'Ragdoll physics' wrote William Butler Yeats 'are the best thing to happen to computer gaming since the death of the Virtual Boy.'

Actually Yeats didn't write that, or anything vaguely resembling that. The point is that when someone starts anything with a quote from a poet- be that 'anything' an article on the relentless chipping away of Habeas Corpus in the United Kingdom by the Junta of the Labour government, or a piece on physics in computer games- you should be very suspicious. you should be suspicious because the writer of that piece has thought 'Ah, a quote from a respected and established poet. This will make me appear learned and well read, and automatically predispose the plebeian reader to accept my argument, however flimsily constructed.' So distrust them. And distrust me, for God's sake, because I'm no different.

What is the big difference between Deus Ex and Deus Ex:Invisible War? Some of you will respond 'one sucks monkey balls and the other doesn't'. Perhaps. The thing that most struck me, the thing that can be most held up as a figurehead of the frequent 'reverse advancements' of technology, however, is the treatment of corpses in the games.

A dead body in Deus Ex (let's call it DX) had a lot in common with that magicians trick where someone lies with either end of their body supported by a chair, and then one of the chairs is removed. The subject of the magic trick, rather than collapsing to the floor in a painful heap , using the last of their strength to reach for their mobile and ring their lawyer, remains quite rigid, plankofwoodlike. Dodgy physics were a great source of joy in DX, and allowed for the player to shoot a starving orphan child, pick up his cadaver, and go balance it delicately on top of a policeman's head, like some grotesque fleshy see-saw (a situation, as far as I know, unique in computer gaming). Shoot someone in DX and they would simply fall to the ground and stick there, as though a powerful magnet had flickered on beneath them and their skin was made of metal. Weird stuff.

Invisible War (let's call this fellow IW, to spare my weary digits) had a new fangled and exciting thing...something called physics. Whilst DX had some rudimentary physics effects, the most startling difference was would what happen if you threw a barrel down some steps. In DX the barrel would arc through the air and land, always perfectly upright, and just stand there, mocking you. An IW barrel would bounce off merrily down the steps, tits over arse, hopefully with the appropriate parabola to squash an unfortunate orphan child standing at the bottom. This, ladies and gentlemen, was the future. But the future wasn't only barrels! Oh no. It was also bodies.

IW bodies, once deprived of the spark of life, would collapse, or fly backwards, or spin off into the air, depending on what you did to them, and with what you did it. The bodies would flop around, lifeless limbs dangling helplessly. The intent was to create a world that felt as though it were reacting to the player. The effect, though, as with practically every example of ragdoll physics since, was to create gunfights which ended up looking like a Charlie Chaplin movie.

PC Gamer magazine (in the UK, at least) used to run a regular section called 'Gamer Snap'. The idea was for people to take a screenie of some amusing incident in a game, normally a bug or glitch, and to send it in. Sometimes they would have normal screens with droll captions. For what it was, it was actually quite high-brow. Then came DX. Overnight the screenshots consisted entirely of corpses, en-masse, spelling out words like 'TWAT', or 'WILLY'. Less high-brow, perhaps, but positively artistic compared to what was to come. Perhaps it's unfair to blame IW for this (although I like to blame IW for most of the woes in my life, so why not?) but ragdoll corpses opened up the door for whole new levels of depravity. Now it was all corpses, slumped over each other in ostensibly sexual positions, piles of slaughtered people giving unconvincing blowjobs for the rest of eternity, their dead, glassy eyes staring out, pleading for a thimbleful of dignity. Arousing, it was not.

Anyway, Gamer Snap went downhill from there, until it recently ploughed into rock bottom with the release of Garry's Mod for Half-Life 2, allowing scores of cretins to make it look like Alyx Vance was giving her dad a blowjob. My sides have only just stopped aching, honestly. It may seem odd to single out a feature as specific as ragdoll corpses as some sort of gaming pariah, but they do prove that stepping forward is not always the best thing to do. Particularly if you're standing on a cliff-edge. Goldeneye! Yes, Goldeneye. That had some of the best death animations in a computer game, even to this day (since most games don't use animations for deaths nowadays so much as physics it's not surprising). You could kneecap a man and watch him collapse to the ground, grasping his leg in agony. Shoot a man in the balls and he'll do an utterly convincing, knees trembling, hands cupping the groin collapse to the ground. Makes you feel a bit guilty. If you shoot a man, say, in the shoulder, he'll fly back, spinning to the ground. People I've talked to about this think that this is an early implementation of ragdolls, but it's not: it's just good animation.

