...play Grand Theft Auto 4 (with its hideous 'leaning into any corner like a twat' implementation) ...play Star Wars: Force Unleashed (with its ridiculous 'grab any joint but don't grab it, just stick like Velcro' implementation) and see exactly how not to use Natural Motion's EUPHORIA.
I mean, it's probably understandable that the only people (it seems) to correctly use Natural Motion's realtime software Euphoria is the company who invented it, Natural Motion. Here's a TACKLE ALLEY MOVIE (in high res and high impact) from their in-house-developed Back Breaker game. Watch this, games developers, and learn that if it's used right, it looks right.
update: new record - I returned home last night from the Writers in Oxford A.G.M. to find that this blog had received more than 600 reads from the Zero Punctuation gaming forum. That's the most readers this blog's ever had IN ONE DAY. Keep it up, guys, spread the message about subversive literature. Ha!
Tuesday, May 13, 2008
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7 comments:
The leaning thing is how (or at least is similar to how) people move round corners at speed. It may be *too* realistic, but that's not really something you can mark against it.
Oh, and 9/11 'truthing'(Japaneses parliament post on sidebar)? such an old look, even the odious George Galloway has given that dead horse up. You can still hate George Bush even if you don't think he's a James Bond pantomime villain, or at least I can. The world doesn't need to be a comic book for it to make sense.
Sorry Chris, it's not 'too realistic'.
I'll agree that the leaning around corners from GTA 4 is overdone, and doesn't look totally natural. Of course, one of the major complexities of computer animation is to accurately capture the nuance of natural motion.
I think that with any new canvas/medium, the initial tendency is to stray towards the brown (the color that you get if you give a child finger paints and a blank piece of paper the first time out), and that you can't have true art without first having some missteps along the way.
GTA IV is full of nuance, and the developers are rightly lauded for taking the leaps that they did. I only wish that Nico would actually grab railings and leap over them if you're leaning into them without the button press (running down steps, in one instance), but I can see the logic behind it (it's a conscious action, so it's controlled by the player).
I haven't played Force Unleashed, so I can't comment on it, but there is also a fine line with fantasy and reality at play there, so it seems a little ambiguous to point it out as misuse of a tool for a game that we haven't even seen yet as finished product.
Griffith,
thanks for posting.
Yes, it's difficult, once you're given a taste of realism you want the lot.
Force Unleashed is having a good go at doing something cleverly macroscopic with its 'force powers' but seems to stop short at pre-scribed moments - I mean the player can't just crush arbitrary object A for example.
But it's never enough. Even the constraints on the ragdoll model (sic) are annoying, the lack of intention in the Actor - he's not looking for the floor or looking where his enemy is... gah, it's so difficult. Such is life.
:)
The overdone leaning seems to be a side effect of a heavily skewed physics model. Everything in Liberty City seems to have its mass multiplied by at least a thousand, so that doing a 90 degree turn at ten miles per hour will make you spin out. If I was a thousand times more massive than I am now, the slightest turn would probably make me lean around like a sailor at 2:00 am on St. Patty's Day.
It's an unfortunate "artificial difficulty" thing that they implemented, because the 360 wasn't able to handle increasing the difficulty any other way, and the PS3 was too hard to program.
Sorry, but I really don't see how you can write off GTAIV's use of Euphoria based on the characters "leaning into any corner like a twat", as you see it. Look at how the NPC's react when you shoot them or run into them; that's where Euphoria stands out from Havok and other ragdoll physics engines. And do you not consider that it's a much more difficult task to implement a real-time animation engine into an open world game than a football game? Anyhow, I imagine if you're taking corners at 90mph with the police on you you'd get thrown about a little bit in your seat...
tatter, cynicalstrike,
thanks for arriving here and commenting. The thing for me about 'leaning into corners like a twat' is YOU LEAN INTO A LOT OF CORNERS. No, let me state this a little more strongly, leaning into corners like a twat is the thing you do most in the game. I'd have thought the first thing any game prototype 'should' do (before adding all the sexy Euphoria goodness) is finalise the basic locomotion model so that it doesn't look so twattish all the time. When runners lean into turns, they lean into the turn FROM THE ANKLE up. The way your player character does it in GTA doesn't only mean that it looks cumbersome, awkward and twattish but YOU COULDN'T ACTUALLY TAKE THE CORNER, in that you're off balance all the time. Gah. Some excellent elements of the rest of the game are let down by this 'schoolboy error'.
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