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Big Changes Planned For The Force Unleashed 2
Star Wars: The Force Unleashed debuted in 2008 to less than stellar reviews, but sales of the game were strong. A sequel for the game is due out in October, and the developers spoke at length with the Guardian's Games blog about the improvements they've been working on. One of their priorities was adding depth to the combat system to make it less of a button-mash. "The team has completely redesigned all the familiar Force powers from the first title including Force Push and Force Grip, and has added a few newcomers including the potentially amusing Force Mind Trick that'll allow you to trick Storm Troopers into leaping from high ledges." Enemy AI is another area that's getting some love, and they're trying to make level design more open and less linear. The team's confidence in the changes they're making stems in part from much greater familiarity with their game-building tools. "Like its predecessor, Force Unleashed 2 will combine three third-party physics engines, Havok, Euphoria and Digital Molecular Matter, to provide cutting edge human animation, materials effects and authentic physical forces. ... 'Whenever you're building the first iteration [of a game series] and a brand new game engine at the same time, everything comes in hot and fast – we were literally figuring out how to get the most out of those three technologies all the way up to shipping. The DLC then helped us to learn more, and that knowledge has given us the biggest leap forward.'" A trailer for the game was released at E3.
It sounds like they are trying to fix my most hated part of the game, the combat system. I loved the look and feel of the game but the combat system made me give up near the end. Surprisingly even though I hated it so much, pulling a Star Destroyer out of the sky was a novel and creative (if poorly implemented) idea.
Force Unleashed 2 has a good chance to unseat Jedi Academy as my favorite Star Wars game, but the original did have some faults. I want a more varied world and new game play. Less blowing past stormtroopers, more lightsaber battles. Do away with the quick time events and the minigame with awkward controls (pulling down the star destroyer). Let me customize my character more. Add some puzzles.
Most of all, make the PC a first-class platform. The port Aspyr did was pretty terrible -- bugs and performance issues all over the place. I shouldn't have to save every 5 minutes for fear of crashing.
Check the dev diaries video from the 1st game : they mixed together 3 physics engine targeting different situations.
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I thought they were constant in any person, and http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Midi-chlorian seems to agree. They are more of a channel for the force than an energy source.
which is totally what she said
Havok is fairly good at throwing boxes around. It can also create ragdolls - but they are of the lifeless kind. You can also optionally buy 'Havok Behaviour' which is essentially an animation blending engine (which most games companies either have, or wish to use another middleware engine - eg morpheme). So *if* you've bought licenses to both Havok and Havok behaviour, you can animate a character, put it into a ragdoll, and to some extent blend the animation results with the results from the physics engine - but it's not great by any stretch of the imagination.
Digital Molecular Matter adds another layer over the top of Havok to provide the ability to shatter objects in the scene based on realistic material properties (i.e. glass shatters, metal will bend and tear, rubber will bounce back into shape). This stuff just isn't possible with the basic Havok package - you can get HavokFX for some particle/fluid effects, but that simply does not compare to the realism offered by DMM (and would also require a great deal of developer effort to come close to the DMM results)
Euphoria is slightly different. I guess you could refer to it as a physics engine, but that's selling the tech short imho. Basically we developed it to bridge the gap between animation engines and physics engines. One big problem when working with physics, is that it's easy to end up in situations where the character gets stuck, or is simply put into a situation where the animation engine is unable to recover. For example, the character gets knocked over, their arm gets stuck under a bus, and a fat guy ends up pining their legs to the floor. Without euphoria, the traditional way of doing things would be to play a 'standup' animation, or author numerous animations to deal with the possibility of these problems occurring. The problem here is that simply playing an animation will remove the character from the physics simulation. Depending on how you do that, the character will either end up penetrating through the bus/fat guy, or the bus and the fat guy will end up being catapulted off into the distance. Not exactly realistic!
With euphoria we've essentially inserted nervous and muscular systems into the characters which, when combined with AI, gives the character an awareness of his environment, and the ability to get himself out of those nasty situations. So using the previous example, with euphoria enabled, he'd notice the bus, attempt to free his hand first, then either wait for the fat guy to move, or attempt to struggle free before blending back into animation. There are numerous uses for the tech in game, and the vast majority are extremely subtle. For example, when a stuntman falls/rolls down a hill/stairs/whatever, he'll normally be using his ams and legs to continue that motion in an overly exaggerated way. A realistic fall would simply be a nasty looking thud, and it actually looks aesthetically 'wrong' to the average gamer (because we've become accustomed to seeing stuntmen on TV/film). Euphoria offers a nice simple way of solving this problem by making ragdolls act a lot more like stuntmen, so that the artists on a game can 'direct' how the character falls (instead of relying on physics alone)..... This video gives a nice overview of the tech.... (note: all animation data in the video is generated from euphoria only!)
So in answer to your original question, they could just use 1 engine, but by using 3 they can make their games much more interactive........
The Jedi Knight games did everything right, from force powers to saber combat to letting you SHOOT the danged baddies if you wanted to. Translate that to the new graphics/physics engine, and done. Instant awesome game. (k, not really, but you know what I mean)
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