently in first person shooters where a mission is failed due to friendly fire. In both cases, the key to addressing this issue is scope management. As games get more complex I imagine tools will automate the relation between objects and their references within some scope. If the object is referenced beyond its initial scope (when and where it was created), such a tool would automatically expand the scope and implement some sort of generic default action (mission failed?). It's a very interesting problem because it hints at the need for a virtual timeline as a means of identifying or creating the scope of a given plot sequence.
Trying to install linux on my microwave, but keep getting a kernel panic...
Indeed, some of the most physics-accurate games I've played, have been some of the most generic and dull in memory. Greater physics can add to a game, but /designed/ physics, is what makes a game /fun/.
Well, I hope these guys working in a similar area are invited to be part of the panel: http://www.theonion.com/content/news_briefs/new_video_game_technology
But that's just like the agents in Enter the Matrix. Either you keep it within the rules of the game and thus run the risk of the player actually beating your supposedly impossibly stacked but still realistic odds, or it's still going to wind up being another readily recognizable arbitrary mission failure and restriction.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
Why can't we have this? (Ok, the closest thing is Burnout, but there the cars only turn soft in the crash sequences.) Car crashes looks absolutely crap in GTA IV and similar games.
In a real crash, a car is *far* from stiff. Look at some crash videos to see what I mean. In todays games the cars seemingly consist of different modules, each which several levels of damage premodeled.
The hobby simulation project Rigs of Rods is the only game I know that actually has softness implemented in vehicles. Imagine these physics in a photo realistic action packed game.
Breast physics are important for making characters look more realistic. (Well, the same math could be applied to other fatty parts of character models, but that isn't nearly as interesting)
Of course, having fully interactive character models would require tons of collision detection, math to compute the results, and keeping track of the deformation of the model relative to the possible deformations. Until it is perfect, it seems that we are headed into the depths of uncanny valley.
Plus, this least to the best job title ever: "Breast Physics Researcher"
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
Red Faction Guerilla lets you wreck buildings at will and AFAIK it's not a problem. From what I read it simply respawns buildings if it really needs them for a mission. You don't really notice because it's at the other end of the map and mission buildings are usually not significant outside the mission (they can be marked as EDF buildings in a mission but outside of the mission they'd count as civilian while other EDF buildings are always marked as such) so you might not even remember that you flattened them. At times the physics are a bit wonky with massive buildings held up with almost all support destroyed but that's a detail issue, not a problem with the general design of being able to wreck everything.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
I, for one, would like to see bullets stop flying straight and true, unaffected by gravity or wind. Marksmanship is a skill, it's not just placing the crosshairs on a target and pressing the mouse like some sort of flash game for 5-year-olds. One of the worst, and I mean worst, features of Return to Castle Wolfenstein was the Panzerfaust. Point and click, and the thing flies straight as an arrow (actually, straighter). I'm sure a lot of the problem is that most computer nerds have never handled a firearm, and they have some mental model of how shooting works...mostly built out of old episodes of "T.J. Hooker" and similar cop shows.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
This is stupid. Who cares about the physics in games. If you're coding for physics instead of for the games speed/fun then you are doing it wrong.
Realism won't work any more than it works in Hollywood movies. They need a "Hollywood Physics Engine", with a bit of ACME cartoon logic tossed in. Examples:
1. Fruit stands are magnetic: every thing comes toward them.
2. Things fly strait up and spin end-to-end when they are blasted or exploded in any way. (see also #9)
3. Cars hitting a bail of hay or lump of garbage fly 300 feet. Good guys always land upright while bad-guys always land top first.
4. Sexy breasts jiggle slow and long
5. In space, everyone can hear you scream.
6. Sparks are the most common element in the universe. Every nick and prink causes vast amounts of sparks.
7. Space explosions are usually poofy despite no atmosphere. If it's really big, then an expanding bluish saturn-like ring spreads out from the center.
8. If slow-motion is used, then the bullets are 500 times slower for every 1x speed reduction in human movement.
9. People fly almost strait up in the air if within 200 feet of any explosion. The exception is if they are near a metal hand-rail, in which case they rotate around the rail during the explosion, until facing downward.
