10 ms·

In the first example it's still really jarring how much their feet slide around on the ground, or sliding in place as they walk into an object without moving.

In the first example it's still really jarring how much their feet slide around on the ground, or sliding in place as they walk into an object without moving. I wonder when this will ever be solved. Don't get me wrong, the engine is incredible and the visuals and systems are some of the best we have seen.

Tade0 3y ago
I've seen a demonstration of a solution on the YouTube channel Two Minute Papers - it was actually about an algorithm that blended animations so that the transitions looked natural.
- jay_kyburz 3y ago
  I wonder how long it will be before we stop using animation and switch to an actual bipedal physics simulation where the agent actually knows how to walk and jump and run.
  - Keyframe 3y ago
    We were there over a decade ago with Euphoria, but I think they've stopped selling/developing it? GTA 4 used it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HauN98naZ9U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HauN98naZ9U
    - ingenieros 3y ago
      They were acquihired by Zynga of all companies which then promptly proceeded to kill off all their products.
    - ajdoingnothing 3y ago
      GTA IV's tech was quite ahead of its time (2008), with the integration of Euphoria (which had to be integrated in-house by NaturalMotion engineers inside Rockstar's studio @ Edinburgh). The other comment correctly pointed out that NaturalMotion was acquired by Zynga, who in turn got acquired by Take-Two (parent of Rockstar Games).. So who knows, perhaps we'll still see an updated version in the sixth major instalment of the franchise.
      - midnightclubbed 3y ago
        Euphoria was used for a subset of animations, for the most part traditional mocapped animations (and a lot of them) were used to drive character movements. I don’t know if motion matching was used on GTA4 but it was on other Rockstar games at the time and subsequently. Characters blended to the hand written, custom, euphoria behaviors in certain situations… it handled falls, stumbles, deaths, etc. Generally it replaced ragdoll physics but wasn’t used during most character movement behaviors.
        deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
        deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
  - ekianjo 3y ago
    It seems like never because we had the tech before and everyone seems to be lazy about using it
  - dymk 3y ago
    The keywords you're looking for are "procedural animation" and "inverse kinematics" - Overgrowth was doing this in 2009. The developer did a presentation at GDC 2014 on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNidsMesxSE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNidsMesxSE
- wilg 3y ago
  I think you may be referring to motion matching, which this game uses and is discussed briefly in the article.
ReactiveJelly 3y ago
I'm surprised it's still a problem. Years ago a basketball game franchise bragged that the PS3 allowed them to do foot planting with inverse kinematics. Years before that, Shadow of the Colossus shipped on PS2... with IK foot planting.
- kylebenzle 3y ago
  Inverse kinematics is used but, again, that does not solve the problem of the trade off between response time and realistic movement. It simply "snaps" the feet to the ground.
  - alpaca128 3y ago
    A lot of the problems occur during movement, when responsiveness doesn't even matter. I still have yet to see a game where it's impossible to get randomly stuck at a fence or rock that instantly stops one's movement for example. Making the character dynamically avoid such minor obstacles would make the game more responsive, not less. And games with fancy animations are often not just less responsive, but also less controllable in general: in Witcher 3 the character cannot walk backwards or turn in place, so you can literally fall off a cliff in front of you by trying to walk away from it. In terms of movement the only difference between Geralt and his horse is the turning radius.
    - kylebenzle 3y ago
      I don't play any video games but it seems like you might be discussing a separate issue. A developer must choose between responsiveness and fluidity.
      - alpaca128 3y ago
        Responsiveness doesn't play a role in what I'm talking about. And if Boston Dynamics can integrate it into real-life robots to some degree then it can also be done in games.
- fulafel 3y ago
ux-app 3y ago
It's always a tradeoff between responsive movement and realistic movement. RDR2 has very realistic animations, with the tradeoff being slightly "floaty" controls. Personally I prefer snappy movement i.e. when I press left the screen character moves left immediately. A more realistic looking animation system introduces a delay while you wait for the feet animation to "catch up" to player input.
- jordanthoms 3y ago
  I guess the problem there is pretty fundamental - in reality you'd be tensing muscles and shifting your weight etc before the snappy movement, but the game only knows that you want to move when you move the stick or push a button - so it either has to show that realistic motion after your button press and introduce latency, or sacrifice the realism in the animations.
  - ux-app 3y ago
    >I guess the problem there is pretty fundamental yes absolutely, you can't have both realism and snappy response times.
    - _kulang 3y ago
      Considering you walk around and don’t have a problem with it, I’d wager that putting a more realistic walk model into a game and changing the control scheme to be a bit more natural would lead to a learnable system for control that would achieve both goals. Say ZMP
      - 4hg4ufxhy 3y ago
        It would still feel unresponsive in comparison. Just like normal physics would feel if you got a taste of breaking them in real life.
      - kylebenzle 3y ago
        I can't see how zero moment point (ZMP) is relevant here? I think what you are saying is why don't we use the same algorithms to control game characters as robots? If its a robot or game character the issue is the same. You can try and predict the next movement but if you are wrong you again have the same problem and the response time suffers even more. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_moment_point https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_moment_point
wilg 3y ago
Alan Wake II actually does have the best approach to this animation issue that I am aware of – motion matching, which is mentioned in the blog post. Used by Naughty Dog and many others. But as the other comments point out, there is still a fundamental tension between responsiveness and animation accuracy.
015a 3y ago
Probably a pretty critical aspect; typically, the camera is angled in a way where you do not see your character's feet [1]. This was less true in Northlight's previous title, Control [2]. [1] https://youtu.be/jQb07FHJ-bQ?t=628 https://youtu.be/jQb07FHJ-bQ?t=628 [2] https://youtu.be/fcDK6tnx4vM?t=6700 https://youtu.be/fcDK6tnx4vM?t=6700
dagmx 3y ago
It’s a solved problem already. Various IK systems will tackle it properly and some games will have your feet IK follow the terrain and hands IK push up against surfaces. However it’s a trade off of performance (the constant ray casting and IK solves aren’t free) but also responsiveness. Many games opt for faster locomotion and responsiveness instead. At the end of the day, it’s a technically solved issue and has been for years, but as with every single thing in game design, it’s a choice and trade off.
- modeless 3y ago
  IK doesn't "solve" the core problem of realistic character motion. Sure you can tweak foot positions to stop them from sliding but the farther they get from the original animation data the worse the result will look. It's no panacea. There are new approaches to generating realistic character motion being shown at SIGGRAPH every year, getting better and better, but the best ones are largely too expensive for games to adopt. Plus, for player-controlled characters, at a certain point you run into a fundamental tension between control responsiveness and physical realism of animations. I recently saw a great article on the topic which even comes with a WebGL demo: https://theorangeduck.com/page/code-vs-data-driven-displacement#footlocking https://theorangeduck.com/page/code-vs-data-driven-displacem...
  - dagmx 3y ago
    IMHO IK provides enough to counter the issues the person I was replying to was mentioning. Now of course you can go above and beyond that for more realistic motion and , but having worked in the space, I would Serguei that is also solved without requiring recent research. Most recent motion research is about novel motion generation but the general problem of dynamic adjustment to authored animation has been solved by several systems already. But just like my original comment, there’s both a development and runtime cost to all of this.
    - dagmx 3y ago
      Ugh autocorrect changed suggest to Serguei but too late to edit my comment now.
taneq 3y ago
That first video looks like deliberately testing the pathological case for locomotion. The second video looks hugely much better. In fact, it's so much better that I half wonder if the first video (which is shown as a demo of their voxel based pathing, not their animation system) is from before they implemented motion matching animation.
augustl 3y ago
And apparently the effect is much more jarring in VR - which is why Valve solved it for Half Life: Alyx https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_MuWmYKGIc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_MuWmYKGIc

