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Do you want Laaagdoll Physics in ArmA 3?

Do You want Ragdoll Physics in ArmA 3  

475 members have voted

  1. 1. Do You want Ragdoll Physics in ArmA 3

    • Yes!
      344
    • No!
      29
    • Yes I am not bothered if it does not work!
      22
    • No I understand that it cannot be sychronised in MP
      24
    • Yes I have seen lots of games with it in MP but I can not name one at the moment.
      4
    • No understand that no game maker has ever made it work.
      9
    • I am not bothered.
      50


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Bouncing tanks and flying cars wasn't enough, now you want bouncing dead people? ;)

Straw man argument. *yawn*

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Saying things like don't utilise ragdoll because X game made it look silly is like saying don't make movies in colour because Notting Hill was made in colour, and it was a pretty awful film. Its all about implementation :) nothing needs to bounce, squish or soar simply because of another game where they do.

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Hi DMarkwick

Would you care to explain to me how you make Ragdoll result in the same effect for all clients?

Kind Regards walker

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You don't if you have ragdoll for the entire death sequence.

You can combine the current system with the ragdoll (for members).

Why do you need the same behaviour for all clients in the first place? So you can check their gear? Is that all?

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It seems you guy really against Physx being used on ArmA3. But I think it's not a bad idea to experience something new. Sorry that I'm not experience in technical caculating can't give any more ideas toward it.

I never care how efficiently Physx may work on network nor how exaggerated the animation might be, I only care whether Physx can make some simulation available which still can't be realized in current VR3.

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Hi DMarkwick

Would you care to explain to me how you make Ragdoll result in the same effect for all clients?

Kind Regards walker

It doesn't have to be the same effect.... rag doll as client side only.. who cares if the body on 1 computer is 5 meters away from another computers calculations... just as long as the weapon he drops is in the same location to access gear...

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Hi Walker.

Did u ever tried AmericasArmy 2 (higher than 2.0 version) or even AA3?

The point is, before v2.0 there was no ragdolls in the Game, and it looked

pretty stupid, as we know it from ArmA, when dead bodies where laying

on balkonyhandrails or stairways like a stiff board. With the Ragdollsystem

it started to look great ... and no, the hit bodies where'nt pushed meters

away like in old Italo-Westerns. When they came up with Ragdolls there

was'nt any impact to the FPS (and i had a *hitty Computer these days).

Guess what: It took a long time until someone even realized, that the dead

bodies wheren't in the same posture on the different clients.

The Reason: It makes no difference in Gameplay, it just did'nt look stupidly

anymore. To me it was a step back, when i started to play ArmA, seeing

my opponents standing up after i hit them just to play the "fall down" animation.

Ragdolls are computed locally, and thats where they should stay. With

PhysiX support there is'nt any impact to your Performance also.

Even the Calculation on a multicore CPU isnt that big deal as i saw so far.

SO: my Vote: Raaaaagdolls Yes, please.

sincerly

fREAk

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Hi PuFu

Because it leads to Objects being in different places on each machine. So for instance A body you can hide behind as player A is not there for Player C it is perhaps the other side of a wall.

This also causes sanity errors in the game. Taking the Above case A walks up to the body takes the rifle and yet the rifle is still there on the corpse for Client C. The bugs and errors are often very subtle and very hard to track down. A random value that depends on the results of a non deterministic calculation from the physics on one computer will be different on another computer so the error can cascade and amplify and causing errors in different system.

It is best exemplified by the saying "For want of a nail the war was lost."

Kind Regards walker

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Man I agree with this! ArmA III should have Ragdoll or maybe BIS make an option to disable Ragdoll in the option menu too Improve Performance :)

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Hi DMarkwick

Would you care to explain to me how you make Ragdoll result in the same effect for all clients?

Kind Regards walker

If the server determines the starting position and the timestep the outcome will allways be the same. Why would it not be the same for all clients?

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Bouncing tanks and flying cars wasn't enough, now you want bouncing dead people? ;)

Well...... The 1 real thing I wanted to see bouncing is on a female :)

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Im fairly sure that it will come as something maybe SP based with switchable options, I see how the whole MP issue shines through, so maybe they are not considering that anyway? And if we all see a dead body or someone die slightly differently hitting the ground and how they end up in MP, is that realy an issue? Then again you can look at the medic system and being hit and having a medic treat you in a position your not actually in as they see you ... hmmm.

Im fine if its switchable and SP based, and when its not switch on and I see what I see now, then that's fine (all bit it a bit smoother).

Edited by mrcash2009

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Ragdolls seem to work fine in the Garry's Mod gamemode Trouble in Terrorist Town. Infact, the ragdolls are made to work with the player, in the sense that all players can still access the information carried within the corpse, to check the details of their death. Actually, I'm pretty sure that the source engine altogether handles serverside ragdolls very well.

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Hi DMarkwick

Would you care to explain to me how you make Ragdoll result in the same effect for all clients?

