Dark Messiah tease video (Source engine game)

when he hits the ice and instantely goes ragdoll i said "ugh" a little bit. it's a cool mechanic though.

i just don't know about this one yet. i guess it could be fun.

that looks totally awesome

probably.

"I'm really impressed how Arkane is using all Sources superior capabilities, like physics.. and.. you know, stuff" -Gabe Newell, the worlds most nerdy nerd

I think you can see from my awesome impressed face, that if I was anymore impressed about the technical aspect of this game, I'd bleed from my eyes. I love the M&M series, but Gabe can go home and make love to a railroad spike, hands down.

he never said that, wtf you talkin about

Awesome. I cant wait to play this.

Quote from MrH2o

Thats my favorite part, he likes slips with his legs in the air, not just falls down

I guess I just mean that Havok ragdolls are looking cheap to me now and totally unconvincing, and that just a bit of canned animation here (leading into the ragdoll) would be better. He hits the ice and just goes limp at the whim of the physics engine, there's no indication that he's trying to compensate or save himself.. I mean if I hit a patch of ice like that I'd probably land on my ass and skid off the edge but I'd still be moving around and trying to save myself. Oh well.

But like I said, throwing ice down to trip people up is a cool game mechanic and I'm looking forward to what else they come up with. This game could be good fun.

I love how the thumbnail is a pic of Gabe

Quote from curman

he never said that, wtf you talkin about

He never used those exact words, but you can read the message pretty clear.

Besides, I have been playing the good old games for a while now, and I have come to an conclusion that ragdolls are actually more unreal than those repeatitive animations. For once in past like three years or so, I'd like to see a good death animation, and that we just threw half the animations through the window, because these gamedevelopment asshats think that physics ragdoll is cool. For instance, World of Warcraft has some pretty cool death animations, and there are plenty of them so it doesn't get repeatitive.

I hate every single one of these "rockstar" status next-gen engine satans, compare them to developers of Farcry, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and Riddick, which all have awesome engines, and none of them have some wal-mart salesmen shitty smile on their face every time you hear about new hot game coming out.

Till we perfect the physics and balance the physics:animation ratio, how do I sign out of this ride?

Because they don't have a face out, that is known enough to automaticly represent the company.

You mention Farcry, a game that was initially a demo showing off whats good from the engines technical aspects.

Valve don't have to do that, they have Gabe!

Riddick had a great engine, but there weren't really any competition with Doom3-engine at the time of release.

riddick had a great engine, but was poorly optimised by comparison to doom 3. not saying doom 3 is without its flaws. every engine has many reasons why its worse and better than all the others. The only real way to sell the engine besides making games inhouse on it is to get out there and try to tell people WHY its better. Even if it is all bullshit, you still gotta try.

Quote from Evert

Because they don't have a face out, that is known enough to automaticly represent the company.You mention Farcry, a game that was initially a demo showing off whats good from the engines technical aspects.

Valve don't have to do that, they have Gabe!

Riddick had a great engine, but there weren't really any competition with Doom3-engine at the time of release.

It's more about how everything seems to go around about three engines these days, Source, Doom3 and UE3. And the game industry is coming on a bit "depression" atleast for small companies, and I really don't see this current trend as something good.

I think Riddick had a better engine than Doom3, not so far from the graphicsl quality, seemed to have more nifty elements and the best part of it all, it ran solid. But Doom3 engine has alot of hidden features that Quake Wars and Prey are going to show off. But if something good has to be said about Source, it would have to be that I'm pleasently suprised about what can be achieved with it in RPG genre, I'm pretty sure that Vampire and MM didn't chose to use the engine just because it has some nifty graphical widgets.

But all in all, I'm biased against physics as a hugely revolutionizing gameplay element, the best games I have ever played are the old lucas adventure games and games like Animal Crossing and Zelda: WW.

F.E.A.R. would have been really cool game if wasn't for some ragdoll, it took all the phear of it and made it in to a Benny Hill comedy with those fucking mimes dangling all over the place.

then dont play it Kosmo.

Best death animations and completely convincing ragdoll effects is CSS imvho tbqph

Quote from RD

then dont play it Kosmo.Best death animations and completely convincing ragdoll effects is CSS imvho tbqph

But that is the problem RD, it's Might and Magic, not to play is just not an option.

