denizsi said:
DraQ said:
Aping reality has the distinct advantage of reality having been playtested rather extensively.
Tested and understood empirically, not studied and broken down to a fault scientifically but not because it's impossible or anything, rather because it's utterly unnecessary. If you practice fencing (or practice in a sports field), you eventually develop a very accurate prediction of the kinetics of your art because you have this amazing super processing power in your head that already abstracts your experience of the real world in a way that you can understand and survive through intuition. But what really happens when two blades connect, how they exert forces on each other depends on too many factors to simulate real-time. And IRL, few people get complete scientific breakdown of what they are doing to better themselves.
Which is moot point, because there is no way to teach a computer to understand mechanics intuitively, so you either try to formalize your intuition and fail horribly, because:
-you don't understand your intuition formally yourself
-there will be many interesting consequences of how stuff works you will not even think about programming explicitly even if you would expect them on intuitive level.
Or you just try to model stuff using physics, which is an already formal description of how stuff works, at certain level of detail, and with certain tweaks and such try to make it replicate the behaviour of the real thing.
Level of detail is the key concept here, for most of our RPG needs, simple rigid body physics (which have been used in games for well over a decade), plus collision detection (same), plus added skeletally animated non-rigid bodies (extensively used for purely cosmetic purposes anyway), plus physical values such as mass, velocity (which are required by the engine anyway), momentum and energy (which can be derived from the former) being factored into mechanics, plus models with various attachments and parts with different properties (like sharpness) should more than suffice and be vastly superior to anything on the market.
We simply need to know what hits what with what in what and define what happens then based on various variables.
Individual 'critical' areas of body could have their own volumes causing certain effect when penetrated or suffering high impulse, armour pieces could have their own volumes. Everything would have defined material (determining how it would react to being hit, cut or pierced), pin strength (determining how hard does it need to be hit to break off), and some damping (determining how much of impact force does it pass on), models would have parts defined as point and edges that would pierce and cut rather than bludgeon, on contact with anything (unless disabled by special flags - like when sheathed).
And then, for example you could define partially predefined, partially procedural animations for combat, and for example have pin strength between characters hand and weapon be modified by weapon skill, strength, agility and animation, so that character with lower stats or in certain stances would be easier to disarm. Hell, swung weapons would still have its mass so you might even end without having to code strength requirements explicitly. Also, dropped weapon or detached piece of armour would retain its initial velocity and be handled by the engine as everything else, so it could for example strike someone and cause damage.
Seriously, are you sure you haven't just been glamored by the abundance of next-gen bullshit? Physics are still expensive. All that stuff called physics that we've been getting are just primitive gimmicks to make people go aah ooh.
No, more like enraged. They use shitload of physics for purely cosmetic gimmicks, while the mechanics reminds so simplistic it hurts.
Stuff like linear HP scale shouldn't even occur in RPGs or FPSes in this century. There are two kinds of linear HP scales - bigger than weapon damage, which fails at being proper abstraction of anything and causes HP attrition which is boring, and similar to weapon damage output, which is decent if extremely simplistic abstraction, but completely unfit for anything like cRPG or FPS, especially given that it causes a lot of random PC kills.
With even a simple physical system as described above you could, for example make awesome and scary zombies, that wouldn't be scary because of being physically tough, but because they would lack anything you could crit them in, so you'd have to compromise their structural integrity to defeat them with physical means.
Even the simplest things like cloth simulation or dynamically destructable environments require considerable processing power when done above average. All the applications in games either look like shit, shit like the animations in Bethesda games, or are done in very small and local scale like in Mirror's Edge, again for nothing other than the aah ooh factor.
Animations and physics in bethsoft games are crappy because bethsoft is physically unable to get its shit together. They are not a good indicator of current state of physical engines - jesus fucking christ, we're talking of people who are unable to model face that doesn't look like misshapen potato here.
Cloth simulation is already more complex than rigid bodies stuck to ragdolls and also happens to be rather useless. Destructive environment is awesome, but indeed - it's computationally intensive.
