These are some animations I think would be a bit more realistic, spice up BeamNG some more. (If we have a character in and out of the cars). 1. Opening doors animation: If you're gonna get in a car you should have an option to open the door, get in the car and close the door, or, just kind of teleport into the car. 2. Gear shifting and pedals animation: Well, shifting gears and stepping on pedals? 3. Turning on/off cars animation: Your character turns the keys in the car to start or stop them. So, what do you think? And post some animation suggestions too?
Have they confirmed that they will add a character? If so, it would be pretty epic they could turn them to a ragdoll state when/if the car gets a big hit. Calculate G-forces maybe to determine if they faint and go all ragdoll on us.
If my memory is functioning correctly, they haven't officially confirmed a character visible inside a vehicle, or maybe they did. Well, I guess that there will be a character for you to move around until you get in a vehicle, but it would be very epic having a guy just going wildly ragdoll inside the vehicle! And maybe see there skeleton? See which bones broke and which didn't? It would be epic.
I hope the dummy driver will jump out of the car when we crashed. It's possible in GTA4 and really cool
Yeah, but you would have to press a certain key, because at some point it would be annoying. Example: I want to see the character get smashed inside the car and break every single bone, then when I'm about to crash, it just bails out.
That should be based on if the ragdoll hits the glass or not. And if he is able to break it and go through it with the velocity he have at impact with the glass. No need for a ejector button.
Guys, guys, this has all been mentioned many times before. Please use the search function for obvious subjects like this. Due to the nature of the physics in this game it would be very inefficient to have a fully animated/rigged character in the car while crashing. Doing ragdoll physics on it's own is already quite hard to do. It's possible in GTA 4 because GTA4 uses one physics engine to do all it's physics work. That engine is made mostly for doing realistic skeletons/muscular systems(ie so your elbow won't bend the wrong way when you get hit by a car...), but they're using it for the cars too. That physics thing on is quite demanding on it's own. Imagine sticking even a less sophisticated engine on top of BeamNG car physics, your performance wouldn't be very nice I'd imagine. Even if it wouldn't hurt performance that much, I doubt you could make the 2 types of physics engines work together. So... Let's say you're using the BeamNG physics itself for a skeleton, which would be pretty hard, since the human skeleton is very complicated... Even in the absolute most basic human skeleton, you'd probably need about 5 nodes per limb( ie 5 for the upper arm, 5 for the hand etc). That probably isn't gonna be realistic at all, but even then you'd already need about 75 nodes just for the character. Just one car is already like, what? Between 300-450 I think, probably even a bit less. Then you'd have to make it contactable with the car interior, so you'd have to make the whole car interior in nodes and beams too... (Probably another 50 nodes extra *per car*)... So, even in the most basic and most unrealistic case, you'll end up with 125 nodes extra *per car*, which means you're throwing almost half an entire car of extra physics onto your processor... You'd basically ruin the high FPS / the realistic car physics(the core of the game), for having some minor feature as a very unrealistic and basic crash-test-dummy, which is only fun for perhaps 30 minutes and then you get bored of it?... Honestly, please stop making threads like this and use the search function next time you want to make a thread :/ It's all been mentioned before.
@Mythbusters: Why would you need to use the beam and node system on ragdolls? If Torgue3D already have support for Physx then you of course do the ragdoll calculations with just that, especially since Physx already have built in ragdoll systems in it. At the simplest state you only need 11 links on a ragdoll character, and within those links you can set and limit the rotations of the limbs to stop it from going all weird on you. And having Physx support for the game can be used in other situations also, so I cant see a reason not to have support for it, especially if its already in the game engine. The problem I see is the collision meshes that would needed. I have no idea how they would figure out how to get the changing meshes of the car to update with a collision mesh? I guess an automatic update/generation system for the meshes would be the only option, but that would be buggy as hell, so I understand why they would take it away. But its not about having the ragdolls use the BeamNG system in my opinion.
