A Question in regards to corpses.

[Jaybanger]

Hello,

 

This is a question in regards to corpses!

 

The reason I ask, is not because I am after a decapitation simulator or something similar

But simply because I believe the immediate fading of corpses during a battle destroys immersion. I believe it adds to a game to be able to look back after you just made I through an area and see the fight played out through littered remains of the battle field.

I believe Jagged Alliance 2 did it best, (it was the expansion however I can't recall the name).

The bodies wouldn't fade, and if you returned to the area there would be crows etc present and it would usually be accompanied by a short conversation between parties. If you returned even later the bodies would have gone through a period of decay (nothing too full on)

 

While I wouldn't want the game to become anything sadistic, some decals to show that a fight took place in a area would be nice.

For example, if in a city maybe next time you return a local shop keeper would be mopping the area?

Or

If in the wilderness, as above crow etc.

 

Anyway

 

Questions, thoughts?

 

 

 

[Sensuki]

I liked the way the Infinity Engine game handled corpses. I think there was a permanent corpses mod however, but generally corpses (and loot on those corpses) stayed for ... 24 hours game time after you left an area (I think) before it was cleared. Although 'gibs' only stayed on the ground for a few seconds after they landed.

 

P:E should be able to do more extreme stuff than that.

Edited May 6, 2013 by Sensuki

[mstark]

In a 2D game based on 2D sprites, keeping corpses around isn't a problem, since a 2D sprite takes up negligible amounts of memory. You may already be aware, but PE uses 3D objects rather than sprites, and each corpse will take up as much GPU resources as a living & moving creature.

 

This is why most 3D games resort to having corpses either fade or rapidly sink into the ground, because leaving them around would quickly become extremely GPU intensive (if new creatures enter the area while corpses are still around).

 

I'm with you in that I very much would like the corpses to stick around, at the very least I would not ever want to see corpses fade/sink right before my eyes a few seconds after I defeated the creature. I don't think excessive on-screen polygon counts due to corpses will be a problem in PE thanks to the nature of the game, so we'll probably see corpses stick around at least until we rest, or leave the area and come back.

 

If mobs in an area are reset/re-spawned, the corpses would have to go away to not clog up available GPU memory with their polygon counts, but since we're not going to be seeing constant streams of hundreds of mobs Project Eternity wouldn't need to free up GPU memory as often as, say, StarCraft 2, an ARPG, or an online shooter. They've said they wish to keep the game playable on a wide range of computers, though, which might mean on lower settings corpses will disappear quicker.

 

Personally, I'm thinking areas will be reset maybe every 12 in-game hours or so (similarly to IE games), so if I'm travelling locally I would still see corpses lying around when switching between areas, but if I travel far away and come back (or rest for a long time), the area will be reset, with fresh mobs and clean ground.

Edited May 6, 2013 by mstark

[Jaybanger]

In a 2D game based on 2D sprites, keeping corpses around isn't a problem, since a 2D sprite takes up negligible amounts of memory. You may already be aware, but PE uses 3D objects rather than sprites, and each corpse will take up as much GPU resources as a living & moving creature.

 

This is why most 3D games resort to having corpses either fade or rapidly sink into the ground, because leaving them around would quickly become extremely GPU intensive (if new creatures enter the area while corpses are still around).

 

I'm with you in that I very much would like the corpses to stick around, at the very least I would not ever want to see corpses fade/sink right before my eyes a few seconds after I defeated the creature. I don't think excessive on-screen polygon counts due to corpses will be a problem in PE thanks to the nature of the game, so we'll probably see corpses stick around at least until we rest, or leave the area and come back.

 

If mobs in an area are reset/re-spawned, the corpses would have to go away to not clog up available GPU memory with their polygon counts, but since we're not going to be seeing constant streams of hundreds of mobs Project Eternity wouldn't need to free up GPU memory as often as, say, StarCraft 2, an ARPG, or an online shooter. They've said they wish to keep the game playable on a wide range of computers, though, which might mean on lower settings corpses will disappear quicker.

