Does anyone have a clue as to how the physics were done in carmageddon 2? That game ran on a 200 mHz machine and had the best car physics and collision physics I''ve ever seen. I''ve been reading Baraff''s papers and other dynamics topics and it seems like the state of the art still hasn''t reached the point that carmageddon did. Anyway, seriously, do you think it was all impulse based, or did they calculate contact resting forces, treat everything as boxes, etc? They even had basic ragdoll physics thrown in. I''m astounded.

Yeah it is very impressive. But I bet it''s very faked. Simple box collisions for cars, looking at where it''s hit do do damage. With people I don''t remember it but it could be some animations made to look like ragdoll (which is fantastically computationally expensive). I''d be interested too if anyone has some information...

quote:Original post by d000hg
Yeah it is very impressive. But I bet it''s very faked. Simple box collisions for cars, looking at where it''s hit do do damage. With people I don''t remember it but it could be some animations made to look like ragdoll (which is fantastically computationally expensive). I''d be interested too if anyone has some information...

I can assure you it''s not faked. Unfortunately VIS closed their Isle of Wight studio (which had a very close relationship with Stainless) where I worked (only for a few months) before I had a chance to look at their implementation properly (you don''t know how much I regret that!), though I did compile and play with some of their old demos that never made it anywhere (yet!). They were pretty impressive...

Incidently, I think the carmageddon 2 demo has a bunch of configuration files that contain the parameters for the ragdoll stuff (including ragdoll dogs, I think). Maybe this config stuff got turned into binary format in the release...

I''m almost certain that the vehicle physics would have been done by calculating the forces on each wheel (i.e. not parameterising the behaviour in terms of turning-torque curves etc). Apparantly their physics coder was/is allergic to "cheating"

I''m sure the force on each wheel could be done, that''s not too expensive - it''s just one body joined to another. Whereas ragdoll physics has many bodies joind together using complex joints. I worked extensively on developing a system recently; on a PS2 you can only do ~5 dolls at once at game speed with nothing else. They could have very simple dolls - like limbs as one unit - I guess.