Tade0 3y ago

I've seen a demonstration of a solution on the YouTube channel Two Minute Papers - it was actually about an algorithm that blended animations so that the transitions looked natural.

jay_kyburz 3y ago
I wonder how long it will be before we stop using animation and switch to an actual bipedal physics simulation where the agent actually knows how to walk and jump and run.
- Keyframe 3y ago
  We were there over a decade ago with Euphoria, but I think they've stopped selling/developing it? GTA 4 used it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HauN98naZ9U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HauN98naZ9U
  - ingenieros 3y ago
    They were acquihired by Zynga of all companies which then promptly proceeded to kill off all their products.
  - ajdoingnothing 3y ago
    GTA IV's tech was quite ahead of its time (2008), with the integration of Euphoria (which had to be integrated in-house by NaturalMotion engineers inside Rockstar's studio @ Edinburgh). The other comment correctly pointed out that NaturalMotion was acquired by Zynga, who in turn got acquired by Take-Two (parent of Rockstar Games).. So who knows, perhaps we'll still see an updated version in the sixth major instalment of the franchise.
    - midnightclubbed 3y ago
      Euphoria was used for a subset of animations, for the most part traditional mocapped animations (and a lot of them) were used to drive character movements. I don’t know if motion matching was used on GTA4 but it was on other Rockstar games at the time and subsequently. Characters blended to the hand written, custom, euphoria behaviors in certain situations… it handled falls, stumbles, deaths, etc. Generally it replaced ragdoll physics but wasn’t used during most character movement behaviors.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
- ekianjo 3y ago
  It seems like never because we had the tech before and everyone seems to be lazy about using it
- dymk 3y ago
  The keywords you're looking for are "procedural animation" and "inverse kinematics" - Overgrowth was doing this in 2009. The developer did a presentation at GDC 2014 on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNidsMesxSE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNidsMesxSE
wilg 3y ago
I think you may be referring to motion matching, which this game uses and is discussed briefly in the article.

