'Ragdoll physics' wrote William Butler Yeats 'are the best thing to happen to computer gaming since the death of the Virtual Boy.'
Actually Yeats didn't write that, or anything vaguely resembling that. The point is that when someone starts anything with a quote from a poet- be that 'anything' an article on the relentless chipping away of Habeas Corpus in the United Kingdom by the Junta of the Labour government, or a piece on physics in computer games- you should be very suspicious. you should be suspicious because the writer of that piece has thought 'Ah, a quote from a respected and established poet. This will make me appear learned and well read, and automatically predispose the plebeian reader to accept my argument, however flimsily constructed.' So distrust them. And distrust me, for God's sake, because I'm no different.
What is the big difference between Deus Ex and Deus Ex:Invisible War? Some of you will respond 'one sucks monkey balls and the other doesn't'. Perhaps. The thing that most struck me, the thing that can be most held up as a figurehead of the frequent 'reverse advancements' of technology, however, is the treatment of corpses in the games.
A dead body in Deus Ex (let's call it DX) had a lot in common with that magicians trick where someone lies with either end of their body supported by a chair, and then one of the chairs is removed. The subject of the magic trick, rather than collapsing to the floor in a painful heap , using the last of their strength to reach for their mobile and ring their lawyer, remains quite rigid, plankofwoodlike. Dodgy physics were a great source of joy in DX, and allowed for the player to shoot a starving orphan child, pick up his cadaver, and go balance it delicately on top of a policeman's head, like some grotesque fleshy see-saw (a situation, as far as I know, unique in computer gaming). Shoot someone in DX and they would simply fall to the ground and stick there, as though a powerful magnet had flickered on beneath them and their skin was made of metal. Weird stuff.
Invisible War (let's call this fellow IW, to spare my weary digits) had a new fangled and exciting thing...something called physics. Whilst DX had some rudimentary physics effects, the most startling difference was would what happen if you threw a barrel down some steps. In DX the barrel would arc through the air and land, always perfectly upright, and just stand there, mocking you. An IW barrel would bounce off merrily down the steps, tits over arse, hopefully with the appropriate parabola to squash an unfortunate orphan child standing at the bottom. This, ladies and gentlemen, was the future. But the future wasn't only barrels! Oh no. It was also bodies.
IW bodies, once deprived of the spark of life, would collapse, or fly backwards, or spin off into the air, depending on what you did to them, and with what you did it. The bodies would flop around, lifeless limbs dangling helplessly. The intent was to create a world that felt as though it were reacting to the player. The effect, though, as with practically every example of ragdoll physics since, was to create gunfights which ended up looking like a Charlie Chaplin movie.
PC Gamer magazine (in the UK, at least) used to run a regular section called 'Gamer Snap'. The idea was for people to take a screenie of some amusing incident in a game, normally a bug or glitch, and to send it in. Sometimes they would have normal screens with droll captions. For what it was, it was actually quite high-brow. Then came DX. Overnight the screenshots consisted entirely of corpses, en-masse, spelling out words like 'TWAT', or 'WILLY'. Less high-brow, perhaps, but positively artistic compared to what was to come. Perhaps it's unfair to blame IW for this (although I like to blame IW for most of the woes in my life, so why not?) but ragdoll corpses opened up the door for whole new levels of depravity. Now it was all corpses, slumped over each other in ostensibly sexual positions, piles of slaughtered people giving unconvincing blowjobs for the rest of eternity, their dead, glassy eyes staring out, pleading for a thimbleful of dignity. Arousing, it was not.
Anyway, Gamer Snap went downhill from there, until it recently ploughed into rock bottom with the release of Garry's Mod for Half-Life 2, allowing scores of cretins to make it look like Alyx Vance was giving her dad a blowjob. My sides have only just stopped aching, honestly. It may seem odd to single out a feature as specific as ragdoll corpses as some sort of gaming pariah, but they do prove that stepping forward is not always the best thing to do. Particularly if you're standing on a cliff-edge. Goldeneye! Yes, Goldeneye. That had some of the best death animations in a computer game, even to this day (since most games don't use animations for deaths nowadays so much as physics it's not surprising). You could kneecap a man and watch him collapse to the ground, grasping his leg in agony. Shoot a man in the balls and he'll do an utterly convincing, knees trembling, hands cupping the groin collapse to the ground. Makes you feel a bit guilty. If you shoot a man, say, in the shoulder, he'll fly back, spinning to the ground. People I've talked to about this think that this is an early implementation of ragdolls, but it's not: it's just good animation.
