THE PHYSICS OF VIDEO GAMES from Dave Thomas on Vimeo.
Half the visual appeal of Red Dead Redemption is in the landscapes. Those were done by Rockstar. But the other half is John Marston’s swagger, or the way a bandit gets caught in his horse’s stirrups.
Backbreaker’s addictive Tackle Alley minigame put you on the field as a ballcarrier juking and spinning his way through 100-yard touchdown runs. Backbreaker 2: Vengeance puts you in the game on defence, blasting those showboats out of the water.
newVideoPlayer("Backbreaker_gawker_001.flv", 494, 300,""); While I’m not the biggest sports fan, I’m always on the lookout for a new football game that will pull me back into the genre that I once enjoyed. Natural Motion (the company behind the lauded Euphoria engine from GTA IV and The Force Unleashed) is getting a lot of press for its dynamic, body-crashing AI in its upcoming football game, Backbreaker. And while all that looks fantastic in this new clip, I hope that the Flash compression hasn’t ruined the beauty of the gigantic, hyperreal stadium in the background. God bless bloom lighting.
We’re all big fans of NaturalMotion’s Euphoria animation system. Replacing canned animation with real-time model “simulation” is a huge step for games, both in terms of graphics but even more importantly in terms of gameplay, since with Euphoria no two attacks or moves will ever end the same way. The tech will feature in stuff like SW Force: Unleashed, Indiana Jones and Backbreaker, but we’ll get our first real good look at it when GTAIV hits in April. And nowhere will it be better displayed than when star Niko…gets his drink on and has to stumble his way home, drunk off his tits. There is a drinking mini-game in very detailed form where you can get drunk and he can actually then stumble around and you have to get home. But all of that is fully simulated. So, it is not based on animation any more. It is actually all synthesized on the CPU. Which means that it has a completely different outcome every time you play.
Realism schmlerism. Real-life drinking always has the same outcome. Least for me it does. Tears, hangover, fry-up breakfast. Wash, rinse, repeat. Simulate that, NaturalMotion. Putting Tech in Motion [GI.biz][Pic]