ReactiveJelly 3y ago

I'm surprised it's still a problem. Years ago a basketball game franchise bragged that the PS3 allowed them to do foot planting with inverse kinematics. Years before that, Shadow of the Colossus shipped on PS2... with IK foot planting.

kylebenzle 3y ago
Inverse kinematics is used but, again, that does not solve the problem of the trade off between response time and realistic movement. It simply "snaps" the feet to the ground.
- alpaca128 3y ago
  A lot of the problems occur during movement, when responsiveness doesn't even matter. I still have yet to see a game where it's impossible to get randomly stuck at a fence or rock that instantly stops one's movement for example. Making the character dynamically avoid such minor obstacles would make the game more responsive, not less. And games with fancy animations are often not just less responsive, but also less controllable in general: in Witcher 3 the character cannot walk backwards or turn in place, so you can literally fall off a cliff in front of you by trying to walk away from it. In terms of movement the only difference between Geralt and his horse is the turning radius.
  - kylebenzle 3y ago
    I don't play any video games but it seems like you might be discussing a separate issue. A developer must choose between responsiveness and fluidity.
    - alpaca128 3y ago
      Responsiveness doesn't play a role in what I'm talking about. And if Boston Dynamics can integrate it into real-life robots to some degree then it can also be done in games.
fulafel 3y ago

ux-app 3y ago

It's always a tradeoff between responsive movement and realistic movement. RDR2 has very realistic animations, with the tradeoff being slightly "floaty" controls. Personally I prefer snappy movement i.e. when I press left the screen character moves left immediately. A more realistic looking animation system introduces a delay while you wait for the feet animation to "catch up" to player input.

jordanthoms 3y ago
I guess the problem there is pretty fundamental - in reality you'd be tensing muscles and shifting your weight etc before the snappy movement, but the game only knows that you want to move when you move the stick or push a button - so it either has to show that realistic motion after your button press and introduce latency, or sacrifice the realism in the animations.
- ux-app 3y ago
  >I guess the problem there is pretty fundamental yes absolutely, you can't have both realism and snappy response times.
  - _kulang 3y ago
    Considering you walk around and don’t have a problem with it, I’d wager that putting a more realistic walk model into a game and changing the control scheme to be a bit more natural would lead to a learnable system for control that would achieve both goals. Say ZMP
    - 4hg4ufxhy 3y ago
      It would still feel unresponsive in comparison. Just like normal physics would feel if you got a taste of breaking them in real life.
    - kylebenzle 3y ago
      I can't see how zero moment point (ZMP) is relevant here? I think what you are saying is why don't we use the same algorithms to control game characters as robots? If its a robot or game character the issue is the same. You can try and predict the next movement but if you are wrong you again have the same problem and the response time suffers even more. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_moment_point https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_moment_point

wilg 3y ago

Alan Wake II actually does have the best approach to this animation issue that I am aware of – motion matching, which is mentioned in the blog post. Used by Naughty Dog and many others. But as the other comments point out, there is still a fundamental tension between responsiveness and animation accuracy.

015a 3y ago

Probably a pretty critical aspect; typically, the camera is angled in a way where you do not see your character's feet [1]. This was less true in Northlight's previous title, Control [2]. [1] https://youtu.be/jQb07FHJ-bQ?t=628 https://youtu.be/jQb07FHJ-bQ?t=628 [2] https://youtu.be/fcDK6tnx4vM?t=6700 https://youtu.be/fcDK6tnx4vM?t=6700

dagmx 3y ago

It’s a solved problem already. Various IK systems will tackle it properly and some games will have your feet IK follow the terrain and hands IK push up against surfaces. However it’s a trade off of performance (the constant ray casting and IK solves aren’t free) but also responsiveness. Many games opt for faster locomotion and responsiveness instead. At the end of the day, it’s a technically solved issue and has been for years, but as with every single thing in game design, it’s a choice and trade off.

modeless 3y ago
IK doesn't "solve" the core problem of realistic character motion. Sure you can tweak foot positions to stop them from sliding but the farther they get from the original animation data the worse the result will look. It's no panacea. There are new approaches to generating realistic character motion being shown at SIGGRAPH every year, getting better and better, but the best ones are largely too expensive for games to adopt. Plus, for player-controlled characters, at a certain point you run into a fundamental tension between control responsiveness and physical realism of animations. I recently saw a great article on the topic which even comes with a WebGL demo: https://theorangeduck.com/page/code-vs-data-driven-displacement#footlocking https://theorangeduck.com/page/code-vs-data-driven-displacem...
- dagmx 3y ago
  IMHO IK provides enough to counter the issues the person I was replying to was mentioning. Now of course you can go above and beyond that for more realistic motion and , but having worked in the space, I would Serguei that is also solved without requiring recent research. Most recent motion research is about novel motion generation but the general problem of dynamic adjustment to authored animation has been solved by several systems already. But just like my original comment, there’s both a development and runtime cost to all of this.
  - dagmx 3y ago
    Ugh autocorrect changed suggest to Serguei but too late to edit my comment now.

taneq 3y ago

That first video looks like deliberately testing the pathological case for locomotion. The second video looks hugely much better. In fact, it's so much better that I half wonder if the first video (which is shown as a demo of their voxel based pathing, not their animation system) is from before they implemented motion matching animation.

augustl 3y ago

And apparently the effect is much more jarring in VR - which is why Valve solved it for Half Life: Alyx https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_MuWmYKGIc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_MuWmYKGIc