Where did ragdoll physics go?

I love when people who don't have a clue how graphics engines work or physics api toolsets comment on how it would pwn preformance.

1. Ragdolls pretty much never has any noticeable impact on preformance if implemented correctly. Given the large number of physics toolkits readily available to game developers, it's as easy as implementing speedtree.

2. Yes because it's more fun to just stand in a corner chain-reviving people that get blown up by liberators and tanks, yet fall down in the same spot as if they were hit by a butterfly? Gotta getz that easy revive xp!! Amiright?

3. Starcraft 2. Enjoy seeing 8 ffa matches with ragdolls on all the units, every single zergling, marine and stalker. Or why not mention GTA4 or Red Dead Redemption which still to this day has some of the most sophisticated ragdolls in gaming history, without slowdown due to it.

4. It is automatically downscaled. (Same concept as Level of Detail for meshes)
If the client has 10fps, he'll only see 1 ragdoll at a time. If the client has 100fps, he'll see whatever it is the max limit the game designers set. A ragdoll only calculates while in the air, once it lands on the ground it enters a "rested" state where it essentially turns into a static model, no longer requiring computation.
I don't know what kind of battles you've been in PS2, but i've played it since beta and i've never seen more than 20 people at MAX getting blown up at the exact same time. That's 20 ragdolls. Hardly worth writing home about.
Modern GPU's (we're talking 560TI and such) can easily handle 100 ragdolls no problem.

There is nothing about ragdolls that magically make a game run awful. Ragdolls (and everything on physx for that matter) is NOT calculated on the CPU, it's calculated on the GPU. That's why physics has been such a big deal lately, precisely because we can have the cake AND eat it at the same time due to physics being processed on the GPU while waiting for the render pipeline to deliver the previous frame. End of discussion.

Talking in 2012 about how ragdolls pwn framerate is like talking about how anisotropic filtering pwns framerate. It simply does not happen these days. Get off your integrated intel gfx chipset notebook.

Once again you are completely wrong maybe if you knew what you were talking about and actually knew what the samsung chip on the quadro 5000 was you could sound like you werent just a desperate troll trying to sound so brilliant.

On my quadro 5000 in my PhysX config tab wich is called PhysX processor Samsung SMS24A-450 dedicated to run PhysX seperatly... there is a big graphic just to show where the chip is located on the card ...
So yea its not memory its a PhysX dedicated processor that utilise GPU acceleration and memory wich is how PhysX engine works.

Go back to school mister electrical engineer...

Also how is it dated lol the only option you have for the highest end quadro today is quadro 6000 wich isnt even available yet where i live or go SLI with previous quadros and guess what the most recent is before it...quadro 5000 .The reason i got quadro 5000 is because it was the best available for me and because it is also ready for a mix with the next quadro series to come IN THE FUTURE wich for you in your own world is outdated for SLI.
I have it for work since i do 3d graphics design for companies and also use it for gaming in mmos since render is processed much much faster and never get slowed down contrary to my gaming rig when there is massive multiplay with alot of high res textures popping it is not apparent.

GL with your future troll attempts !

Right. That's why when I turn the ragdolls up in games that allow me to control the amount use much more CPU than GPU power as well as start to become sluggish after a certain number of ragdolls build up. Things like Garry's Mod (Source Engine) or Crysis (CryEngine) or even Mount & Blade (****** if I know what engine) all start to become CPU locked after you begin to have a lot of ragdolls in play.

The GPU only offsets so much. You can offset physics, and even more so if you have something like PhysX hardware, but there's still a lot the CPU has to do.

Yeah, you can do a lot more these days; but only because the hardware is better. There are still limits.

But dear god would i love to see that with my very own two eyes before i die.

i dont know about that that medic tool is future tech, who knows what functions it has

I don't know about PS2 but in other games, ragdolls are client side, meaning after the char is killed and turns in to a ragdoll state, each client will see it differently and it will respond differently on each client as well.

I was here.

But isn't that a problem. Do ragdolls and non ragdolls fall into the same spot? I mean if an explosion goes off, currently we die and fall in the same spot, but with true ragdolls the body can fly. So if it is clientside, does that mean one person will see it fly but someone else will see it differently? Wouldn't that effect medics more? I don't really know the technical side of things though. So I'd like someone to explain it. Unless you meant processed client side, so one would have more dynamic movement if your GPU is powerful but the other person sees something slightly stiffer? They fly or fall to the same spot?

You do realize SMS24A-450 is just the model designation for a basic wide screen monitor (made by samsung). It has nothing to do with physx, i think your confusing displays for GPU's

Thanks for the laugh though.

I find it funny how counterstrike: source came out with ragdolls in 2004 but Sony in 2012 cant implement them due to terribad optimization !
Also lol at people qq-ing about revive problems ! watch some battlefield 3 vids or better yet, how about you run your lazy *** after dat' corpse ?!

sigh

I started to correct this post until I realised it's just full of half truths and false statements. Have you ever even worked with physics in games?

Why would it?
The game already tracks every players position. Tracking the position of a corpse is no different, even if it is moving for a few seconds.

If the arms, legs and head do not line up or look the same on each players screen is not important. That's clientside.
What's important is the absolute central axis of the body, the location of that. One set of X Y Z values.
It isn't any harder to track that flying in the air than tracking a live player running around.

And garry's mod is the worst example of physics in a computer game to date. It's woefully unoptimized.
Play the standard HL2 campaign, watch 20 guys ragdoll at once as you throw a grenade.
What's so hard about that?

I swear, it's as if half the people in this thread has never played any game the past 10 years (that wasn't planetside 1).
Ragdolls is a piece of cake. As long as you're not sitting on your 5 year old iMac.

OK, people need to understand the following: Ragdolls are cool? YES! We want them? YES! Are they viable in a MMOFPS? Maybe! People forget one thing: In single players, the initial position and the final position are calculated by the client. In PS2, The problem lies in the following, imo:

- Player A is bombarding a spot, killing player B, C and D.
- Server is now sendint the information to the client that B, C and D are dead.
- Server is now calculating the position of death + Geography + force of impact in order to calculate trajectory of bodies
- Cliente is rendering the calculations the server has send him on trajectory
- Server is now calculating where the body is prior to his death, informing ALL other clients where the dead body lies
- ALL CLIENTS are recieveing the information from server and making the assumed representation of it

People don't seem to understand that Ragdolls will consume a LOT of processing and bandwith in a MMOFPS like this, even more when rendering issues are fixed, when people will be seeing a lot of more dead bodies flying from various places. This Server <> cliente data transmitions will clog the current system, and good thing it isn't available to us now.

Once everything is fixed, the Physics as a whole can finally be checked on (remember, vehicles and debris also function second to physics, but are quite bugged yes, cause most debris calculate poorly the trajectory in which they fall compared to impact or collision).

Wait a few more months people, ragdoll and physics as a general rule aren't destroying the game, they can be looked upon once other game breaking problems are solved.

Yeah but almost all of those games are small scale or singleplayer. Dkamanus points out more of the issue in his post. Took until ARMA3 (coming out this year) for ragdolls to be introduced when it was totally possible even back 12 years with OFP (where ARMA comes from).

I'm pretty sure in a few years when everybody has PCs that can handle it, they'll re-add it.

It can be clientside, only if it is forcibly enabled on all clients. Every computer will do the same math calculations.. just with latency between them. Physics is dynamic using math.. not scripts. So all of us would see the same thing in theory.

RagDoll Physics.... you want this?