In the end I suppose it's part necessary evil, part Emperor's New Clothes. On the off-chance those two cliches weren't informative enough, I'll elucidate: Ragdoll physics, and modern physics engines in general (Not you, Ageia! Back in your kennel!) allow some great things to happen. You can lob a grenade through a doorway in Crysis,and watch as the explosion blows some chap clean out of the window, landing with a crash on the bonnet of a jeep parked outside. This is immersion at work, and what a game should strive for. Contrariwise (what a word) you can smack someone with your sword in Oblivion and watch as their corpse limply bends back on itself, kneeling before you but warped back over their spine, like some nightmarish supplicant contortionist (whilst we're on the subject of Oblivion's wanktacular physics let's not forget the way that falling objects do not accelerate, leading to a person being smacked up into the air with a hammer and floating gently back down to earth, like some sort of screaming, bloodied balloon). This is immersion breaking.

And game designers know ragdoll physics are deeply silly. Look at the disdain with which Flatout treats your hapless avatar. A new PS3 game consists of nothing more than pinging an unfortunate ragdoll around a city with explosions and catapults and...trampolines, probably. If there is to be a bright future it will be procedural animation, consisting of the amalgamation of animation and physics, giving characters some semblance of knowledge of spatial awareness. The new Splinter Cell looks quite good in that respect, although the same cannot be said for Sam Fisher's beard.

Actually it's just occurred to me that the physics in Hitman: Blood Money are way sillier than those in IW, with people literally flying 15 feet in the air when shot. And it's just occurred to me as I wrote that the Hitman series was probaly the first to implement ragdoll physics. I'll let Invisible War off this time.

I see your point, but I actually enjoyed the ragdoll physics in IW, there might be many many things that disappointed me in that game, but the malleability of the corpses is about the only thing in the game I felt was an improvement on DX.

i love ragdoll physics though, its so entertaining when you cannot be bothered to do anything else but go on Crysis (in beautiful very high settings) stick on maximum strength mode and see what you can do using a shovel and a small shanty village

also as for the procedural animation, may i direct you to look at Spore? which uses almost solely procedural animation throughout

Hey, I've certainly got many a chuckle from ragdolls over the years, but at times I want to take a computer game seriously, without being constantly reminded it's just a game. I suppose it could just be the effect of film and TV and that sort of thingy, but I've come to expect the aftermath of a massive firefight to look...dramatic, really, rather than absurd. I think my main pet hate with them (and Oblivion is the main offender here) is when the body bends backwards over itself whilst still sitting there. SWAT 4 did that a lot too. I'm no forensic scientist, maybe it happens a lot, but the whole thing can be such an immersion breaker.

well the old warhammer of massive pain causing (+3) to the ol' spinal cord will do that to you, and i remember another game thats out fairly soon that looks good in the whole ragdolls not being absurd category, the Force Unleashed. now that looks fancy ragdoll style.

It does look good, but it uses the same procedural animation they're using in the Indiana Jones game. Should be good fun picking up a TIE fighter with the hitting someone with it, that's pretty much all you can ask from a game. And lightsabers, always lightsabers.

Dont forget the fancy gizmos they are cramming into every hole of this thing, sadists will be overjoyed, or at least as happy as they get when they find out stormies will cling to eachother if you chuck them over an edge.

Too bad i love stormtroopers, id have their babies. <3 stormtroopers! :D

Pfft. All of the Timesplitters games have animated deaths, but i suppose thats hardly surprising since the developer that makes them is essentially the team from Rare that made Goldeneye. I also strongly doubt the fourth installment in the series will change this factor.

when i first read the title I was expecting something else lol.

Ragdoll is great It adds realism to the game. But if the developers take time from perfecting your actions to perfect the actions of a corpse then I hate it.

Ragdolls are fine. They add far more to the immersion than they take away from it. I'm far less immersed in a game when each person dies in an identical fashion, and even manage to go through walls. Sure, when the bodies in Oblivion's heads fall through the floor and turn the corpse into a flailing human tornado... I accept how that might not be totally realistic.

From your article though, I would say the players are the problem, not ragdolls.

Ragdolls only are good when you're playing a game that spoofs the ragdoll mechanics. Because unless every game universe has weapons that suck the innards of the people that get killed by such items, then I find it irritating that the man I just caused death upon is able to defy physics (Both universal and body constitution physics) and gravity even more than I can.

Yeah, it still does bother me that when I fire a double-blast of 12-gauge shot into a Combine Overwatch soldier's kneecaps, he just drops to the floor dead. You can have an NPC do a death animation into a ragdoll state (so you can have your cake and throw it through a portal, too*), so there's not a lot of reason to forego it if you're THAT much into "realism".

