We did eventually “fix it”, of course - bubbling mountains of corpses didn’t fit with the grim and gritty sort of themes of the game. It actually became a bit of a contest around the studio - bored developers would compete to make the biggest volcano. The more bodies there were, the bigger the volcano. Body would wiggle against body, each time triggering the touching corpses into rag doll physics, resulting in a large conical pile of the dead. The bodies, all combined into the space of a single body, would bubble up like a corpse volcano as the gunshot would trigger a chain reaction. Remember, rag doll activated at the introduction of any outside physics force. That wasn’t seen as a problem… until you shot one. ![]() They could clip through each other as you dragged them into a pile. The weird thing is that because the bodies were only partially in rag doll, they could end up occupying the same space. It was actually fully possible to simply drag bodies to each other to make a big pile of corpses, and it was actually within the player’s best interest to do so - find a good spot to hide the bodies and then put all of the bodies there to be safe. Then it would immediately go into physics, doing the normal things one would expect a corpse in rag doll physics to do.īecause the players could drag bodies around, they had to be put into a partial rag doll state - the player would always drag the body by the legs, so the body could be rag doll from the waist up. However, one of the affectations of our rag doll system was that the body often wouldn’t actually go into a rag doll state until an outside physics force acted on it in order to save on having to do some extra calculations. This way the player would never see it during the sequence, and the body would be in rag doll physics the next time they did take a look. In order to solve this problem, my melee combat system wouldn’t actually kill the bad guy (or turn on rag doll physics) until near the very end of the sequence, after the camera had stopped looking at the victim. You can’t just have somebody go all floppy in the middle of a judo throw. Sometimes, like during a scripted melee takedown sequence, we had to let the animators have full control in order for the action to look right. However, we couldn’t just immediately put them into rag doll physics when they died. This meant that the bodies of the fallen would spread out more realistically as they hit things. Like many games, we used a rag doll physics system for our corpses. However, today’s war story isn’t really about the stealth system - it’s more about a weird issue that came about because of what that entailed. And it makes sense - after having worked on a stealth system, I realize why so many stealth systems feel tacked on - they’re really complex, and very easy to screw up. This overall design design decisions regarding stealth raised all sorts of issues, which eventually led to many of the stealth elements in the game being cut or streamlined to a very high degree. So we added the ability to drag bodies around as a gameplay element to give players a way to deal with this. ![]() The game was meant to incorporate certain stealth game elements - if an enemy ignorant of your presence saw the corpse of an ally (as an example), that enemy would go into high alert mode and possibly even call for assistance. Once upon a time, in a studio far, far away, I was working on the melee combat system for first-person shooter game.
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