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CryEngine 3 soft-body physics simulator
- themstheones 14y agoIs there a way to filter out gaming articles?
- Cushman 14y agoVideo 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.
- themstheones 14y agoThis 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.
- kmfrk 14y agoNo more than you can filter comments.
- barik 14y agoI would actually like to see more gaming articles on HN, as long as they have as technical slant like this article does. Video games are a huge avenue for computational exploration, with many difficult research problems in graphics, AI, physics, optimization, systems, high-performance computing, and even cognition modeling. Of course, I'm certainly biased since I'm attending the Foundations of Digital Games [1] conference this week. [1] http://www.fdg2012.org/ http://www.fdg2012.org/
- GuiA 14y agoWhat a subtle plug :)
- marshray 14y agoIt's a real time soft-body physics simulator. It's certainly well suited for entertaining humans with real time simulations, but you don't have to use it for games if you don't want to. Open your mind, figure out how to use it for something else instead!
- Scene_Cast 14y agoHm, 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.
- Stwerp 14y agoMinor 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.
- gnoupi 14y agoIn 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.
- Tomis02 14y ago> 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=VpiNDxssUL0#t=653s http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v... The quad damage'd grenade jump at 11:19 is mind-boggling. I don't remember seeing that in Quake 3.
- mattiask 14y agoIt was quite serendipitous how although Rocket jumping was "incidental" to Q1 most levels still played extremely well using that feature. Still level-designers who later knew about it and designed for it managed to (ab)use it even more. I designed a level where the entire layout was optimized around rocket-jumping being possible (and encouraged) as much as humanely possible, great fun!
- checoivan 14y agoThis 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.
- FrojoS 14y agoI believe that in many cases, physics simulation has the potential to actually reduce the development effort. Because physics defines additional constrains, the developers have to define less them self. In your example, it might be less work to model the mechanics of the car, then to create dozens of different crash animations that look somewhat realistic and don't repeat them self in a too obvious way.
- daenz 14y ago> 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 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.
- Retric 14y agoWhile 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.
- alecco 14y agoThis user looks like a (new) pusher of Geek/Extremetech stories.
- ender7 14y agoAfter 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.
- FrojoS 14y agoSure. But, you can't really use those results to secretly improve underfunded research areas with actual value - like medicine - while making a buck with games.
- sray 14y agoJust to make sure that I understand what you mean here - are you saying that games have no value?
- chc 14y agoThey actually did that with the newest Twisted Metal game. They had to bring in an engineer to customize Havok to make the physics more cartoony, because nobody wants realistic car physics in a Twisted Metal game.
- mtgx 14y agoI 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.
- malkia 14y agoHow 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...
- treeface 14y agoSimple. 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.
- malkia 14y agonot for an fps game
- AJ007 14y agoOr you flip the truck over right at the beginning of a mission.. The solution: vehicle availability. That is how GTA solved the issue.
- malkia 14y agoyes, but again not for an fps game, especially if playing along with ai, scripted or not, or other players (coop)
- TillE 14y agoI don't see how this is any different from the thousand other ways that players can fail a game challenge. OK, you broke your car. Either go on without it or load a previous saved game. Of course, if you're talking about hand-holding, heavily scripted games (like CoD), then you'd only apply these physics in scripted sequences anyway.
- gnarbarian 14y ago"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.
- WiseWeasel 14y agoIt was probably implied that they meant to add "in a game engine".
- a-priori 14y agoAlso real-time.
- davyjones 14y agoYes. LS-Dyna (http://www.lstc.com/ http://www.lstc.com/) is the used in the automotive industry extensively.
- sigkill 14y agoThat and Ansys AutoDYN have given me enough grief over the years. I look forward to software looking like, and having the ease of use of the CryEngine 3.
- ori_b 14y agoOne 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.
- tsumnia 14y agoThe developer submitted a copy to Reddit's /r/gaming where he did some follow-up Q/A. When one of the redditors asked him about truck or truck action, he said the current state of development couldn't do it, but it was in the works.
- blueprint 14y agoThe creator said this on reddit (http://bit.ly/K87f3X 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.
- antihero 14y agoThere 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.
- parkrrr 14y agoI'm glad you mentioned this. BeamNG was actually founded out of a game called Rigs of Rods, which in turn was influenced by 1NSANE. What you ask for is possible in Rigs of Rods (although soft-body on soft-body is usually enabled on a per-vehicle basis). There is a plane that ships with RoR (the Antonov) that actually starts to wobble and shake apart at high speeds (I believe above 150 knots).
- MindTwister 14y agoIn Carmageddon i completely bent my car around a light post. It could only drive in circles after that.
- antihero 14y agoAhh I hope shit like this happens in Resurrection.
- moe 14y ago+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...
- MindTwister 14y agoThere 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.
- adviceonly 14y agoThat is the coolest thing I've seen in a long time. Can't wait to see how this will be used.
- teamonkey 14y agoDeformable 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.
- rieter 14y agoIt's not their own physics engine. It's a licensed technology: http://beamng.com/ http://beamng.com/
- teamonkey 14y agoYou'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.
- gavanwoolery 14y agoIn 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.
- lloeki 14y agoAlso, 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.
- sigkill 14y agoWait, what do you mean by "with license mandating a certain maximum level of damage"?
- GuiA 14y agoSome 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.
- cornelln 14y agoDoes anyone know the title/artist of the music in the video?
- cornelln 14y agoThis reedit thread has the answer http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/u9ek6/been_working_on_this_for_the_past_few_months_now/c4thnw2 http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/u9ek6/been_working_o...