No physics engine?

TQ had physics ? OO ... never really noticed lol.

In a game like this i dont think physics is that importen.

What would a physics engine add in your opinions?

For the most part it's used for procedural animation... which would, in this game, entirely come in the form of inertia modeling.

So you spent 100k developing a physics engine and licensing (a total guess) and now you have creatures that can programmatically collide :P big whoop.

I wish I knew what a physics engine meant t.t I feel so stupid right now :(

"

maplexstream wrote:

I wish I knew what a physics engine meant t.t I feel so stupid right now :(

A physics engine is a module of the game engine that recreate rudimentary physical forces. It can be used in a variety of ways depending on what the developers want. In arpgs physics engines are generally used to create realistic ragdoll effects. In PoE when you kill an enemy it dies with the exact same motion every time because its death animation was created by hand. In other arpgs when an enemy is killed, instead of playing a preset animation, its model is passed to the physics engine where it's sent flying through the air and crumples against a nearby wall or the floor.

I actually am having a hard time thinking of any game that significantly benefited from having a 'true' physics engine (excluding gravity.)

I suppose some puzzle games... but that's about it.

When I think physics engine it's hard to imagine anything but an inertia simulator, which can be more or less explicitly programmed to be slightly less real, but processed much faster.

So beyond that, I fail to see where such a thing has ever been an integral part of the game.

I quite enjoyed the ragdoll effects in TQ. Doing a really powerfull move that sent monsters flying was fun.

"

Oasisbhrnw wrote:

I quite enjoyed the ragdoll effects in TQ. Doing a really powerfull move that sent monsters flying was fun.

That can be done without a physics engine though.

I suppose on a technical note we can call all interpretations of physical events as the 'physics engine.'

Physics engines then have 2 qualities I can think of:
1) how accurate are they compared to reality
2) how causal are they, ie. how far can they generate out new effects to a generic object without an outside call to an animation.

As such, POE does have a physics engine, it's just very limited.

I've always thought ragdolls in ARPGs are comical, cause almost always when you kill something, for some reason, they hop up in the air and somehow manage to land square on their heads. As far as I know, getting hit by something sharp or something blunt doesn't cause your corpse to do such a thing.

Given the small size of the dev team at GGG and the fact that a physics engine would primarily just affect aesthetics, it seems like it'd just be a lot of work for very little gain.