Ragdolling needs death animations

M

Matt

First time out of the vault
With all the modern games, when you completely drain an enemy of all his life, he instanly collapses into a heap with no eccentric animation or parting words, and though ragdoll physics are really cool, this aspect is pretty boring.

When I shoot someone in the groin, I want to see him double over and clutch it while screaming, I don't want to hear him go 'uhhh' lamely and do something like this:

ragdoll.JPG


With pretty much all ragdolling games, as soon as you damage an enemy enough he has no control over his faculties and just crumples. I think that when you kill an enemy, he should do a death animation and then go limp when he's done, or if you shoot him again while he's doing his thing.

There's also not many good death cries anymore, one's like Payne 2's 'Goin' down,' and Mafia's best one, 'Arrggh, I'm dead, arrggh!' I know grunts and things are realistic, but they're boring too if you're hearing them all the time.
 
Yes, but they are more realistic. What you are proposing is more of a pre-death response.

You shoot someone in the groin, they are going to scream, until they die. If you shoot someone in the head, they drop like a rock, and maybe grunt while their last breath leaves their lungs. That's all.
 
I think what they are trying to say is that even with fatal wounds, unless someone has all neuromuscular control lost, they shouldn't fall down like a rag doll.

Limb movement and force/tension/friction of limbs upon surfaces are one of the things being considered for many ragdoll engines, as a refinement.

Still, to make them feel authentic, you need to have a little bit of human reaction input into the game. Like if someone is running away from a guy mowing others down with a minigun and gets torn into from behind with bullets. It wouldn't kill him dead like a side of beef to the ground (it might, depending upon the severity, but not all the time), he might sputter and crawl around for awhile while they are still alive but losing blood. This gives more consideration to making clean kills rather than just aiming for body parts and shooting them apart.

It adds a bit more consideration to tactics, and if you're mortally wounded and left to die, well...I hope your gun has bullets left in it. :)
 
Just thinking that, with some animations, like a guy getting shot in the leg and falling down and clutching it, that it might conflict with the environment, as it did in non-ragdoll games. For example, he might clip through a wall or his body might hand over a ledge while the animation is going.

So for death anims in ragdolling, the anims would have to be pretty flexible, able to move the guy's body from whatever position it originally lands in (face-down, face-up, against a wall, etc.) to the animation position. In fact, it couldn't be a straightforward animation really, the game would have to calculate what position his body is in and what parts to move where depending on that. 'Dynamic ragdolling'.

I wonder how close we are to that?
 
Actually that's pretty close to how the Hitman games work.
 
Half Life 2 looks pretty promising in that respect, if trailers are any indication.

But none of those fancy ultra-realistic ragdoll death animations give me as much thrill as killing Hitler in Wolfenstein 3D (the '92 original, that is). First you bust his armor and he runs around unprotected in his uniform, then, when you damage him sufficiently, he begins to bleed from every orifice in his body, his skin tears open, his flesh begins falling off his bones, his ribcage becomes visible, until he finally collapses into a heap of flesh, blood, bones and internal organs with a satisfying splatter noise. Aaargh, beautiful! Such were the death animations my generation grew up on!

No wonder this world is going to hell...
 
Matt, did you play Thief 3? Some quite ridiculous ragdoll physics in that game. Too bad I can't find the Dancing Guard video someone made of a dead or KOed guard.
 
Haven't played Thief 3, but I've played the demo of Invisible War a while ago, though. Ragdolling in that wasn't too great: people would contort into all sorts of positions when they hit the floor, and whenever your character drops a body he hurls it full-force for some reason, resulting in spasmic flailing similar to that of Dismount.

I saw my friend play the Postal 2 demo yesterday and the ragdolling is as bad as the gameplay and voice acting combined.
 
Ragdoll deaths in raven-shield and cs source often end up with the dead person backwards on the ground with their head between their legs and spine bent in a U.
 
Francisco M L S G S said:
I wonder how close we are to that?
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Doom3 definitely took one step forward in the ragdoll technology but it's nothing compared with what you described.
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Whot?

I seem to remember that, when playing Doom 3, all the enemies did was blow up...

Pretty dissapointing, if you ask me.
 
Yeah, you rarely got to see any ragdoll physics demonstrated in D³, since the enemies often disintegrate into before they hit the ground. But the zombies were fun, when you managed to kill them without stripping the flesh off their bones. Punching them out got some realistic effects.

Far Cry has good ragdoll physics, they're realistic and fun at the same time. Sending a poor merc over the hood of your humm-vee or bowling guys over cliffs with barrels is lots of fun.
 
I saw my friend play the Postal 2 demo yesterday and the ragdolling is as bad as the gameplay and voice acting combined.
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I thought it was cool that you could kick things. Huhu. Simple things amuse simple minds. :(
 
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