CS:S had some weight to the ragdolls so they wouldn't just keep spinning on the ground, so it makes it bit more convincing. Ragdoll in models after some sort of animation is fine, but to let ragdoll do the death animation completely is just plain wrong

Gabe can talk alot of crap can't he.

Source engine isnt very interactive, its just heavily prescripted in some way.

For example, when I first played HL2, a picked up a wooden box and put it in a fire... It didn't catch on fire.

I think the clip of shooting the fireball at the wooden planks to make the statue fall makes the game look cheap and lame. Anyone?

The ice is rad, could do with a slipping animation though.

Quote from JynxDaddy

I think the clip of shooting the fireball at the wooden planks to make the statue fall makes the game look cheap and lame. Anyone?

Well, it's one of the physics fads, others being the ragdoll and breaking objects. Like the BS they talk about friction and buoyancy, I tried to do a raft in garrys mod to put the nodbuggy on and use it as stationary machinegun post at sea. Bullshit, that thing flew apart, literally, the planks just shot to different directions.

Quote from JynxDaddy

The ice is rad, could do with a slipping animation though.

Now what would have been cool, instead of instantly dying and becoming lifeless sack of meat (I suppose big bad dudes weaknes is small patch of ice on the floor, poor guy, he wouldn't survive in Finland), it would have been cool if he grabbed on to the ledge, and you could have gone and stop on the poor bastards fingers. *evil laughter*

Well there ARE certainly both friction (to an extent) and buoyancy in source - don't you recall putting bouyant barrels under that ramp in HL2's water hazard level, or building a little bridge at a certain point in nova prospekt? It might not be perfect, but its not bullshit either.

I agree that it does look overly fake in games when anything that is killed instantly becomes a lifeless ragdoll, but the scenario you described is just about an impossible pipe dream for the time being, at least for it to be done in an any way realistic and animated way.

Quote from ReNo

Well there ARE certainly both friction (to an extent) and buoyancy in source - don't you recall putting bouyant barrels under that ramp in HL2's water hazard level, or building a little bridge at a certain point in nova prospekt? It might not be perfect, but its not bullshit either.

Maybe not complete and utter bullshit, but everything in HL2 is either way too light, or way too heavy. Example, you can lauch a humanoid character up several ten feet in the air with a grenade, but that very same grenade, barely moves a car. It still seems way too scripted, like barrels have insane amounts of buoyancy because they are ment to be used for certain missions and everything else is just trivial if it acts like it's real life counterpart. But then again, if everything was made 100% realistic, it would wreck the gameplay, and no one wants that.

Quote from ReNo

I agree that it does look overly fake in games when anything that is killed instantly becomes a lifeless ragdoll, but the scenario you described is just about an impossible pipe dream for the time being, at least for it to be done in an any way realistic and animated way.

Well, if you can make games where the player character grabs hold to a ledge, why can't NPC? Besides, it doesn't have to be realistic, I mean, how realistic it is to slip on to a small piece of ice and fall to your demise?

Realistic was maybe the wrong word. Perhaps I should have said smooth, or seamless. Making a player character grab a ledge is easier due to the fact they aren't being "ragdolled" - or at least not in any situations that they can then go into a situation like grabbing a ledge in current games at least. You can be sure that the player is going to be in a reasonable range of movements; be it a running animation, jumping animation, falling animation, or whatever. You can do the same with non-ragdolled NPC's - you can merge animations and the interpolated frames will look fine because they are going to be reasonable movements (eg. moving an arm from pointing a gun forward to reaching upward to grab that ledge).

Once you give up strict control of limbs and let them play victim to gravity or whatever other influences, you can't very easily regain control and pull them back, in a convincing way at least, to a controlled animation. One arm could be bent back over their shoulder, their legs doing the splits, and their back in some horrible contortion - how do you pull that together to a "grabbing" pose, quick enough so they haven't already fallen out of reach of the ledge, and yet slow enough so they don't look to be moving at light speed and just snapping into place?

I'm no animator so perhaps there are good workarounds for this that I'm not aware of, but as far as I can tell, with current tech we can't really expect ragdolled bodies to snap back to life realistically. It would essentially require that NPC to learn a way to pick themselves up from any given pose and work out how to get into another, which isn't feasible for a real time game.