 

Personally, I'm thinking areas will be reset maybe every 12 in-game hours or so (similarly to IE games), so if I'm travelling locally I would still see corpses lying around when switching between areas, but if I travel far away and come back (or rest for a long time), the area will be reset, with fresh mobs and clean ground.

Taken that I know nothing about computer development,

 

Would it be possible to convert a 3d character into a 2d sprite when the play goes off screen so that it is persistent when they return?

Or would it be too hardware heavy?

I was just imagining a 2d sprite that would blend into the surroundings as time goes on.

 

Thanks for seeing my point!, I was expecting a couple of posts telling me to get counseling.

 

I just really believe its something that is glazed over in video games as a lost opportunity to create atmosphere and immersion.

[mstark]

It's not as much a lost opportunity as a very difficult problem to solve.

 

In a 2D game, every animation has to be pre-rendered, in 30 frames per second. For example, an attack animation that is 1 second long requires 30 separate images FOR EVERY ANGLE that the attack can be performed in. Infinity Engines has 8 angles, resulting in 8*30=240 drawn frames, and that's for a single attack, with a single weapon type, for a single character sprite, for a single gender of a single race. As you can imagine, this quickly adds up. Infinity Engine games (Eg. Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale) probably chose to save time by making a single death animation (resulting in the corpse landing at the same angle every time and looking the same). For each angle you'd like the corpse to fall in, you'd have to pre-render a separate animation. Not to mention if you'd like the corpse to decay, you'd have to create separate states for every single angle in which the corpse can die.

 

That's quite a lot of time (and money) spent creating sprites, time that could be spent polishing out bugs, enhancing the story, or making new areas.

 

The benefit of using 2D sprites is that it takes up barely any graphical memory, so you could have virtually endless corpses & decay states on screen at once (you can see this in Age of Empires (1) to some extent, during large battles http://media.moddb.com/images/downloads/1/16/15535/rot.JPG).

 

When it comes to 3D, you gain some benefits, but lose others. The trouble with 3D, simplified, generally boils down to polygons - there's only so many you can have on screen before your graphics card melts. The more expensive your card, the more of them you can see at once ("higher" settings in a 3D game generally equate to 3D objects using more polygons).

 

If using 3D, you can develop a physics/rag doll engine providing a potentially endless amount of death animations. All handled by the physics engine in real time, calculating how bodies collapse. This opens up easy ways of creating flying death animations as fireballs go off, etc. The problem is that the body can land in a virtually unlimited amount of positions, which can't be predicted and easily replaced with pre-rendered static 2D sprites once they stop moving.

 

But then, if you figure out a way to do it on the fly, would you even want to replace it with a static 2D sprite once it stops moving? Or would you prefer keeping it a 3D object that you could blast around the map over and over again by throwing fireballs at it, watching it tumble around? (which one is less immersion breaking?)

 

I suppose one way to do it would be having the game "screenshot" the corpse once it becomes immobile and seamlessly replacing the 3D corpse with the static sprite (an interesting idea), but then, there would be no way of making it decay without impossible to implement decay states for the live generated 2D sprites, since those could not be generated intelligently on the fly.

 

If they figure out a way to keep the 3D corpses in game for a longer period (possibly by reducing the polygon count, read: "quality", of a corpse), they could apply simple effects such as the skin tone changing with the age of the corpse. They could even have chunks of meat taken away from it IF there is a modeled skeleton underneath the regular textures (time consuming, to produce not only the character model, but also its skeleton).

 

Maybe it won't even be a problem to keep corpses around in Project Eternity, considering that once you've killed something, there isn't going to be anything new "re-spawning" in that area for quite some time, meaning there's no need to remove the corpse until this happens.

Edited May 7, 2013 by mstark

[J.E. Sawyer]

Currently, corpses "hang out" for a while, as in the IE games.  After an amount of time has passed (currently only a few minutes, but probably 24 game hours in the final game), the corpses disappear.  We probably won't do any sort of decomposition modeling.

[mstark]

Will death animations & corpse positions be pre-defined or use some form of physics/rag-doll mechanic (which might end up looking rather strange, considering they'd be collapsing onto a flat surface)?

