
CryEngine 3 soft-body physics simulator - 11031a
http://www.geek.com/articles/games/cryengine-3-gets-awesome-soft-body-physics-simulator-20120529/
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ender7
After we achieve mostly-realistic physics simulations I look forward to the
new middleware that re-enables implausible effects. It turns out that most
real-world physical interactions are nasty and short, and lacking in
beautiful, orange and crimson fireballs.

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mtgx
I haven't had a good computer in about 10 years until recently (used a netbook
in between), and I've tried many new games recently, and I'm disappointed to
notice that the movements of the characters have barely changed over the past
decade.

The graphics have gotten quite good, although I would've expected to see much
better by now, and I think they started stagnating on visuals in the past 5
years (after Crysis) because of the rise of laptops, which are replacing PC's
for most people.

But still my main disappointment was with how unrealistic the movements of the
characters are. The characters "look" pretty real, but then that idea gets
completely ruined by the way they move. It kind of ruins the experience.

Take Skyrim for example, great visuals overall, especially for the
environment, but I hate the way the character moves and how it fights. While
the visuals make you think you are in 2012, the movements make you think it's
still 2003, the year of Morrowind.

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treeface
It depends on the game. I think we're right at the point right now where some
developers are making a huge push toward absolute realism (see: LA Noire's
facial models and Battlefield 3's destructible environments), but it's still
in the early stages.

I think a huge part of the problem isn't a sudden move to laptops, I think
it's that the current generation of consoles is _seven years old_ , and major
developers (i.e. those with the resources to innovate) tend to design with the
console in mind these days.

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tom9729
LA Noire's facial animation, while very impressive, was lifted from real
people: so we're a bit far off from simulating that (in the sense that we're
simulating physics in games).

For anyone who played Bad Company 2, I think Battlefield 3's destructible
environments were a bit of a letdown: the levels got more complex but they
really toned down what you were allowed to destroy (a wall here, a wall there,
etc). I'm not exactly sure why they did this.

I agree that the current generation of consoles are holding us back. I can't
wait to see what kind of games we get on next-gen hardware, I just hope it
happens without too much of this online-required nonsense that seems to be
becoming the craze..

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hahainternet
Try out Max Payne 3. While there's still motion capture etc, the euphoria
motion system is _fantastic_ and I think character movement is a nearly solved
problem.

Facial animation I just wish they went back to Brütal Legend because they were
cartoony, but the most expressive faces I've seen in a game.

LA Noire was just rubbish in every way.

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checoivan
This looks amazing.I tip my hat to those guys, and would love to see this in a
Burnout game.

I wonder how easy it is to incorporate this in a game model. In the truck
model looks like each piece of the car is modeled individually and might be a
lot harder for the artists to make models. And wonder how are materials
calculated, some things in the model bend in different ways.

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daenz
> In the truck model looks like each piece of the car is modeled individually
> and might be a lot harder for the artists to make models. And wonder how are
> materials calculated, some things in the model bend in different ways.

If I had to design the modeller/composer for this kind of thing, I would
probably make some kind of "paintable" deformation weights. I could be totally
wrong, but I don't think there's any way they could calculate tensile strength
based on the model's geometry in (playable) real time. So they might have to
manually set how weak/strong groups of vertices are...and tie those vertices
to some soft body joints. I imagine if they only do the physics on those
joints (movement, bending, crunching), it could be pretty cheap?

Example of how joints apply weights to vertices in things like humanoid
appendages: <http://i.imgur.com/QiDDu.jpg>

If any of you brilliant Crytek guys are reading this, could you comment on the
setup? :) I'm an amateur 3d engine guy, and I love this stuff.

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Retric
While calculating material strength in real time is probably not possible,
nothing stops you from auto generating those deformation weights using a lot
of simulation time while the game is in development.

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daenz
So you're saying they would create the model assets, and then do physical
calculations on each component of the model, then bake those weights into the
model? It sounds somewhat plausible.

My gut tells me they manually place soft body joints and then paint the
weights for the models. It seems like that would be easier to maintain and
more predictable for the deformations that they expect to see.

For example, you and I know how the front of a truck "should" look if half of
it gets crunched in, but that deformation is because of an engine, the body,
lots of metal/plastic components, etc. Obviously it's not yet realistic to
model every single component of a truck, and perform a physical simulation
"baking" step, so that the truck crunches in that way in the game. They have
to fudge that kind of crunch...so it makes me think they're manually rigging
the softbodies.

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ori_b
One thing I noticed is that they didn't have any soft-body on soft-body
collisions. They had second cars floating around the track, but I didn't see
them collide the two.

It's probably just because the person doing the demo just didn't think of it,
but it would have been interesting to see how it handled soft-on-soft
collisions.

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blueprint
The creator said this on reddit (<http://bit.ly/K87f3X>):

whyareallthenamestak:

Looks really cool. Would have been cool to show a two vehicle collision
though.

zinklesmesh:

Not possible just yet.

UNREASONABLEMAN:

Zinklesmesh, Is this physics system limited to Cryengine, or is it going to be
a pluggable piece, much like Havok? Is anything else in the works, such as
real-time dynamic breaking or deformation of terrain (so many games seem use
some kind of swapping out of art assets cheats, I'd love to see actual cutting
and deformation of the mesh itself, difficult as that would be from a
texturing standpoint) Will you have the ability to up the soft body collision
detection quality, and the polycount for those people who have high end
systems? I think this is the most amazing real time soft body demo I've seen
in a long time, and would love to see it pushed to its usable limits.

zinklesmesh:

We can port it to any engine pretty easily. We already support breaking apart
of parts and meshes to some extent - we're still developing that. The
collision is also a work in progress, and will be much better in the future.

