Are real time physics really not canned animations

[Dawgthem]

Think about it and i mean really think about. All i hear are people saying eltie has real time physics...and 2k11 dosen't..........ALl RTp is are animationst hat you can break out of thatare suppose to be realistic...dosen't 2k11 speak of this anyway..it seems one game calls it Rtp and the other game dosen't need to and people assume one is better. ALl that has been done in both games is that instead of players being in two player animations there locked into individual animations that correspond to each others ANIMATIONS...................ITS STILL TWO ANIMATIONS responding to each other in other words...its a two person ANIMATION!! not one time in the ELIte video did i see more than 2 people on court responding stumbling or anything against the ball handler on the person defending them never three or more...all that has been done is that that animations are divided yet still somewhat unified...and this is suppose to be real time phsyics.....its not................oh and please don't start with you can break out of the animations.because both games have implemented that it no longer phases anyone

[Mos1ted]

Re: Are real time physics really not canned animations

When I think of the words "Real Time Physics", I think about Newton's 3 Laws of Motion. I dropped my Physics class in high school after the first week and switched over to an anatomy class instead, but I was in class long enough to learn about Newton's Laws.

To me, being able to break out of animations is not an example of RTP, it's just giving the user more contextual control. While every little boy tried their best to "Be Like Mike" growing up, very few of us had the physical tools to actually be able to do it. This is why you need canimations because the idea is to replicate a player's physical tools in the video game. Why go through the trouble of including broadcast licenses, yet make the focus of your game more about instantaneous control vs something that looks like you're watching a real game on TV (and as a result produce a game that looks totally lifeless and unrealistic)?

When I look at the Elite videos currently available on Youtube, I get instant flashbacks of last gen Lives. Basically, the series is regressing instead of progressing. The whole RTP is just an overstated marketing ploy to make the consumer believe he's seeing something new and innovative in the game. In reality, he's playing Live '06 with a new name.

RTP in theory should be that each player on the court moves independently of one another. If two bodies make contact, they react accordingly. If I'm sprinting down the court at full speed with my player and want to slow down, momentum should take me several steps past my stopping point. If I pull off a spin move, I should not be able to do anything else until that spin move is complete because the momentum needed to do a spin move makes it physically impossible to stop yourself to perform another (controllable) physical function. I'm not seeing that in Elite, and with one month left until the game ships, I doubt I will.

I'm not a programmer, but I would imagine that it takes YEARS to properly implement as system that works like that. Just look at Backbreaker; it took 3 or 4 years for that game to be made. 2K understands that and instead chooses to mimic physics through canimation rather than try to build a whole new system from scratch to do that dynamically. You can call it old technology if you want, but it works. And as a result, their game continually looks and plays more like real basketball than their counterpart's.

For this generation at least, canimation is still the way to go. While gamers may complain that it takes away the experience and likens itself to watching a movie rather than enjoying an interactive product, I think many fail to realize all the physical coordination and laws that go into place in playing basketball (or just physical activity in general). In real life, there are situations where you have no physical control over your body. If you're running and you trip all of a sudden, can you break out of your "falling to the ground" animation? No, momentum and physics will take you down to the ground (and hopefully without a crowd around). But yet we want a fully licensed game that supports to simulate a real life league and its players to do what we want when we want without regards to whether is humanly possible or not? (In my Wilson voice) I don't think so EA.

[Dawgthem]

Re: Are real time physics really not canned animations

When I think of the words "Real Time Physics", I think about Newton's 3 Laws of Motion. I dropped my Physics class in high school after the first week and switched over to an anatomy class instead, but I was in class long enough to learn about Newton's Laws.

To me, being able to break out of animations is not an example of RTP, it's just giving the user more contextual control. While every little boy tried their best to "Be Like Mike" growing up, very few of us had the physical tools to actually be able to do it. This is why you need canimations because the idea is to replicate a player's physical tools in the video game. Why go through the trouble of including broadcast licenses, yet make the focus of your game more about instantaneous control vs something that looks like you're watching a real game on TV (and as a result produce a game that looks totally lifeless and unrealistic)?

When I look at the Elite videos currently available on Youtube, I get instant flashbacks of last gen Lives. Basically, the series is regressing instead of progressing. The whole RTP is just an overstated marketing ploy to make the consumer believe he's seeing something new and innovative in the game. In reality, he's playing Live '06 with a new name.

RTP in theory should be that each player on the court moves independently of one another. If two bodies make contact, they react accordingly. If I'm sprinting down the court at full speed with my player and want to slow down, momentum should take me several steps past my stopping point. If I pull off a spin move, I should not be able to do anything else until that spin move is complete because the momentum needed to do a spin move makes it physically impossible to stop yourself to perform another (controllable) physical function. I'm not seeing that in Elite, and with one month left until the game ships, I doubt I will.