10. Poor tire traction, AKA "skidding", actually makes cars go faster. Heroes never win unless they skid a lot. The more smoke from the skid, the faster the car.
11. When jumping between buildings or platforms, nobody ever has a good margin: they always barely make it. Physical laws expand the width to be barely below the maximum of the hero.
Table-ized A.I.
imagine you willy being smacked until it bleeds
When a developer creates distructable scenery and lots of alternate routes, it means that they have to produce a lot more content, that the user won't see on every run-through. This means games get shorter (or development times get longer). Admittedly, one sees higher replay value, but generally that's not considered as valuable. Personally, I miss the epicly long singleplayer games of old (Half Life 1 anyone?), and would like to have the best of both worlds. Unfortunately, the tendancy is towards very short single player games.
-- Lattyware (www.lattyware.co.uk)
Am I the only one that is tired of all these epeen graphics and physics that make any machine that costs less than a grand run like a slideshow while the AI makes Forest Gump look like a genius? I swear the AI was better 5 years ago than it is now.
I picked up MoH:Airborne in the 10th anniversary pack and by the second level it was just sad how fricking awful the AI was. Sure the game looked nice and all, but when you have Nazis lining up to hide behind the EXACT SAME COVER that you have already piled corpses by like fricking firewood, I mean come on now. And if you crank the difficulty on high in the new games all it does is give you EA style cheating where you can be in the perfect cover and everybody knows exactly where you are, or you get a green ass grunt that can snipe you from a half mile away with a crappy bolt action without even an optic scope, meanwhile you pound bullet after bullet into them and they act like they are the Terminator.
So if any game designers are reading this, enough with the epeen graphics and physics already. They graphics and physics were good five years ago. Nobody cares if in the heat of battle every stick falls correctly when you blow a building up, but they sure as hell notice when the bad guys just tiptoe through the tulips while walking through a killing field where you have piled up bodies all over the place. And please don't say online makes up for your shitty AI either, because it doesn't. If I wanted to deal with a bunch of campers, lamers, turtles, and teabaggers I would be playing Halo. There were plenty of games in the past like the original Far Cry that would give you a decent fight. Build on that instead of turning our PCs into slideshows.
Oh yeah, and quit calling them "multi-platform" when you try to pass off some lame ass console port as a PC game without even taking a second to think about a decent PC control scheme. Thanks.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I believe this actually is where gaming is going though, to a very real physics model which takes away the feeling of artificial limits.
Where necessary, limits can be placed on the gaming through outside factors, e.g. in a military game, unacceptable civilian deaths leading to failure, or in a GTA type game, the feds arriving.
I think to make the experience feel unlimited, these limits need to be applied through such in-game factors, rather than certain skyscrapers being magically indestructible.
It should be easy in most cases to work the story to provide the necessary incentives, say putting one of your side's key characters in the skyscraper with the bad guys, preventing all-out destruction.
There does come a point to enjoyable gaming where we, the players, have to choose to embrace the story, rather than vandalizing the sandbox we are playing in.
It's gameplay that makes you come back, not reality.
100% true. But major game titles are big business, and what they want is for you to play a new expensive game for a short while, then buy another. Your going back and playing games you already paid for gives them nothing, or worse than nothing.
Morrowind's response to killing a plot-critical NPC was to tell you that you screwed up big. Then it let you keep playing, knowing that you couldn't complete the plot normally. Why can't a similar system be used for this?
Space ships bank when turning because it stop your Earl Grey from spilling all over the console.
You'd think people complaining in a physics thread would know some.
No sig today...
God damnit, i hate people like you. Games werent better back then. It's a common mindset.Ever heard an old lady talking about how everything used to be bette? Ever heard your parents talking about how their generation were better? It's the same mindset. You tend to believe the games were superior simply because they are imprinted in your brain as good memories. Surely if you would have played Halo 3 as a kid you would in 10 years say that halo 3 was better than any "Modern" shooter. It's simple logic and it's also the truth. So get the fuck out.
i find vandalizing the sandbox to be the most enjoyable way of playing a game..