[AwesomeOcelot]

If you render the dead 3D models out to sprites after you exit a map, those sprites would have to be saved in the save files, that has a cost in terms of loading times.

 

The decay states would have to come from the 3D model, which means a lot more work for each model, if we're talking 3 decay states that's at least twice the work for each 3D character model.

 

The thing about having corpses stay in 2D games is that they have 2 or 3 states of decay, perhaps even 8 degrees of rotation, and they're a limited selection of different corpses, something you can get away with in a low fidelity game. In a high fidelity 3D game, even if the corpses are the same model, there's a lot states in game that has physics, skeletal rigging, and rag doll death.

 

I think it could work, render out 3D models to 2D, at this time do all decay states from the positioning of the 3D model, send to the save data, load a sprite dependent on the time it's been there on return.

 

Since so much of the game will be 2D, I wonder if having many 3D models is going to be a problem, especially with the poly count on them, which is lower than a lot of games because you're viewing them from a longer distance in PE. It's probably not going to be Age of Empires, but it could be even more than Assassin's Creed.

 

After 24 hours cannibals obviously claim the bodies.

Edited May 7, 2013 by AwesomeOcelot

[J.E. Sawyer]

If we can afford to have the 3D models there in the first place (i.e., when they are alive), we can afford to have them there when they're corpses as long as we're not loading a bunch of new creature models in on top of them.  If we wind up in some wacky situation like that, we'll probably make a script command to do a forced corpse cleanup on area load.

[Arsene Lupin]

Isn't it simply a matter of setting up the game engine so it will only render X number of corpses at a time, and at X+1 the first corpse disappears, X+2 the second, and so on?

 

Currently, corpses "hang out" for a while, as in the IE games.  After an amount of time has passed (currently only a few minutes, but probably 24 game hours in the final game), the corpses disappear.  We probably won't do any sort of decomposition modeling.

 

I can understand the reasons why, but I've always loved the little decaying/decomposition animations you'd see in a lot of the old sprite-based RTS and RPG games.

 

I would like, though, some kind of visual effect other than "fade into nothing." Final Fantasy X had this cool effect where corpses would explode into fireflies (basically), and Final Fantasies 7 and 8 did this cool "pop-out" style animation where the model textures were replaced with orange transparency, and then would "warp" away with a cool sound effect.

 

I know neither of those would fit with Eternity... but I'd still like... something. Maybe make the transparency effect slightly slow, and move from one angle to another so it looks like the corpse is being "absorbed" into the ground? Or maybe make it look like it's burning into nothingness w/ a cool little sound effect?

 

Not that I want to give you guys more work to do or anything, but maybe remember this if you've got some animators sitting around with nothing to do the week before release or so?

Edited May 7, 2013 by Arsene Lupin

[crackwise]

Guys, I don't know if many of you have played the Myth series in the past. But in my opinion they are one of the greatest 2-D games with physics. As far as I know, in Myth 2 Soulblighter the surroundings are 3-D but the characters are 2-D sprites. But the explosion physics in this game is so cool!

 

 

Look at this video:

 

Perhaps Project Eternity could have such physics. It would be so fun, having such physics with a game which has gunpowder and magic at the same time! : D

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=niLBL44VOxc

 

 

[Arsene Lupin]

In the IE games, if you killed an enemy with a crit, they'd explode into a bunch of fleshy chunks.

 

If that same kind of gruesome animation isn't in PE, I'll be sorely disappointed.

[Bishibosh]

Something I've always wondered in RPGs is 'why do we always just leave the corpses to rot where they are?'.

 

It seems awfully unsanitary of us to leave corpses all over the place and sometimes maybe our opponent was some annoying bandit but someone with honour who we happened to best. I'm assuming this game, nor any other RPG for the foreseeable future, won't allow us to bury or cremate corpses?

[AirBreather]

Hello,

 

I was wondering about the feasibility of this - the subbing in/quick switch of a low poly alternative model when the character dies?

 

Either generic, or perhaps somehow based/derived from the living npcs' model?