Ragdoll Physics

[jute]

Have any of you port authors considered ragdoll physics, or physics implementations in the style of modern games in general? I know there are some open-source physics packages out there. Something like this seems ideal for an engine like Doomsday.

[sirjuddington]

We need decent 3d models first.

[Graf Zahl]

We also need a completely different physics engine. But that'd mean it's no longer the Doom we all love. I don't see it happen at all.

[Quasar]

Yeah, DOOM's present idea of physics would make even Newton roll in his grave. No inertia, conservation of momentum; angular momentum; accurate models of environmental forces such as friction, gravity, or air resistance; torque (although Lee Killough tried, bless him :P); etc.

Objects in DOOM are just boxes (or cubes with 3D extensions) that glide around. The "physics" are an afterthought of what the game needs to operate in the intended manner.

Ragdoll physics are only really useful with models anyway, since sprites cannot animate their various body parts independently in the way needed for such simulated reactions. Out of all the DOOM ports that actually support the use of models, none of them that I'm aware of support skeletal animation or even independent bounding boxes for different body parts. They're just displaying the model while running the normal blockmap-based collision detection underneath it.

[Patrick]

The closest thing that comes to that is using the "PITCHWITHMOMENTUM" flag in GZDoom's MODELDEF. I have been able to make some cool physics effects using this, but ultimately, its really only useful with projectiles and other effects. My bouncing grenade animation looks very realistic thanks to this flag.

[DaniJ]

Far more important is a skeletal animation system. Once you have that then ragdoll becomes a lot more doable. A skeletal animation system is something we are planning to do post Doomsday 2.0

Skeletal animation is not something that can just be tacked on top of the existing DOOM state/frame based animation (well, not easily anyway). At the very least you need to break the state<>frame relationship.

[Quasar]

DaniJ said:

Far more important is a skeletal animation system. Once you have that then ragdoll becomes a lot more doable. A skeletal animation system is something we are planning to do post Doomsday 2.0

Skeletal animation is not something that can just be tacked on top of the existing DOOM state/frame based animation (well, not easily anyway). At the very least you need to break the state<>frame relationship.

Doom 3's game code would be an excellent reference on how that kind of generalization ends up working :)