I had to ask, considering the "latest screenshots" are about a month old. I think it's likely that Raven will make this much needed upgrade. I'm not talking about the crude kind seen in Postal 2, but the amped up Raven Shield style.

Rag-doll physics would be cool, but if they are not in, it won't ruin the game for me. :)

Ragdoll physics have been confirmed, though they might not be as advanced as those seen in, say, Deus Ex: Invisible War or Max Payne 2.

But they'll be up to at least Raven Shield or UT2003 standards. :)

Raven Shield ragdoll physics (RDP for short) were insane at some parts. I'm sure most of you have seen the guy bent over backwards on his knees. At the very least, I wanna make a dead Reborn dance! If you have no clue what we're talking about, go here (http://www.havok.com/xtra/demos/demo-ragdoll2.html) for an interactive simulation.

Wow! It's great we have ragdoll physics, no more heads through the wall. Yipee!!!!! :D :D :D :D :D

PS. Great simulation, it cracked me up!

I sincerely hope so! I want to hunt down a stormie with a repeater and shoot him into the air! :D

Has anyone of you seen that HL2 movie from the pressconference on the E3?? OMG, he picks up a body with that gravity gun and then whipes an entire table with crates, barrels etc into an airpool using the the body... It looks sooooo great!

JA won't have those physics, but it certainly will be better than JO I hope, especialy for stormtroopers :D I hope the physics can also be applied to the saber!

The problem is that there is a limit to the combined amount of top-level graphics (bump-maps, vertex lighting, and so on), AI, general physics, as well as whatever ragdoll effects are needed. Doom3 will not have waves of monsters, more like one or two at a time. I suspect HL2 will need to make some similar compromises. There are people here looking for everything (not that I blame them) - next gen graphics, ultimate physics and AI, as well as waves of enemies and everything 'movie-like'.

Raven did talk about the 'ragdoll skeletal system', but I'm not sure how that translates into ragdoll physics, and changes to death and hits.

Mike

Raven Shield's ragdoll physics did have some problems -- like the guy bent over backwards, or an enemy's legs would be doing "the splits" as his body stood up straight, even while dead, or a dead enemy would lay in his back with one leg sticking straight up in the air.
All that has been addressed with a patch. :)

Now, the simulation Drivian Taluus showed us is of the Havok2 physics system which is being used in Deus Ex 2 and in Max Payne 2.

JA's won't be quite that sophisticated, but at the very least we won't have enemies whose bodies are stuck halfway through a wall anymore. That, more than anything else, always destroyed the immersion factor for me, and made me realize, "It's just a game!"

But no more! :D

Yeah you're right, I never heard the word 'Ragdoll physics', only ragdoll skeletal animations :confused:

But I don't expect HL2 physics anyway, just a bit more realism, like Rassick said, no more stormies with their heads sticking in a wall :D

The thing about ragdoll physics is that they are sooo funny. (Play around with the skeleton for a while...) :lol:

The weird thing with the simulation is that the body is a little to rigid. It'll try and return to it's original pose, even in bizarre positions. However, even if there are crude RDP in JA, at least we'll have more varied death anims. But how will it work with dismemberment?

I don't see dismemberment posing any problems. Even on the skeleton simulation, you could remove his limbs! :D We also know that JA will have many more dismemberment locations.

Besides, in JK2, your saber would dismember a guy, and then he would begin the death animation.
So I'm guessing the ragdoll might somehow affect the removed limbs as well.
Imagine, if you will:
You run up to a hapless stormtrooper and shear his arm off at the elbow. His forearm flies off, flipping in the air, bouncing and rolling as it impacts, never doing the same thing twice. The stormtrooper might scream and probably pass out, doing a nice, unique ragdoll death.

Just think about rag doll physics as throwing a rag doll down the stairs. Not as the Aerosmith's song :).

Havoc also has a avi called "FallGuy" about 6 megs with sound to demonstrate the physics.

Its very real looking, almost easy to believe they are REAL bodies flying down the hill!


check it out. link (http://www.havok.com/havok2/)

Havok is Source Engine's physics engine :).

It's not developed by Valve, though. It's middleware used in a lot of games and software.

I know that, is developed by Havok :). Discreet's reactor also uses Havok's physics

Rag-doll phyisics can sometimes make-or-break a game. I know i definetly would'nt have enjoyed Postal 2 without the implementation, but it also made Raven Shield less enjoyable to play because they went wild with the physics. Its all how the programmers tend to deal with it.

Originally posted by KBell
Rag-doll phyisics can sometimes make-or-break a game.



Ragdoll physics 'Make or break'? Are you serious? Do you mean that a crap game, so long as it had a decent Rag-doll physics implementation would be good, and a 'world class' game, without Rag-doll physics would be lousy? That, in my understanding, is what 'make or break' means.

To me, make or break things for JA would be - no lightsaber, no force powers, set in the BattleStar Galactica universe, or whatever ...

And Postal 2? How many times did you end up with bodies self-supported doubled over backwards in impossible positions? I saw it plenty. And let's face it, Postal 2 was more about sticking a shotgun up a cat's a** for a silencer and watching people barf as you pi**ed in their mouths than about them realistically dropping to their deaths as they burned to death from the gas can and match (or in the 'enhanced' game after you finish once and get to pi** napalm).



Personally, I see rag doll as one of those 'touches' that helps with immersion and 'feel'. Like being able to use your saber as a sort of 'glow-lamp' in JK1, like the dancing shadows from the wall torches in RtCW, and so on. Provides added depth to the game, but not make or break.