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
Maybe the world is just a big game and we're the Players. What would happen if we did not play the game the way the Designer wanted it to played?
"Many of those tools are being put to work these days to find more realistic ways of breaking things"
I rest my case.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
I am a sucker for emergent gameplay. It is enjoyable making my own doors and watching a structure crumble piece over piece in the new Red Faction. I very much appreciate the connection they are trying to make between physics and emergent gameplay. But, I am curious how far these physics could really take the player into emergent gameplay.
It seems like AI, obviously on an individual level, but perhaps even more so on a massive social and strategic level would seem to be much more fruitful for emergent gameplay. I realize AI is not easy, but I can't help but think it couldn't be too hard to have a society or a strategy crumble the same way a Red Faction structure does.
Why is the physics of the game world important? The thing that really counts is the plot and the game-play. Requiring super-duper CPU power (or GPU power) for the physics and the graphics is another big waste. Looking at all these new ... and expensive ... games makes me want to dig out my old Sega Genesis and play some of the old games like the Phantasy Star titles. Kindergarten graphics, no real attention to physics, but those games were FUN!
I'd love to see a Linux port of those games!
Teen Angel - a Ghost Story
Seriously though, when I was first going to college I took placement tests for physics and calculus. They said my physics was excellent, my calc sucked. (But honestly the physics test was pretty much "Do ya get newton's first law?", anybody who saw Mr. Wizard would have done well.) Anyway the physicist who looked over my results pretty much said, "Yeah, you should take the hardest physics 101 we have, the calc shouldn't be much of an issue." Turns out silly me, that "physics" course was more of an applied calc course, guess how I did? :) (What's even more disturbing is that I actually got only one question on any test completely right. Turns out the question pretty much difficult for any of us to solve it if we tried calc yet wasn't bad if you used simple geometry.)
Oh the other hand I retook Physics years later after my calc was good. (Man does it make way more sense.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
Stop players from destroying your plot points Metroid style. You want to smash through this locked door? Too bad, you don't have the bazooka yet. You want to knock down this skyscraper? Come back in two levels when you have the BFG. We won't need it then. Make destroying big and important structures something rare and special and hard to do.
I think the problem with modern gaming is that basically designers just go "OK, now destructible environments are getting pretty good, let's just slap that into our game cause that's the way to go".
What I think they should rather do if they took a more artistic approach to game design would be "It would be cool if we could make a game that would consist in blah blah blah" then see if it can currently be done and then do it.
Game designers do what they can, not what they want.
You just got troll'd!
So you've either got arbitrary restrictions or arbitrary game ending scenarios because I just happened to collapse a skyscraper or fourty that the plot needs.
Well, do it like in the real world. If the bad guys headquarter gets blown up before some story mission, relocate him to a different building. Its not like reality stops working just because some building gets blown up, people work around it, construction workers repair it, police mean jail the person who did it and so on, a video game can do much of the same, especially when it is an open world game to begin with. Its also a simple matter of economy, blowing up big stuff requires lots of explosives, simply don't give the player a way to obtain them or just rebuild stuff on the right side of the map, while the player is blowing stuff up on the left. A single player can't level a whole world.
here I thought I was the only one that thought of Bible verses when getting high!
damaged by dogma
No matter how realistic they make the game, when you come to a locked door, you won't be able to get through it, despite the fact that you're carrying a crowbar/shotgun/friggin' rocket launcher, etc.
Fences that are taller than waist-high will post a problem, too.
Download the Trine game demo from Steam and then lets talk again..
Admittedly, I often do too, but as a tangential activity to actually completing the game as originally intended.
I always spend some time exploring the limits of the box when getting a new game! With Prototype and inFamous kicking around at the moment, it's happy times.
Yet the applied rotation accompanied by the lack of initial lack of gravity until the turn itself begins does not spill your tea?
Nice idea though! Mmm, Earl Grey...