Still, some games get the ragdoll physics right (Half-Life 2) and some get it terribly, terribly wrong (Thief: Deadly Shadows). People are not made of rubber, and their arms do not turn into hoses when they die. Seriously, I can't imagine being a mortician in a Havok-physics universe... how would you get people into their coffins?!

*you see, you can throw the cake through a portal at yourself.

What was the first game to feature ragdoll physics?

Can't say that it was the first, But Hitman: codename 47 was no doubt one of earliest in a long line.

Ragdoll physics needs a lot of work before it looks good.
Me, I believe that procedural injury animations combined with pre-done ones, combined with ragdolls, will be the best. Then you punch someone in the face, their head flips back, their body moves back, their legs take a few steps back to compensate, then they balance up again. All done differently with every dude you punch.

Aside that, I think that what one needs to do is to make gun physics more...compatible with how human bodies really work. As someone mentioned, you don't die because you get shot with a handgun in the leg ten times. Your leg might fall off at the knee around shot eight, but you'll be alive. With ragdoll physics, it looks like a person is replaced with a bunch of sacks of sand tied together by string the millisecond their hit points reach 0. (And that is because that's how, basically, ragdoll physics work.)
If a game lacked classic hit points (and in the same breath I will mention that the annoying wolverine healing factor everyone and their dog has in action-adventures and FPS games nowadays doesn't count) and instead had good o'l Deus Ex damage zones....
Well, then we'd be closer to how it works.

Aside all of that, there is one last thing I believe would help greatly.

Picture the scene: A german SS commander is walking up and down the lines of his troops, you hold your breath, the needle of your scope stopping at his head, you squeeze the trigger. His body falls back, the soldiers fall down in disarray and terror. The ambush begins.
Minutes later, you survey the scene and find that all of these people, laying around randomly, look like they fell asleep, either resting against a wall or in weird yoga poses.
Not a wound on any one of them.

Now this is mainly because of whiners from the political gaming-fuels-murder morons. But in the bad old days of the original Soldier of Fortune FPS, if someone got hit in the head with a dumdum .50 Desert Eagle round, they freaking looked like they got hit in the head with a dumdum .50 desert eagle round! Their lower body was sticking through a wall, sure. But their head was the unidentifiable mess (to anyone but a skilled dentist, who might make a few guesses with the bits left of the lower jaw) that a lot of gunshot victims are.
In Half-life 2, or Crysis, or F.E.A.R...I hit someone in the face with a shotgun blast, the best I can hope for is that the head dislodges in one perfect piece from the neck (and even then, only in F.E.A.R.!). Most likely they will just kinda fall back, not a scratch on their pretty little faces.

All that, just to say "I think if we bring damage animations back, and add some of that newfangled procedural animation Spore keeps saying will be so awesome, I think ragdolls would look a lot more like real life"
and on a related note, I think that this would be juuuust fine. Trust me when I say that Soldier of Fortune did not make me a killer, au contrare, it kept me cool when I was white-hot mad. Messily slaughtering someone in extremely ridiculous ways helped my younger teen self to cope with anger in a safe and harmless way.
Likewise, I think that turning a downtown cafe into a crime scene of fifteen casualties in a theoretical megasuperhyper-realistic game would STOP more people from doing it than the amount of whackjobs it would "train".
But since everyone here agrees (most likely), that's irrelevant.

In Half-Life 2, the situation of people falling over in a boring fashion does occur, but there are those rare instances where I genuinely think there's some part of the Source engine programmed that when he and you are just so and you shoot him with the shotgun, he flies back, arms failing like he still has some strength in him to move his arms feebly through the air, giving a bit more reality other than [Entity is dead, activate Ragdoll].

What I hate about physics engines is when enemies/corpses are too sensitive to the ground.

Like in TFU there was this mushroom platform that would wobble when something landed on it, but when I dropped an enemy on it he kept felling over to that small wobbling.

All Floppy and Useless, lets not discuss my issues thank you very much.

Gigantor:
'Ragdoll physics' wrote William Butler Yeats 'are the best thing to happen to computer gaming since the death of the Virtual Boy.'

Actually Yeats didn't write that, or anything vaguely resembling that. The point is that when someone starts anything with a quote from a poet- be that 'anything' an article on the relentless chipping away of Habeas Corpus in the United Kingdom by the Junta of the Labour government, or a piece on physics in computer games- you should be very suspicious. you should be suspicious because the writer of that piece has thought 'Ah, a quote from a respected and established poet. This will make me appear learned and well read, and automatically predispose the plebeian reader to accept my argument, however flimsily constructed.' So distrust them. And distrust me, for God's sake, because I'm no different.