In the end I suppose it's part necessary evil, part Emperor's New Clothes. On the off-chance those two cliches weren't informative enough, I'll elucidate: Ragdoll physics, and modern physics engines in general (Not you, Ageia! Back in your kennel!) allow some great things to happen. You can lob a grenade through a doorway in Crysis,and watch as the explosion blows some chap clean out of the window, landing with a crash on the bonnet of a jeep parked outside. This is immersion at work, and what a game should strive for. Contrariwise (what a word) you can smack someone with your sword in Oblivion and watch as their corpse limply bends back on itself, kneeling before you but warped back over their spine, like some nightmarish supplicant contortionist (whilst we're on the subject of Oblivion's wanktacular physics let's not forget the way that falling objects do not accelerate, leading to a person being smacked up into the air with a hammer and floating gently back down to earth, like some sort of screaming, bloodied balloon). This is immersion breaking.
And game designers know ragdoll physics are deeply silly. Look at the disdain with which Flatout treats your hapless avatar. A new PS3 game consists of nothing more than pinging an unfortunate ragdoll around a city with explosions and catapults and...trampolines, probably. If there is to be a bright future it will be procedural animation, consisting of the amalgamation of animation and physics, giving characters some semblance of knowledge of spatial awareness. The new Splinter Cell looks quite good in that respect, although the same cannot be said for Sam Fisher's beard.
Actually it's just occurred to me that the physics in Hitman: Blood Money are way sillier than those in IW, with people literally flying 15 feet in the air when shot. And it's just occurred to me as I wrote that the Hitman series was probaly the first to implement ragdoll physics. I'll let Invisible War off this time.
Actually Yeats didn't write that, or anything vaguely resembling that. The point is that when someone starts anything with a quote from a poet- be that 'anything' an article on the relentless chipping away of Habeas Corpus in the United Kingdom by the Junta of the Labour government, or a piece on physics in computer games- you should be very suspicious. you should be suspicious because the writer of that piece has thought 'Ah, a quote from a respected and established poet. This will make me appear learned and well read, and automatically predispose the plebeian reader to accept my argument, however flimsily constructed.' So distrust them. And distrust me, for God's sake, because I'm no different.
What is the big difference between Deus Ex and Deus Ex:Invisible War? Some of you will respond 'one sucks monkey balls and the other doesn't'. Perhaps. The thing that most struck me, the thing that can be most held up as a figurehead of the frequent 'reverse advancements' of technology, however, is the treatment of corpses in the games.
A dead body in Deus Ex (let's call it DX) had a lot in common with that magicians trick where someone lies with either end of their body supported by a chair, and then one of the chairs is removed. The subject of the magic trick, rather than collapsing to the floor in a painful heap , using the last of their strength to reach for their mobile and ring their lawyer, remains quite rigid, plankofwoodlike. Dodgy physics were a great source of joy in DX, and allowed for the player to shoot a starving orphan child, pick up his cadaver, and go balance it delicately on top of a policeman's head, like some grotesque fleshy see-saw (a situation, as far as I know, unique in computer gaming). Shoot someone in DX and they would simply fall to the ground and stick there, as though a powerful magnet had flickered on beneath them and their skin was made of metal. Weird stuff.
Invisible War (let's call this fellow IW, to spare my weary digits) had a new fangled and exciting thing...something called physics. Whilst DX had some rudimentary physics effects, the most startling difference was would what happen if you threw a barrel down some steps. In DX the barrel would arc through the air and land, always perfectly upright, and just stand there, mocking you. An IW barrel would bounce off merrily down the steps, tits over arse, hopefully with the appropriate parabola to squash an unfortunate orphan child standing at the bottom. This, ladies and gentlemen, was the future. But the future wasn't only barrels! Oh no. It was also bodies.