A dozen years ago I developed and demoed the first ragdoll physics system that worked. Among other things, I'm responsible for the "ragdoll falling downstairs" cliche; that started with a demo I did in 1997. I looked at ragdolls as a first step. I was expecting game development to go in the direction of physically-based characters driven by active control of character muscles. That hasn't happened.
The problem is partly technical and partly dramatic. The dramatic part I encountered in dealing with Hollywood types. What directors want is to specify the start and end conditions; the job of the system is to realistically get the character to the desired ending mark. In real-world stunt work, there are wires, guides, and rails that make things go the way the director wants, even when that's not physically realistic. When that's not enough, cuts are used to conceal the lack of realism.
Physics systems are inherently unidirectional - you keep working forward from the current state. This is fundamentally incompatible with directorial control. As a result, the trend in character animation has been to get enough motion capture data to cover the things you want the character to do, and use a motion splicing engine to patch the pieces together. (This, incidentally, was first used in Godzilla, the movie, for the baby 'zillas). That's become more or less the standard approach for games.
Using a character control AI to drive the character's muscles realistically has been attempted, but with modest success. Motion Factory tried this in the 1990s; their system was only kinematic, and not too successful. Havok is trying it now. For this to work, you need computerized muscle control good enough to drive a real-world robot, like Big Dog. And then it has to look good from an aesthetic perspective. It's really a hard robotics problem, which is why I was interested in it in the first place.
From a gameplay perspective, if you take the physics seriously, you lose the "superhero" capabilities of game characters. Jump off a balcony, and don't expect to land on your feet. Jumping up to a balcony? Forget it. Hand-to-hand combat works about as well as it does at the dojo. ("Your left foot was too far forward for that throw. Again!" "Yes, sensi.") Trying to control a physically realistic character via a joystick is nearly hopeless. You can't even drive a real car very well through a remote joystick, let alone a game pad. (I've actually done that; using a remote steering wheel is a huge improvement over a joystick.) In driving games for consoles, the physics is tweaked to make the car incredibly stable. (Lowering the center of gravity to below ground is a common trick.)
So what do we have? Ragdolls. "Infinitely destructible environments." Some skin deformation. Cloth. Plus rain, snow, water, and explosions that don't feed into the game play at all. (That's mostly what the "physics cards" do.)
Way back when I was playing Syndicate for the first time and marveling at how awesome it was, I was still struck by how much cooler it would be if I could level buildings. Even these days, games like GTA would be even cooler if buildings could be as thoroughly trashed as the cars are. Real world physics has come a long way in games these days but there's so much more that could be done.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
...it's the gameplay, stupid!
Technology is nice and all, but if it ain't fun to play then who gives a damn? Granted, if a game utilizes new technologies in order to create a unique gameplay experience, then all is well. The problem is, most of them don't. It seems like the article is mainly looking at FPS games where you can blow up the environment. SNORE.
Unless the technology complements the gameplay experience, then all you have in your hands is boring tech demo with some re-hashed gameplay on the side. I couldn't care less if the debris from whatever I just blew up bounces and reacts in a true-to-life fashion. Now, if whatever it was I blew up allowed me to reach some hidden area of the level, crushed a group of enemies, or helped me solve a tricky puzzle, I would probably find it more interesting.
I still think one of the best use of physics in a game was the ability to kick zombie heads around in Blood (link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_(computer_game)). Okay, so maybe it didn't add to the gameplay like I was just bitching about, but it was really fun! I think there was even a level that had a soccer field and you could get access to a Life Seed if you kicked a zombie head into one of the goals. Damn, that game was awesome.
We need a plot-object garbage collector!
Earl. Grey. HOT!
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
For Real Ultimate Power! Fight with best strength!
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Well, do it like in the real world. If the bad guys headquarter gets blown up before some story mission, relocate him to a different building. Its not like reality stops working just because some building gets blown up, people work around it, construction workers repair it, police mean jail the person who did it and so on, a video game can do much of the same, especially when it is an open world game to begin with. Its also a simple matter of economy, blowing up big stuff requires lots of explosives, simply don't give the player a way to obtain them or just rebuild stuff on the right side of the map, while the player is blowing stuff up on the left. A single player can't level a whole world.