I just explained why... There's a very good chance you can't have both types of physics interact with eachother, and even if you can, running both the ragdolls and the regular physics engine at the same time AND having them interact with eachother *all the time!* will probably impact performance very badly. Also, the car meshes itself don't have collision in BeamNG, something I also already said... BeamNG uses a skeleton out of joints and sticks to simulate its cars, that skeleton makes the collision mesh. That skeleton is what makes the meshes visually deform. Both the deformation task and the collision task are performed by the same thing: the skeleton of the car. Not the visual mesh. I could make a scooter skeleton in BeamNG and make it look exactly like a car in the game, but if you'd crash into it you'd still go straight through anywhere but where the (invisible) scooter would be. If you would have the character interact with the actual mesh, you'd need yet ANOTHER physics system which would calculate collisions per polygon on both objects, which would have an even BIGGER impact on performance. Even if you'd then make yet ANOTHER low poly mesh for both the character and the car(which would again have to be updated at the same time as the visual mesh), even if you'd do that, it would basically be the equivalent of running the ragdoll physics, the BeamNG physics, AND the whole GTA IV physics system at the same time(since that's how GTA's deformation works, it has a low poly collision mesh that deforms). 2 of those types of physics are already taxing the cpu enough on their own. And if that isn't already taxing enough on your CPU, you'll have to run some code that makes all those types of physics interact with eachother... That's would be absolutely killing to run all at the same time. That's why I said you'd have to make a whole contactable interior into each car, integrated in the deformation skeleton of the car... And even then you're gonna have trouble having the ragdolls interact with the interior, so the easiest way to do it would be to make the character out of nodes and beams as well... Which would end up being the the same as sticking almost half a car into every single car... It's just not gonna work. Wheither you like it or not, it just won't work as well as it does in GTA or whatever other game with cars and ragdolls, purely because BeamNG runs a type of physics that's completely and utterly different from other games. You'll see that in a while, someone will make a ragdoll person, and everyone will complain about how it doesn't work right, simply because a human skeleton and it's muscles is WAY to complex to simulate with 11 joints. If it was as simple as that, I doubt the Euphoria physics engine(the one GTA uses) would've caused such a hype when it was announced. EDIT@Below: Actually, GTA IV uses Euphoria and Bullet And I'm talking about the Euphoria side of the physics in GTA. Also, my name is Mythbuster, not MythbusterS...
Yes, I understand where you're coming from, but you started to imply that the ragdoll character it self would need beams and joints from the BeamNG system, something I don't agree with. The collision mesh in a ragdoll character are basically spheres and "oil-tank" primitives (have no idea what that shape is called, so I used oil-tank since thats what 3ds max uses) that comes automaticly when you assign the Physx ragdoll system to a character. You only need to scale it a bit to make it fit that specific character. And there is no need to "deform" the mesh of the character, it only have to collide with the car collision mesh (I know the car don't have that now, only the internal BeamNG skeleton) so the problem here is how they would add a collision mesh to the game that would not affect the simulations that much. So as I said I see the problems that comes with this seeing as making those two systems work together would be a pain in the ass. The only solution I can see is if the engine supports some kind of a skin-wrap system, so that you could make a really basic box for the car as a collision mesh, and then skin-wrap that collision mesh to the physical mesh of the car, which is then driven by the internal BeamNG skeleton. At least skin-wrap is a pretty cheap system and it doesn't cost much to calculate seeing as it isn't using calculations per se, but more lookup tables from its parent polygon or vertexes. I've used it earlier when I needed to fake cloth simulations on characters and the like.
I don't see how rag doll simulation doesn't require node/beam structure as that's exactly what it is. Joints and bones. Joints with limits/constraints that could be mimicked by more beams. A joint may have a collision sphere around it and a couple of them, making a bone, have a collision shape called a capsule (oil tank). BeamNG would need to support collisions between n/b structures and dynamic rigid bodies like those spheres and capsules. It should be more efficient than several collision triangles per bone. IMHO it is safe to say that they do support collision meshes. A triangle of nodes and beames can be collidable, although for the time being only with other nodes, AFAIK. Now imagine you have all this done, cars have super simple n/b interior with collision planes limiting rag-doll movement. You need to have it sit in its place while reacting to external forces. Hands should turn steering wheel correctly etc. In the end you get a higher rating due to a form of violence for the effort. Burnout doesn't have driver characters in cars and it doesn't really matter.
I agree with Mythbuster and Gouranga, it would take to much FPS to have a ragdoll character with bones that break and stuff, I just gave a suggestion, but what I really meant is that we should have a ragdoll character inside, the bones and breaking where just an idea. Anyway, it wouldn't matter if we had or not a character in the vehicle, BeamNG isn't about the character, it's more about the vehicles. (If I spelled something wrong, it's because of the keyboard I'm using).
Wouldn't BeamNG be nice with a ragdoll character inside the vehicle? No beams and stuff, but let's say, the outer body? The flesh? I am not a physics expert by the way, so give me your opinion about my opinion, so I know if would be ok to have a ragdoll character. Something pretty awesome would be to just be normally driving around in a semi truck, fully loaded with concrete in the trailer and suddenly run over someone and not even notice? So evil...
We all want a ragdoll character, they are just discussing wether it would even be possible and still have decent fps. They're talking about beams as a way to actually make him flexible and "collidable".Because that's how the engine runs everything. You would also have to make the inside of the car (seats,dash) out of beams,also. Or you could use some other physics engine along with BeamNG to run the ragdoll and stuff. I really think it would cool to have a ragdoll in the game. It would just complete the crashes to have a ragdoll flying around inside(or outside) the car.