IW bodies, once deprived of the spark of life, would collapse, or fly backwards, or spin off into the air, depending on what you did to them, and with what you did it. The bodies would flop around, lifeless limbs dangling helplessly. The intent was to create a world that felt as though it were reacting to the player. The effect, though, as with practically every example of ragdoll physics since, was to create gunfights which ended up looking like a Charlie Chaplin movie.
PC Gamer magazine (in the UK, at least) used to run a regular section called 'Gamer Snap'. The idea was for people to take a screenie of some amusing incident in a game, normally a bug or glitch, and to send it in. Sometimes they would have normal screens with droll captions. For what it was, it was actually quite high-brow. Then came DX. Overnight the screenshots consisted entirely of corpses, en-masse, spelling out words like 'TWAT', or 'WILLY'. Less high-brow, perhaps, but positively artistic compared to what was to come. Perhaps it's unfair to blame IW for this (although I like to blame IW for most of the woes in my life, so why not?) but ragdoll corpses opened up the door for whole new levels of depravity. Now it was all corpses, slumped over each other in ostensibly sexual positions, piles of slaughtered people giving unconvincing blowjobs for the rest of eternity, their dead, glassy eyes staring out, pleading for a thimbleful of dignity. Arousing, it was not.
Anyway, Gamer Snap went downhill from there, until it recently ploughed into rock bottom with the release of Garry's Mod for Half-Life 2, allowing scores of cretins to make it look like Alyx Vance was giving her dad a blowjob. My sides have only just stopped aching, honestly. It may seem odd to single out a feature as specific as ragdoll corpses as some sort of gaming pariah, but they do prove that stepping forward is not always the best thing to do. Particularly if you're standing on a cliff-edge. Goldeneye! Yes, Goldeneye. That had some of the best death animations in a computer game, even to this day (since most games don't use animations for deaths nowadays so much as physics it's not surprising). You could kneecap a man and watch him collapse to the ground, grasping his leg in agony. Shoot a man in the balls and he'll do an utterly convincing, knees trembling, hands cupping the groin collapse to the ground. Makes you feel a bit guilty. If you shoot a man, say, in the shoulder, he'll fly back, spinning to the ground. People I've talked to about this think that this is an early implementation of ragdolls, but it's not: it's just good animation.
In the end I suppose it's part necessary evil, part Emperor's New Clothes. On the off-chance those two cliches weren't informative enough, I'll elucidate: Ragdoll physics, and modern physics engines in general (Not you, Ageia! Back in your kennel!) allow some great things to happen. You can lob a grenade through a doorway in Crysis,and watch as the explosion blows some chap clean out of the window, landing with a crash on the bonnet of a jeep parked outside. This is immersion at work, and what a game should strive for. Contrariwise (what a word) you can smack someone with your sword in Oblivion and watch as their corpse limply bends back on itself, kneeling before you but warped back over their spine, like some nightmarish supplicant contortionist (whilst we're on the subject of Oblivion's wanktacular physics let's not forget the way that falling objects do not accelerate, leading to a person being smacked up into the air with a hammer and floating gently back down to earth, like some sort of screaming, bloodied balloon). This is immersion breaking.
And game designers know ragdoll physics are deeply silly. Look at the disdain with which Flatout treats your hapless avatar. A new PS3 game consists of nothing more than pinging an unfortunate ragdoll around a city with explosions and catapults and...trampolines, probably. If there is to be a bright future it will be procedural animation, consisting of the amalgamation of animation and physics, giving characters some semblance of knowledge of spatial awareness. The new Splinter Cell looks quite good in that respect, although the same cannot be said for Sam Fisher's beard.
Actually it's just occurred to me that the physics in Hitman: Blood Money are way sillier than those in IW, with people literally flying 15 feet in the air when shot. And it's just occurred to me as I wrote that the Hitman series was probaly the first to implement ragdoll physics. I'll let Invisible War off this time.