A lot of stuff like that is pretty simple to describe in a few sentences, but pretty hard to do in actual practice. At the moment, highly destructible environments will remain in the domain of a few specialized titles, because the entire game has to be *completely* designed and built around this concept - not to mention the technology.
Current game dev pipelines are set up around the concept of creating and importing geometric meshes, and applying textures and shaders to those to simulate a real-world material. These art pipelines are long, deep, and pretty complex. Given the fact that not every type of game will really benefit from the massive restructuring of both the game engine, tools, and the additional art and game development time, this is going to remain a bit niche for a few years.
As we approach the photo-realistic threshold (we're pretty close already), we game developers will start focusing on dynamic, rule-based interaction rather that the visuals, I believe. Instead of simply modeling/animating/texturing a tree, we'll teach the the computer to understand the materials, composition, and natural reaction that defines a tree, all in addition to the look. It will grow (or the designers can set an age), change with the seasons, and players will be able to take an axe and chop it down and turn it into lumber, or turn it into firewood, or furniture. Game engines will define a generic set of physics and material-based set of rules, and any sort of objects can just plug right into the system. Large libraries will be developed (including, ultimately, creatures and humans), and games will be developed using these advanced building blocks.
Oddly enough, this jump in technology will, may actually start allowing games development budgets to begin leveling off. At the moment, it's really not feasible to re-use art assets from game to game, except in the case of some limited episodic releases, or similar titles on the same generation of consoles. The technology is still advancing too fast, and each generation of games looks much better than before. But at a certain point, we'll be freed up to re-use more of our past game world 'components' instead of recreating them for each new game, because we'll reach a threshold where it simply doesn't make sense to throw away perfectly good art assets.
Interestingly, we've already seen this sort of transition with code, at least to some degree. It use to be that game engines were re-written from scratch practically for each new game. Nowadays, companies are developing and maintaining their code base for much longer periods of time, only re-factoring or rewriting specific components as required. Or, they are licensing an engine, which has undoubtedly gone through a similar iterative development cycle. As such, we can do more in a shorter period of time, because we don't have to start from scratch each time.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
I suppose it depends on the game. If you went true realism in terms of destructive power players destroying buildings would very rarely be an issue even if they had grenades and RPGs. Without actual shaped charges and large quantities of high explosives it'd be difficult for someone to take out the average "Near-Future" reinforced structure of a game building.
But then you'd have people screaming over how unrealistic it is that one frag grenade doesn't blow a 5 foot pit in the ground.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
Where necessary, limits can be placed on the gaming through outside factors, e.g. in a military game, unacceptable civilian deaths leading to failure, or in a GTA type game, the feds arriving.
Dude, have you ever played GTA? The feds can arrive, and I'll tell you what it means: free tanks! Woohoo!
There is plenty software makers can do to make games more playable and enjoyable - start looking at the scripts, story play and character acting. The console gaming segment has made for fairly linear stories to get to check-points. Look, I'm not saying that the 80s games were terrific either with the "get object A and take to room B" gameplay, but there was only so much to stuff into 64Kb of memory. Some RPG open stories and environments, like Oblivion and Sacred show how characeters that want to explore and advance their character the way they want can do it. Far Cry 2 is a rare modern shooter that has the same concept. I'm sure it is cheaper to explore this avenue and probably more succesful than to invest in working out how to get quad cores cranking. I'm still using DX9 and happy with it. Now lets go get that Kilrathi scum, Paladin!
I think you're a lot closer to how the future will go with regards to sandbox gaming.
There should be a lot of cosmetic and insignificant damage, for example the trees in Crysis, but there needs to be a level between destroying the lean-to huts with a single grenade and not being able to even dent the bigger caravan-type military huts.
Hopefully as system ram sizes begin to skyrocket, these issues will disappear. I remember a time where racing games left only a 10 foot tyre track from your car, and now they're permanent for all cars.
Red Faction: Guerrilla