Ragdoll deaths

I've seen and played a few games now, where dying basically involves letting a ragdoll model fall. It looks completely ridiculas. Whatever happened to the good old death animations. The characters limbs basically fall and then the character slides along the floor.

At least they looked plausible. Next gen my ass... Lazy more like it.

(EDIT - to name a one, Tomb Raider Underworld)

LOL...thats very true :)

I was talking to a developer from a major studio a month or so ago about ragdoll deaths, his sad resignation that without a ragdoll death the game wont get published said it all.

I dont play many of the latest games, but I see no reason at all why they cant have a ragdoll and include mommentum from the last bullet or something, add in some severed limbs to bounce independently and make use of that physics engine and surely the publisher would still be happy?

Agreed. That is sad that without a ragdoll death it wouldn't have been published. Obviously it's viewed as superior, and not having it would be a backwards step. If your going to have a dead body flying about, at least get it to look somewhat real. Golden axe did an ok job of it i guess.

I think we might need a few backwards steps, then a turn around, then some forwards steps.

..I guess publishing depending with who you working with..not all publishers are that strict...to me its looking weird to reject game ebcause ragdoll death...

Just go back to the old death animations, call it RagDoll++ and everything would be good...

I thought the deaths in Hell's Highway looked pretty good.... like how the body slumps, or when it rotates backwards after a head shot... or when it goes all bullet time as a guy is blown over a wall by a grenade... all using the physics engine to drive the body parts as far as I can tell - since it's always different.
Fair enough, I did blown one onto a slanted roof once, and he slid down and landed in a crumpled heap - I can only imagine that is what it might look like in real life - I don't really fancy heading off to a war zone to find out though...
Looks real enough for me :-p

You can always mix death animation and ragdoll. Kinda transition from animation to ragdoll.

Brother's in Arms:Hell's Highway has that shitty ragdoll deaths. I throw a grenade to enemy trench and a cinematic camera starts to show spinning nazis in the air in slow motion. Fallout 3 has it too. You shot a dog with a hunting rifle and it bounces off the ground 2 Feet!

It reminds me, in old movies how they used dolls to simulate falling people from very high buildings, cliffs and stuff.

Hahaha, spot on man. I think the main point of someone dying is, most situations in games, the body still moves under muscle control of some sort. It doesn't just go limp.

Actually just reading a few internet sites on this, and alot of people seem to like it, because it looks comical, and one guy even says that's what he looks for when playing a game... Comical indeed. However, i would bet these are the same guys that moan the physics are good enough.

Personaly I don't think it matters too much, usualy too busy to care so long as they are out of action. Most games do add a little momentum from the bullet that hits them or have some kind of reaction before the ragdoll though. You kind of expect things to flail a bit with a grenade blast and I don't see the point of muscle simulation at this stage of game tech.

Don't see why everything has to be realistic and full of gory detail except to please sickos into what ammounts to death porn.

BTW Left4Dead has a great mix between animations and ragdoll.

The best thing about ragdoll deaths is when the bodies land wrong, or stick on the scenery, causing them to endlessly twitch, slide and jump about. It never gets old.

Wasn't that the point of ragdoll physics? I think it looks better with an animation death.

It might look better but with linear animation, the character doesn't fully interact with the environment. This is OK if your character dies on a flat surface, but what if they bounce head first over a cliff edge?

It's even better in games like Fallout 3, if you kill someone in shallow water, and they bounce around playing the "water splash" sound indefinitely.

That's not realistic. Reality isn't gory at all. Fallout 3 again the perfect example. Apparently a 10mm round (roughly the equivalent of a .45 for you Yanks) is powerful enough to take a mans head clean of. Well there's several things wrong with that scenario, mainly the bullet not having enough mass and surface area to cause a significant transfer of kinetic energy. Don't get me wrong, shooting someone in the head with a .45 will kill him, but not in the way Hollywood or Video games will have you believe.

The things that bug me about the ragdolls is when they don't bother adding mass to the limbs.

Playing Gears of War 2 lately, and the bodies move like balloons if you run into them. Awesome game otherwise, but this detail is a bit off.

Other games have gotten it correct though, and I think it adds quite a bit. Max Payne 2 is one of my favorites for this.

all i know of ragdoll deaths is that youtube vide of some monkey and bloke getting catapulted across a city and some motorbike stunt thing with nigh on impossible stunts, mildly amusing

now if it was the itv (now pg tips?) monkey it WOULD be funny

What were the deaths in the StarWars: Battlefront series? I would say mixture of ragdoll and animation (although I'm no expert) and those were spot on... when you got blown into the air by a grenade your limbs flailed but it still had that ragdoll effect if you proceeded to tumble down a cliff.