Indeed Mr.I'm-using-Oscar-Wylde-as-a-face.

But seriously, on to your point. I "half-agree", which makes me sound like an indecisive prick, allow me to expand:

Ragdolls by themselves aren't bad, it's the fact that they're generally poorly executed that makes me them. All the corpses instantly seem to become weightless and loose all muscles and sometimes bones. It's not that the dead character is a bit "limp" after dead, it's mostly the transition from "human" to "ragdoll" that's generally done with all the dignity of George Lucas and then the actual ragdoll that overlooks the simple physics from the engine it's using. They're still a lot more realistic than corpses that feel like they're made of fucking wood though.

That said, I too miss the good'ol death animations. It was a lot more realistic to have an enemy limp then fall down when shot in the leg instead of making him do a front flip while his limbs spaz around like they're electrified. But on the other hand I'm grateful that long are the days where a dead body was akin to a wooden bench or a stone.

My point is that middle ground is GOOD. Some games seem to implement this already to some extent (CoD4 or Crysis for instances). Nothing says you can't have both death animations -AND- ragdoll physics. Just make sure the "ragdollization" takes over AFTER the death animation, that the ragdolls have human WEIGHT, and that the corpse's muscles and joints don't instantly liquefy upon death. In other words: Make sure physics are well applied, that I can't send a guy flying 20 ft backwards doing 12 somersaults cause I shot him at close range with a shotgun or that I don't liquefy a guy's skeleton with a shoot in the knee.

I don't know much about ragdolls, but one of my favorite games where the whole death/gore thing was done well was, seriously, Drakan. If you turned the gore up you could literally hack off enemy body parts. The evil giant spiders squished and crunched very unpleasantly.

And, of course, my favorite scene in the game, which involved a giant throwing a Worg at you and his vicious splatter death right at your feet.

has anyone in this thread heard of Endorphin or Euphoria its the pysics system that is taking over the ragdoll, i assume a majority of people in this thread have either owned or played GTA IV well that had euphoria/endorphin "rag dolls" in it

I'm completely in favor of ragdoll and anything else trying to approximate real-world physics but when they completely cock up the clipping plane (or worse, when I go to rob the Tiber Septim Hotel's dining room for alchemy ingredients and find plates of venison floating a foot up from the table, to crash down only upon the pulling of a load-bearing corn cob), immersion turns to "what the fuck was that?"

Dead bodies clipping through the scenery is inexcusable, albeit occasionally hilarious when, say, a Mythic Dawn assassin finds himself embedded in a rock like a scene from The Cask of Amontillado gone horribly, horribly wrong.

Also, I think Oscar Wilde and Bender from The Breakfast Club look remarkably similar to one another. Just a thought.

SimuLord:
I'm completely in favor of ragdoll and anything else trying to approximate real-world physics but when they completely cock up the clipping plane (or worse, when I go to rob the Tiber Septim Hotel's dining room for alchemy ingredients and find plates of venison floating a foot up from the table, to crash down only upon the pulling of a load-bearing corn cob), immersion turns to "what the fuck was that?"

Not to mention the game's somewhat bizarre view of how much space your character took up, so that you could walk *past* a table in first-person view and a plate that WASN'T EVEN NEAR THE EDGE suddenly goes flying through the air. You can't pick it up and put it back, either, because that would be Stealing.

It would bug me, also, when I bought a house and spent some time redecorating the place (I know, I know, who does that, but still), only to come back and find my stuff scattered across the room--the little Imperial City house had a problem where one of the goblets always, mysteriously ended up on the floor no matter WHERE you put the damn things.

And what's the point of making all these little flavor objects when the furniture itself is immobile and indestructible? I think it's better if the developers decide whether they're making a game or a reality simulation and then ONLY DO ONE rather than making a game that sort of simulates *some* real life stuff but not other stuff. Whereas if you know up front that you're just making a game, you won't spend valuable dev time and money on being Martha Stewart.

Gigantor:
It does look good, but it uses the same procedural animation they're using in the Indiana Jones game. Should be good fun picking up a TIE fighter with the hitting someone with it, that's pretty much all you can ask from a game. And lightsabers, always lightsabers.

Wow. Which version of Indiana Jones are you watching? It sounds awesome.

good physics are often needed only in games like gary's mod in which the fun is in buiding a catapult to launch a crate through 15(!!!!) portals and in to a guy that then goes careening hilariously off a cliff. otherwise I do prefer goldeneye physics yay fer hit boxes.