I'm not a programmer, but I would imagine that it takes YEARS to properly implement as system that works like that. Just look at Backbreaker; it took 3 or 4 years for that game to be made. 2K understands that and instead chooses to mimic physics through canimation rather than try to build a whole new system from scratch to do that dynamically. You can call it old technology if you want, but it works. And as a result, their game continually looks and plays more like real basketball than their counterpart's.

For this generation at least, canimation is still the way to go. While gamers may complain that it takes away the experience and likens itself to watching a movie rather than enjoying an interactive product, I think many fail to realize all the physical coordination and laws that go into place in playing basketball (or just physical activity in general). In real life, there are situations where you have no physical control over your body. If you're running and you trip all of a sudden, can you break out of your "falling to the ground" animation? No, momentum and physics will take you down to the ground (and hopefully without a crowd around). But yet we want a fully licensed game that supports to simulate a real life league and its players to do what we want when we want without regards to whether is humanly possible or not? (In my Wilson voice) I don't think so EA.

Thats i've always tried to say..like in 2k ..thats what the animations are similar to..in real life if i run up behind you and strip the ball from you your going to stumble back not immediatly start running to try to steal it back in real life if i cut to the rim and jump into you...its difficult for you to get your hands in a swatting motion if i had the ball at my hip

[Jano]

Re: Are real time physics really not canned animations

RTP in theory should be that each player on the court moves independently of one another. If two bodies make contact, they react accordingly. If I'm sprinting down the court at full speed with my player and want to slow down, momentum should take me several steps past my stopping point. If I pull off a spin move, I should not be able to do anything else until that spin move is complete because the momentum needed to do a spin move makes it physically impossible to stop yourself to perform another (controllable) physical function. I'm not seeing that in Elite, and with one month left until the game ships, I doubt I will.

Great post Mos1ted and to the part in bold I feel that Elite does feature what you are talking about. In air collisions when they happen allow for both the offensive and defensive player to adjust in the air. I actually saw a couple examples of it when I watched a few guys playing the game at the EA event.

I believe jtdribbles was playing at one point and he took some contact in the air then adjusted shot as it happened. He moved indepedently to what the defensive player was doing but the problem was the context of the animation didn't look right.

And I even experienced the independent movement first hand while I was playing defense. On D while I was guarding the ball handler I could get as close to him as I wanted.

So if he was dribbling to the right I could push my player right next to him and kind of ride along with him. But if at any point I wanted to back off and give him space I could. I wouldn't get locked into any close D animation it was all under my control.

Some things I noticed while playing D was there were times when my player should have opened up his stance but instead kept strafing left or right. So that lead me to believe that the Dev team still hadn't implemented a contextual animation for that specific kind of action on the floor.

So, It seems that EA this year had to go back to the drawing board on a lot of areas in the game due to the RTP. They had to scrap some animations from Live 10 because they wouldn't work in the game because it was a two player sequence rather then two seperate animations.

So you're probably right about it taking a few years for them to be able to simulate every type of situation cleanly. Mostly because they probably have to go in and build separate animations for almost every area on the floor. Whereas with the two players you can probably cut down on that time because its a choreographed (or mocapped) sequence rather then an actual animation being built up from the groundfloor.

[Killa Season]

Re: Are real time physics really not canned animations

3.1 Conventional Asset Generation Does Not Scale Up
Currently, most 3D animation assets are either produced manually via keyframing or through motion capture. Both techniques produce canned animation of sufficient quality, but both are also proving costly and time intensive, requiring game studios and visual effects houses to spend significant resources on 3D animation. Recent history suggests that the exponentially increasing capabilities of new hardware (both console and PC) also gives rise to exponentially increasing volumes of assets. Therefore, as the three graphs below show, when it comes to developing titles for nextgeneration hardware it will not be possible to cost-effectively meet the explosion of asset requirement with current animation techniques.

3.2 Current Animation Assets Are Static
Currently, most 3D animation is canned. It is produced manually and then played back in essentially fixed form. As a consequence, current animation assets are not fully interactive; thus putting major limitations on realism, believability and gameplay. For example, despite the availability of high-quality motion capture data, it is not possible to create believable and coherent American football tackles as the infinite number of possible character interactions cannot be predicted or produced beforehand.

On current generation PCs, dynamically simulated characters run in real-time, or faster. This means that canned animation assets can be synthesized on-the-fly, or, we emphasise again, can be produced orders of magnitude faster than with conventional animation techniques. In practice, the performance bottleneck of Dynamic Motion Synthesis is the physical simulation of the body. The AI routines (once developed) take up only a fraction of the total CPU cycles.