Sorry if I got testy ...

Mike

There's no doubt in my mind JA will have the body deformations that SoF2 has. In SoF2, if a guy dies, his leg could get caught on a railing, instead of clipping through it. Then you could blow his leg off and watch his limp body fall. I'll be happy if JA has at least this, but full ragdoll physics will not suprise me.

Originally posted by Emon
There's no doubt in my mind JA will have the body deformations that SoF2 has. In SoF2, if a guy dies, his leg could get caught on a railing, instead of clipping through it. Then you could blow his leg off and watch his limp body fall. I'll be happy if JA has at least this, but full ragdoll physics will not suprise me. They have also said that they have much better 'positional knowledge' so they can avoid clipping issues from JKII and even SoFII (I know, how many times have we heard that before about a Q3 game :rolleyes: but [edit: the positioning, clipping and death/dismemnerment accuracy in] JA will be better than SoFII which was better than JKII which was ...).

Actually JK2 was better than SOF2 imo.
Even in most magazines it was ranked higher than SOF2 :p... unless you're talking about rago-doll stuff :P

I Hope Raven are going to implement some proper rag-doll physics, someone should ask ni the next question thingy (HINT HINT)

Originally posted by Agen_Terminator
Actually JK2 was better than SOF2 imo.
Even in most magazines it was ranked higher than SOF2 :p... unless you're talking about rago-doll stuff :P

I Hope Raven are going to implement some proper rag-doll physics, someone should ask ni the next question thingy (HINT HINT)

Yes - I failed to provide proper context. JKII was definitely better than SoFII. Granted I like SoFII quite a bit, despite my 'mini-review' from last May saying the level design was so linear it looked like it was done on an Etch-a-Sketch :)

I was talking about 'positional knowledge', the ability of the system to know where it is and where things should be placed. Raven said they had problems with that in JKII (they used the crystal on Mon Mothma's desk as the example), and have come a long way since.

Perhaps we should put up a new thread for questions for Raven ... and hope it can stay questions only.

Mike

Aah, no problem then :) Just gettin' a bit freakin' when you said SOF2 was better :p, maybe in the level design and nice touches but fun- No :D

A question thread was made for jk2 i'm pretty sure and took about 3 pages before ChangKhan (Great guy) started answering 'some' questions. It's a great idea as long as people don't go stupid over it.

I'm looking forward to the rag-doll physics. I played through raven shield a couple of times, but I never really paid attention to what dead bodies where doing 1) because once a guy was down I was looking for the next tango before he got me and 2) because I tended to be too far away. In JA they should be great, or at least more prominent, since you'll be standing right in front of your opponent as you help him become one with the force. I do hope that the saber will be seen more as a blade than a bat. It would be silly to send people flying through the air when you're really just slicing them on the spot. Oh, and I'm hoping for vertical bisection too. That was sadly missing in JO considering how many down slashes one could use.

Rag-doll made ut2k3 a bit cooler, lets hope it does the same to JA

Well SoF2's engine and code is much better than JO's is, it isn't as buggy.

I hope in the next interview someone asks about the MP and SP, I think they share the same code. So instead of having code for SP in one DLL and EXE, and code for MP in another DLL and another EXE, you have one or two EXEs but the same DLLs. That way, you have less buggy code because there's less to debug, and it's much, much better for modders.

Off topic, however did SOF II get both Source Codes released?

Actually, in a way, MOHAA's iteration of the Q3 engine was better than JK2's and SOF2's .... in MOHAA, the facial animation was more realistic, and all the characters had round fingers. In JK2 and SOF2, fingers were more like long, articulated rectangles.

SOF2 only looked marginally better than JK2, didn't run as smoothly, and still crashes even on my killeRig. :D

If the 'rag doll system' refers to the way some characters fell in SOF2, then I hope they have fixed some of the issues with that system. For example, when some enemies died, and fell against something quite small on the ground, they would assume a position as if propped against a wall. It was not only disconcerting, it looked a bit silly, especially as they appeared to be floating in thin air. This was obviously a problem with the bounding box around characters and objects...which also led to some of the problems with firing around objects.

It would be nice if they could implement something like the havoc physics system into the game, which would alleviate some of these problems, I'm sure. However, I'm not sure about whether Havoc is compatible with the engine.

Some ragdoll effects in other games have looked awkward and unrealistic, because the skeletons have not been constrained in how far limbs and torsos can bend in a given direction. If this was constrained, it would look more realistic.

I'd love to see ragdoll effects make their way into JA, if they are implemented well.

Stormhammer,

SOF2 did not have ragdoll physics (UT2003 was the first game to), but rather, the same old precanned death animations that we all know and are getting sick of.
What SOF2 did was a rather crude premature version of ragdoll -- it simply bound a clipping box to the characters, so they would bend a bit when hitting an object like a wall or desk after their corpses fell, rather than just going through them like in most games.
But yes, it did look awkward, and yes, you have to be careful that ragdoll is done properly.

i thought that the physics in Hitman 2 were pretty good, you could drag the bodies around and they would react reastically to the environment. As far as I'm concerned we do no need much more than that.

Yes, but Hitman didn't just tack on the body physics like the latest Unreal games or Raven Shield or Postal 2 did. With Hitman, the physics were written in with the Glacier engine from the very beginning.

Rag doll livin' in a movie, Hot tramp daddy's little cutie :rock:.

I just wanna make a map with fallings and pits and throw ppl down to see what happens, and then make a nice video of it with country music.