/games/ - Games

Thanks to this lovely presentation from naughty dog I found their tech interesting and it explained a lot about how their present day releases function so well when it comes to realistic animation.

To summarize the most important sections of the video the developers at naughty dog animate rigid bodies by first giving characters like Joel, or Nathan real ragdolls that simulate human behaviour as closely as possible, and then have certain collisions of those ragdolls stay active while keyframed animations play. For animations that are used to transition between other animations ragdolls are only active in the instance that the animation itself has an event requiring one. What ends up happening are the characters of naughty dog titles having natural looking motion and playing these games communicate a sense of weight to the player because that weight is real in the game world than doing what most developers do by not giving the players avatar physics but random objects and vehicles. It’s beautiful how many emergent details come up because of this, Nathan and Sam will bounce in response to ruff terrain while driving, NPCs slump over but don’t twist in weird ways when shot at, while climbing certain objects Nathan will move said objects along with his own body, the list goes on and I wish more developers had the time to implement and appreciate and implement such details in their own games.