Kind Regards walker

OK :)

First of all - I'd like to see normal, freeform ragdoll for SP play. That's just a personal preference, I'm generally a big fan of ragdoll in games.

My main reason for wanting ragdoll in ArmA is battlefield visual dissonance, so that your familiarity of death poses does not lead you to immediately identify & dismiss bodies in the middle distance. You play slightly differently when you cannot readily identify an object that lies in open ground that you might wish to cross. You might be compelled to pump a few rounds into it, or get another player to try and identify it, or something.

For ragdoll MP implementation, I'd suggest that the main important detail about bodies is that they're in the same position for all players, however I'd also suggest that they DON'T need to be in the same pose. To this end, we'd simply sync the main torso area - say just the chest segment - and allow the clients' machines to look after animating & posing all the limbs etc.

When I say sync the main torso, I don't mean necessarily applying a physics simulation to it either. Just apply one of say 20 different falling animations to it, in that way it is using the same bandwidth as the current system, and even the same method, just that on the client's machine the arms, legs, head etc are ragdolled to provide the visual differences. In much the same way as particles are generated client-side and are therefore subtly different on a screenshot-by-screenshot basis, I'd suggest that the minor diffrences in poses between clients is unimportant and even unnoticeable. If the chest segments are synced, then the rest of the bodies will be closely enough posed so that normal gameplay will be entirely unaffected by it.

However, I might also suggest that even applying physics to the chest torso only and syncing it across MP is perhaps not unthinkable. I'm pretty sure an appropriate solution can be wrangled where the server can dole out enough information to accurately sync bodies, for the most part they will be simply falling straight down right? But even for more dramatic falls, say off a building or down a stairwell, a little bit of body warping will be an acceptable price, if that warping is not grotesquely apparent. And those situations will be by far in the tiny minority of unit deaths.

Edited by DMarkwick

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Straw man argument. *yawn*

Sorry, it wasn't an argument. It was a joke based on the observation of a trend.

I admit not having a technically educated opinion on the subject.

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Well if you shoot an HE shell near the feet of a soldier, I expect to see some air time.

Something like this

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If the server determines the starting position and the timestep the outcome will allways be the same. Why would it not be the same for all clients?

Hi Leon86

Because the way that floating point calculations are carried out on different computers means the results are non deterministic; you get wildy different results caused by the butterfly effect. The chance of this is amplified by variances like time signals in different hardware and software in the variety of computers on different parts of the net, variances in OS XP, Vista, Windows 7 and whaterver OS version comes next; individual DLLs external to the program but used in everything from sound to graphics software and beyond and obvious things like random seeds.

Please Read:

http://gafferongames.com/networking-for-game-programmers/floating-point-determinism/

DMarkwick at least understands some of the risks problem but most others do not.

And the suggestion of a clientside ragdoll pre animation off a deterministic calcualtion of body position has some merit. And is somewhat similar to the compromise aproaches of other Game makers:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ragdoll_physics

But as they all found out Ragdoll is problematic at best. Without exception they all had to compromise on its use.

In all of those cases the number of entities and clients is way below what ArmA runs to.

@DMarkwick

On a more mundane and slightly pedantic point the proper point to use for any center point is not the thorax it is the top of the pelvis just below your navel, as that is your center of gravity. This is in fact reflected in any off the shelf ragdoll animation model. And is correct to reality as you can prove by bending down and touching your toes; if your center of gravity was in your thorax you would tip over while performing this exercize.

Kind Regards walker

Edited by walker
missing word

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On a more mundane and slightly pedantic point the proper point to use for any center point is not the thorax it is the top of the pelvis just below your navel, as that is your center of gravity. This is in fact reflected in any off the shelf ragdoll animation model. And is correct to reality as you can prove by bending down and touching your toes; if your center of gravity was in your thorax you would tip over while performing this exercize.

Well, pragmatically it doesn't matter, it just needs to be a representative segment (i.e. not a point) and the chest segment makes most sense as it's going to represent the main mass of interest of any body.

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Hi Leon86

Because the way that floating point calculations are carried out on different computers means the results are non deterministic; you get wildy different results caused by the butterfly effect. The chance of this is amplified by variances like time signals in different hardware and software in the variety of computers on different parts of the net, variances in OS XP, Vista, Windows 7 and whaterver OS version comes next; individual DLLs external to the program but used in everything from sound to graphics software and beyond and obvious things like random seeds.

Yeah, I read that article, it's mostly about keeping rts games in sync giving only player inputs. The minute differences in floating point will not noticably affect a 3 second ragdoll animation. besides, they even give examples of games where they were able to achieve perfect sync, although it took some effort.

Edited by Leon86

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Something like this

Or this:

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AS DMarkwick said, just sync the upper body and let the limbs fly as they wish...

You can't hide behind a foot or an arm in game anyway, so it doesn't really matter if it's not the same on all clients, as long as the torso is in the same position (and orientation probably).

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Wonder how much protection and arm or leg would really give against high powered weaponry anyways...

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