People should refine their games as they make them…… Yep!

……….your responses are as generic as it gets man!

How would you like it if you presented a concept, and instead of even begging to address it, all I had to say was:

A good game requires good levels!

Make sure the music isn't annoying!

It can't be too short but it also can't be too long!

Adding more animations means adding for time to the development!

When adding the text make sure you use a nice font!

????

…………

All you've said to me is: “Complex physics engines are a complicated thing to make"……..

Yeah, and the sky is blue!

I don't need you telling me that! Nobody does! It's self evident!

………..

I came here to talk about how games could benifit from more complex interactions with the environment! And to ask what you guys thought about a full game focused on this!?

Surely you have something to say about that!?

INCREASING COMPLEXITY! that's the history of gaming, that's the future of gaming!

Why nobody here on “gamedev”.net has anything to say about the future of environmental interactivity I don't know!?

……..but you should all just call it quits if you're that uninspired/impassionte!

Blackberry said:
……….your responses are as generic as it gets man!

Generic input → generic output.

Blackberry said:
I came here to talk about how games could benifit from more complex interactions with the environment! And to ask what you guys thought about a full game focused on this!? Surely you have something to say about that!?

No. You asked for confirmation. You rated your own ‘concept’ as brilliant and you wanted other devs praising your ‘idea’ for that as well.
And it did not happen as expected, and now you whine like little boy after getting beaten up on the schoolyard. No, actually Knidergarten, not yet school.

I take all my responses back and claim the opposite:
Your concept is brilliant, and nobody before came up with such genius ideas.
Physics is easy, making games is easy, so even you can do it. Although you do not even know how to calculate torque to rotate a rigid body to a target orientation for the next frame, i'm sure.

Blackberry said:
Why nobody here on “gamedev”.net has anything to say about the future of environmental interactivity I don't know!?

Probably all the others were smart enough to identify a trolling toddler right from the start.
I'll try to improve myself on that skill.

Again - good luck. You really have a need for it.

I'll try another way….. You called physics “the sleeping princess of gaming", so what does gaming look like when she wakes up!?

Blackberry said:
You called physics “the sleeping princess of gaming, so what does gaming look like when she wakes up!?

As said, i believe in a transition from passive and dead rigid bodies towards active and living robotics.
Currently all characters are doen using animation, extended by animation blending and IK.
The extensions do not solve the primary limitation of animation: It's static, predetermined data. It's not dynamic, and it can not adapt to player interactions. It's actually a tool for offline animations at Pixar and Disney, but it is not the right tool for us.

Once we replace aniamtion with actual simulation, we can break the chains which hold us back.
I'm not yet sure what kind of new games this enables - we will discover that while working on it.
Question is: Why haven't it been done already? I can tell the HW is ready at least since the PS4 generation, because robotics simulation is not that expensive.
Currently the only game i know which claims to do it is Examina. But that's still puppets on strings - ragdolls hold upright with external force. That's not a simualtion of the real thing, and it does not add much to standard animation blending and IK.
There is also Natural Motion, used in some Rockstar and Remedy games afaik, but in game results did not impress as much as their marketing videos. Currently they do not even list their character simualtion middleware on their webpage anymore, so maybe it's dead.

Obviously it isn't done yet becasue it's hard. For a long time, Boston Dynamics was the worlds only company who could build self balancing robots which can walk and run. We need to do the same, and it won't be any easier to us. Considering we also want melee combat and other character interactions, we even need to beat Boston Dynamics.

Recently it became a lot easier with the use of AI controllers. The dev of the Newton engine is workign on this for years already. But afaik he has not yet achieved a self balancing / walking humanoid robot. So i conclude he does not really get quicker to the goal than i did back then, when i worked on this. (It took me 5 years to get self balancing and some clumsy walk.) I also assume AI controllers will lack precise control hindering design, ML also is a form of static data, training will be costly and achieving the intended results will be a matter of tedious trial and error. On the other hand, AI can easily learn new complex actions and behaviors from new sample data, while i need to code everything manually an some things like a dancing couple feel just too difficult.

In the end we might end up mixing a lot of stuff - animation, human engineering on control problems, and machine learning. Idk.

But no matter how - i'm sure this is the next big thing in video games. Currently the AAA Titanic is sinking, but don't worry - the future is ours… \:D/

I'm not exactly sure what you're talking about, it's a little over my head….. Would you agree that it's certainly more complicated than a nice swinging rope, or a hose that sprays (fake) water further if you turn in on fully, or placing the edge of a peice of plywood on a block to make a jump, or the other things I've been describing?

Blackberry said:
I'm not exactly sure what you're talking about, it's a little over my head….. Would you agree that it's certainly more complicated than a nice swinging rope, or a hose that sprays (fake) water further if you turn in on fully, or placing the edge of a peice of plywood on a block to make a jump, or the other things I've been describing?

Regarding complexity, robotics is ofc. much higher complexity to implement than trivial animation.
But once it it works, making game characters which can already walk and run by themselves is much simpler than trying to fake it using countless animation clips.

Regarding your current ideas, it's almost tangent to that. A robotic character already can pick up objects and carry them around, so that's an advantage. With animation it's more difficult to have a character interacting with physics objects. Most people dodge the problem by using first person. Held objects just levitate infront of the player without any hands holding them.

So far i have not seen a game where a character interacts with physics objects in a realistic way at all. (Beside some exceptions like rope physics in Uncharted, and ofc. pushing crates, maybe.)
That's actually a good example to illsutrate how much of a limitation animation really is.

Seriously man, you say you want to see this simulation replace animation, but where would be the best place for that to begin!?

With a director saying “I want you to show me 100 different sucssefull light attacks on the same enemy, and they all look totally different! I want to see the blade recoil relative to the force it was swung with and the surface it hit! I want to see the enemy stagger in accordance with the exact hit! I want to see his flaming arm hit the guy behind him in the gut! I want to see that guy gasp for breath! then I want to see the guy next to him glance around! Accidentally slicing a forth enemy's balls off!"?

Or with a director saying “I want you to make it so the player picks the ladder up different every time, relative to it's position”?

If you make the game characters sorta like Karl Sims evolved creatures they do most the work themselves, and u just have to write the code that motivates the behavior instead of the explicit animations, and its a lot easier.

But yeh… its if you have the system at your disposal, otherwise u cant do it.

If you see my little robot animations (Ive got a post here with it), I have the physics system there, its full of bugs yet, but yes All I do is add the a.i. to it, and I've got it myself. 🙂

Im actually working on lighting now, got the graphics bug again. Then I'll be back to physics and ai!

You obviously have some issue with my Moneky game JoeJ….. but honestly, can you think of a better video game for developers to develope/showcase some of this simulation stuff!

it involves just 1 character instead of 10, and that's obviously gotta be way easier to do!

And contains no action, so no need to worry about the massive effect that this would have on the gameplay of an action game!

And the gameplay (about picking stuff up and using it) and the camera (upclose and personal) are perfect for this stuff! (No developer is going to spend half the budget for one fancy little effect in the background!)