'The physics of snowboarding - Part I
Welcome to the first developer-diary of
Stoked Rider - Alaska Alien. In this issue we will tell you about the physics-technologies used to bring this game to life.
When starting the development of this title back in 2003 it was a clear move to go for an external physics-middleware. After programming our own snowboard-physics for the freeware games in this series we learned about the disadvantages of faking the physical behaviour. The outcome was a feeling like boarding on rails without much variation between different runs. So the decision was made before starting the actual development. After some evaluating we finally decided to go for AGEIA's physics-SDK (called Novodex back then). Let me now tell you about some of the more interesting physical-features this game offers:
Dynamic physical gameplay
This game-title utilizes AGEIA's physics middleware software to simulate the snowboard-terrain interaction. Getting a behaviour similar the sliding/friction of a real snowboard was quite a tricky task but the results allow for some precise steering while offering lots of variation making this game perfectly for fans of competitive-gameplay.
Physically-simulated ragdolls
Having a ragdoll for animation of characters is nothing particulary new, but having a ragdoll blended seamless into gameplay is something we are quite proud of. This can be best seen when bailing after a hard crash and having the possibility to recover and continue riding. Imagine the rider rolling down the mountain and when landing on the board, the run continues seamlessly.
Interactive foliage-effects
When colliding with trees or bushes, each branch of the tree reacts realistically on the rider/board contact.
Universal collision-detection
This feature enables to get very exact collison-responses btw. physicall-represented objects. So good-bye to the times where collision responses were based on abstract spheres or boxes representing the collission-hulls of objects.
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'The physics of snowboarding - Part II
Fracturing Objects
Below's screenshot demonstrate an ice-arch breaking into 800 small objects when colliding with the rider. Each of this objects is calculated physicall-correct and even interacts with other objects upcon colliding ( like doing damage to the rider..)
Physics accelerator support
Recently buzzwords like hardware-accelerated physics or PhysX by AGEIA became quite popular among gamers.
Let us show what new kinds of gameplay can be achieved by utilizing the capapbilities of a PhysX-card (available since this year).
Some background information on SLUFF
Avalanche professionals call a bunch of loose snow sliding down a mountain “sluff”. That sluff-avalanches can be deadly and this fact also is a reality for this snowboard game.
See how the rider triggers such a sluff-avalanche. Its important to know that like in real-life it can be deadly when the rider gets in touch with the avalanche. Here the rider decides for a route around the boulder-formation resulting in a tactical-outrun of the avalanche.
Now look how sluff is flowing around the boulders in a very realistic way, which only gets possible with the power of the PPU-card.
We think new gameplay like this is pretty exciting and demonstrates what can be done when having enough processing-power available for physics-calculations.
Here a whole new level of gameplay in terms of player<->world interaction gets possible offering gamers a new experience.
That's it for this week's developer diary. See you around soon on the slopes of virtual-Alaska!
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