Well whatever it was, the games had good death sequences. They did a lot of good things, even though the games are not nearly as popular as they were... sad.

Does anyone know what I'm talking about even?

Yeah, I play BattleFront II on the computer. I don't think it's ragdoll at all - for example, if you play as a Hero than every time you die it plays the exact same animation. Even if I throw a grenade into a crowd of stormies, if you look closely you can see the 'flailing wildly while flying through the air' animation looping until they hit a wall or the ground, where they snap to a 'dead' animation. The thing that bugged me the most was that if you're already dead and lying on the ground (with the camera looking down at you), if a grenade goes off near you you sort of pop up without changing animations. That looked wierd.

Great games, though.

Having a death animation is also bad for repetition. Let's say you make a game like Serious Sam, hordes of enemies attacking at the same time and they all die with the same animation over and over again.

Hidden&Dangerous had great ragdoll physics too.

yeah but you can blend animations in modern engines using weights, so you can mix your current movement with a death anim and throw ragdoll at it, let the ragdoll take over.

That way you can overlap your seperate run and shoot animations blended together, blend in your death anim and throw the ragdoll at it.I really don't think it's that hard to do so long as your engine supports seperate anim tracks and lets you blend anims for seperate parts of the body with either weights 0-1 or overlapping keyframes.

You can animate multiple death animations ;o)

I agree with combining the two techologies. There was a PS3 demo, there where using some special system to blend the two animations. It looked really good.

If you haven't seen some of the euphoria demos, check these out.


http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=euphoria+physics&search_type=&aq=7&oq=euphoria


Euphoria was used in GTAIV, so if you have played that you've already seen this in action, but these demos are some pretty cool stuff.

That's the system i'm talking about :o)

Heh just remembered the editor someone released for ogre recently/

Technofreak: Blend Tree Animation System and Editor.





Looks like a really nice node editor to simplify the use of ogres weight and keyframe animation tracks.

Video

http://www.vimeo.com/2007054

Read my first post

Yeah, ragdolls are totally useless. They don't work realistically. You're much better off just making a big explosion where the enemy vanishes in void.

I like them personally, it's very satisfying to see a character react properly to collisions under zero muscle control conditions.

This is a strange thread, honestly, most people don't get death animations right anyway. Ragdolls look a million times better and they don't repeat. Who wants to go back to the days when every character dies the same way over and over and over. This thread is butt backwards in fact. What is wrong with you people?

When it's done properly yeah. Bodies flying through mid-air, weightless practically, bouncing around. It looks terrible. Bring back the old death animations, which i repeat, you can have more than one :o) Does it look a million times better when a character dies over a balcony and they start vibrating around, stuck between falling and stuck there. Or hanging on by a foot, somewhere, where that shouldn't really be possible.

Halo did ragdoll deaths well though. You felt characters had some weight to them though.

Call of Duty games don't have ragdoll deaths, and they get published.

Check it out. The advancement of computer game deaths! Watch her slide! Watch her bounce! Yours for only £39.99!

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=xY9qOm-uTMU

Heh, I guess it's not called ragdoll for nothing :)

heres my view. things like the euphoria engine are heading in the right direction for me. The characters can be knocked over and they try to stop there fall on any objects around them, if they get knocked out they just fall which looks very painful. I beleave they have made it so if they get hit in a area they will grab the bit thats been hit then go down. the more layers of detail they put into it the more it will look like the liner animations we used to see with all the interaction of the physics engine.

its just there not quite there yet.

I guess some of it depends if they allow direct access to the bones in code, and let you interact with them. In theory it seems it would all be quite easy, but theres also going to be a budgeting of resources issue. Someone has to decide how far they want to go with it, what their base target platform is and CPU budget, whether their physics API and bone system is compatible and rhobust enough, and whether they want to put the human resources into making it happen.

My guess is that most don't bother simply because it narrows their game to people with higher spec systems, and most publishers are adverse to risk and would rather support the broadest audience without compromising gameplay. Might not be a big issue for those with dual core, or 8800 or higher cards that can do physics on the GPU.

A lot of people, myslef included still have single core 2ghz systems and good 7 series cards. Can still play all the latest games well, but for how long I don't know.

ragdolls save you _much_ time. you don't need to have dozens of different death animations. and when its done properly, it looks good.

Ragdolls are ok, but I prefer animated deaths like good old quake II where you would blow someones head away and they still shoot a few times before they fall down. I also liked the gibs in those games, but they could have made it look a bit more like bodyparts.

I hope game programmers will find a good combo of both in the future.