Rockstar to Use NaturalMotion Technology in Upcoming Games 39
CVG reports that future Rockstar titles will feature NaturalMotion technologies in an effort to make the games more realistic. Specifically, Rockstar will be licensing the 'Euphoria' engine, an advanced physics and substance simulation model already in use in several upcoming LucasArts titles. There's no word in the article on which games will feature the technology, but this certainly seems like something that would fit well with the sandbox style games of the GTA series. " Employed in the recently revealed The Force Unleashed, euphoria simulates the human body and motor nervous system. It means that in-game characters are fully interactive and always react differently to external influences, ultimately leading to a more life-like experience for the player. Specific reference to how euphoria 'uses the processing power of PLAYSTATION 3 and Xbox 360' to simluate the human body and motor nervous system was made in the announcement. While Rockstar is yet to name games using euphoria, its integration of the tech is well advanced."
Re:finally (Score:3, Informative)
Re:finally (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Well.... (Score:2, Informative)
NaturalMotion isn't quite as dynamic as it may appear. It's not doing a full physical simulation most of the time. There's still considerable use of motion capture data and kinematics. Blended approaches like that are the norm in animation; full control of a humanoid character with real physics is still not that great. There's continual progress, though. Today, we have the MIPS and many of the algorithms. When I was first working on this, we had 20 MIPS, and things were rather slow. We could get the theory to work, but the hardware wasn't there yet.
Much of this was done a decade ago, by Motion Factory [internet.com], which was a Stanford spinoff. That was purely kinematic, but produced reasonably good movement. Eventually, Softimage/Avid bought that company, but didn't do much with it. Boston Dynamics [bdi.com] has also done work in that area.
Re:About Time (Score:2, Informative)