Soft-body real-time game physics with cars

[Isaac]

[youtube]9JPDtDfxf6w[/youtube]

[Ferno]

cool stuff.

i'm sure body shops, collision estimators and crash reconstruction specialists would be all over this.

[Isaac]

Did you ever get into the GTA games? I did. I'd love to have this quality of damage in the game.

[roid]

A lot of driving games implement pretty good damage models and deformations into their engines, but during the process of licencing the intellectual property of the cars from the manufacturers they find there are stipulations from the marketing department. Such as: "You may not display our car model in any manner other than at it's best, you may not deform or visibly damage it".

So the damage gets turned off. It can later be re-enabled with a cheat code, legally an unofficial action which thus sneaks past the lawyers. But since development of the damage model was put on the back-burner the moment they realised it couldn't be used officially - it does tend to remain a somewhat unpolished feature of said games.

I saw these videos months ago and was amazed by them at the time. But the more i thought about it, the more it seemed mundane, like this was really just slight improvements to the damage models on a lot of games we've all already seen. I guess my point is that this kindof stuff should have been old-hat by now, standard everywhere, but was probably only delayed by lawyers and corporate-image PR flim-flam.
It could still be better. Fabric-style deformation and tearing has been around for ages now. How about some metal tearing, realistic flaking paint, leaking of appropriate engine fluids. Ooh, modeling of metal fatigue and friction heating would be wonderful. This is cool, but we've got some catching up to do, chop-chop everyone . Not trying to be negative, just an alternate side-stream of conversation.

[Isaac]

Roid,

They just change the car names and brands, to made-up ones.

I'm not sure what game you're referring to that has wrecks that are near the quality of that posted above.

As I was saying, games like GTA would benefit a lot from higher quality crashes The reason is, unlike simple racing games, the crashes in sandbox games are something you use in the gameplay, like setting up traps.

Of course, uncreative people probably wouldn't see the benefit of having their crashes be more realistic. Roommates would always get mad at me for never playing the missions and instead trying to bend the rules of reality within the game environment. "It's only a gimmick" is what I'd expect from those who only play sandbox games for the linear missions.

[Alter-Fox]

Trackmania2 has really good car damage physics.

[Isaac]

You mean, as long as you land on your wheels, you take no damage? That Trackmania2?

Looks like a fun game, though.

[roid]

Heh yeah, the crash modelling in the GTA vid was terrible.
Didn't relatively ancient games like Carmageddon (1997) have mesh deformation? It was crude sure, but it was something. I don't understand why things stagnated for so long.
Mind you, i am certainly no expert, I barely play any games anymore. I probably shouldn't even be talking about this stuff, i'm not a gamer anymore, i don't know what's up.

There's good ol' Rigs of Rods of course, (i'm seeing development blog entries from 2005 for that).
It also references some other games like Bridge-Builder (2000), 1nsane (2001) by Invictus.
[youtube]aCT23jGwYhw[/youtube] [youtube]yQZLvl0f7DE[/youtube]
Maybe we all just had to wait for some good soft-body physics algorithms that were finally computable at a reasonable speed before car crashes got good, post-Gish (2004).
Or maybe it just had to wait until physics sandbox games became more popular, that's been a relatively recent development. Garry's Mod wasn't a thing until 2004, Phun was 2007 (but i srsly doubt it was the first of it's type, atm i just can't think of anything else). I imagine the influx of sandbox games has created a familiarity, and thus a demand for more, which may be inspiring developers and accelerating things.

[Alter-Fox]

You mean, as long as you land on your wheels, you take no damage? That Trackmania2?

Well it is pretty crazy stunt-wise, and I think the devs wanted it to be possible to actually finish tracks without taking damage. Maybe for future game modes. That could make an interesting online mode... whoever finishes the track with the least damage wins .
I rarely manage to finish an average track without my car looking like it shouldn't be drivable anymore. Don't let the videos of Zooz the most skilled TM player in the universe fool you.

[Warlock]

so cool