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Scene_Cast
Hm, looks sweet! One gripe about super-realism - usually "fun" stems from
unexpected game-play variations (and decreasing entropy). In Quake 3, it was
the rocket jump. In sandbox games, it's, well, the sandbox. This is also why
finding (physics) bugs is so fun. Here, however, I'm not sure if one will be
able to do interesting things. Can you, for example, smash half the truck away
and be left with a "bike"? Just random destruction seems like it will get old
fast.

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Stwerp
Minor Pedantic Point of Contention: Quake 1 had the rocket jump "discovery";
by Q3, it was an expected part of the gameplay. However, this does not affect
your argument in any way.

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gnoupi
In Q3, it was more the way jumping impacted your movement speed which was a
discovery. Another example would be the Tribes series, with skiing which was
also an abuse of the game physics (and taken as the main movement mechanic in
the latest game, Tribes Ascend).

It's nice to see such parts of gameplay emerging from simple bugs. I would
argue that it's much more rare nowadays, with games which aim to be always
more realistic, and blocking your movement.

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Tomis02
> In Q3, it was more the way jumping impacted your movement speed which was a
> discovery.

Not really sure what you're talking about. Rockets and grenades hugely
impacted player speed in Quake 1, but not so much in Quake 3. Check the speed
run of the following level to see what I mean:

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=VpiNDxssUL0#t=653s)

The quad damage'd grenade jump at 11:19 is mind-boggling. I don't remember
seeing that in Quake 3.

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gnarbarian
"most realistic damage model ever." I'm willing to bet that most car companies
have far more advanced simulations which use extremely sophisticated finite
element analysis to test designs. Albeit not in real time.

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WiseWeasel
It was probably implied that they meant to add "in a game engine".

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a-priori
Also real-time.

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antihero
There was an game that did this (obviously nowhere near as well) called
1NSANE. I spent hours smashing cars off of things, because I find the
destruction so interesting and awesome.

Things I'd love to see:

* Soft body on soft body. Imagine Destruction Derby 2 with this stuff.

* Explosion modelling - Stuff getting ripped apart and sent flying.

* Aircraft destruction modelling - if you could clip your wing on a building and have your aerodynamics adjust accordingly.

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MindTwister
In Carmageddon i completely bent my car around a light post. It could only
drive in circles after that.

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moe
+1 for Carmageddon, still one of the best games of all time.

I can't even remember what the game-goal was (hit checkpoints or something?)
but I do fondly remember randomly wrecking cars for way too many hours...

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MindTwister
There were 3 ways to win.

* Smash all opponents

* Kill all the people in the streets

* Finish the race (1st)

Of the 3, smashing all opponents was the easiest.

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malkia
How would one design & test this? How would one sanely design alien or
futurstic looking vehicles?

It's very cool, nonetheless, but imagine if there had to be 2 people riding
this thing, part of the gameplay, and now the truck looks so damaged, that
placing these two characters inside would produce even bigger mess.

So what you do - you disable the truck collision for this case? You place the
characters anyways?

Or just deal with a progression break, in now what would be much difficult
ways...

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treeface
Simple. Make two game modes: Indestructible Cabin mode and Hardcore mode. In
hardcore mode, if you get into an accident and the cab happens to crush your
legs, you have to finish the rest of the game in a wheelchair.

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malkia
not for an fps game

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gavanwoolery
In concept it is interesting, but I feel that it would add very little to
gameplay beyond whats already been available. Many games feature pretty good
vehicle destruction (mostly faked, but good enough to suspend disbelief).

As usual, I would prefer these companies invest their effort into more
interesting AI and game mechanics. I played Crisis 2 a while back, and beyond
the improved graphics, it did not feel much different from Half Life 1 to me.

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lloeki
Also, racing games often come with license mandating a certain maximum level
of damage some cars can take: some cars can be screwed, while others can only
be scratched.

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sigkill
Wait, what do you mean by "with license mandating a certain maximum level of
damage"?

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GuiA
Some car makers only allow developers to use them in the game as long as you
can't destroy their cars past a certain point, both to keep the car
recognizable and to not hurt the reputation of the brand.

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teamonkey
Deformable physics like that isn't much of a problem if you only have one
vehicle in an empty world on the most expensive consumer-grade hardware.

CryTek are showing off their _own_ physics engine here, that's the big news.
There's nothing too special about their physics engine over others, it's more
about the pipeline and the amount of work needed to create a soft-body
vehicle.

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rieter
It's not their own physics engine. It's a licensed technology:

<http://beamng.com/>

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teamonkey
You're right. I'd heard that they were now working for CryTek, but I can't
find that confirmed anywhere. They still appear to be independent.

But my point still stands. What is special here is the workflow in creating a
physics-based vehicle. Other physics engines like Havok come with pre-made
rigs, but tuning a vehicle for desired gameplay is still hard. Making it run
fast in a game environment is harder still.

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alecco
This user looks like a (new) pusher of Geek/Extremetech stories.

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cornelln
Does anyone know the title/artist of the music in the video?

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cornelln
This reedit thread has the answer
[http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/u9ek6/been_working_o...](http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/u9ek6/been_working_on_this_for_the_past_few_months_now/c4thnw2)

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themstheones
Is there a way to filter out gaming articles?

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Cushman
Video games are one of if not _the_ primary driver of consumer hardware.
You're reading these words right now using probably _dozens_ of technologies
originally invented to make better games.

Gaming may not be your cup of tea, but the cutting edge of video game
technology is definitely of interest to hackers. Calling this a "gaming"
article is a little spurious, I feel.

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themstheones
This video is more interesting than most game stuff, and I really would like
to read something about how the algorithms work, even though I don't ever code
stuff like that.

I'm not too interested in consumer hardware though.

