Hi everyone,

I hope you all are enjoying the delightful spring weather. Today, instead of taking a question directly from the Question of the Week thread, I focused on two rather interesting topics that had come up lately, jumping and physics, both of which generated a surprising amount of discussion within our community! Here's the question:

There’s been a fair bit of discussion about jumping and physics. Can you tell us a little about the type of physics we can expect to see? Will there be ragdoll style effects? What about jumping? Will we be able to jump in combat?

Physics
While designing Earthrise engine we tried to build the best realistic experience and in the same time balance client requirements and server load. The physics engine will run simultaneously on the client and on the server. The server will ensure that the physics results from the client are feasible and prevent cheating. We are using a 3rd party physics core, which can take advantage of hardware and GPU acceleration and also have some internally-coded subsystems. Player movement and control is governed by the physics engine – forces such as gravity or wind (and other) will affect players, NPCs, and other game objects. Player mounts (vehicles) have mass and their movement and collisions are generated by the physics engine. Visual effects, such as particle systems, explosion blast waves, and projectiles will use the physics engine too, on the client side. The audio subsystem will use physics world and object materials to generate proper sound effects.

A ragdoll system will be used for players, NPCs, and monsters. It will augment animations to ensure good foot to surface contact, maintain player look and pose, provide realistic hit, knockback, and fall movements. The level of the effects of the physics system that the players will see will depend on the player hardware, allowing an essential set to run on hardware with the minimum Earthrise requirements. Many other effects such as object destructibility and buoyancy are planned with subsequent patches.

Jumping
Do birds fly? Does grass grow? So do players jump in Earthrise. We're still working on many aspects of movement and dynamics, by considering the combat system in every aspect, as well as realism. Presently, jumping will require a small expense of stamina, so "bunny hopping*" will be limited in activity. There are numerous abilities planned that will modify jumping in order to suit it for different situations.

Jumping will also solve environmental problems the players might face, and it will be on par with most other games in the genre.

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* Bunny Hopping has been discussed in the following threads:
http://forums.play-earthrise.com/index.php?topic=1114.0
http://forums.play-earthrise.com/index.php?topic=1107.0
http://forums.play-earthrise.com/index.php?topic=405.0
http://forums.play-earthrise.com/index.php?topic=58.0

Bunny hopping, or bunny jumping, is a term used in computer and video games to describe the basic movement technique in which player is jumping repeatedly instead of running in order to move faster or/and to avoid enemy fire. (Definition source)

Wind is mentioned briefly in this thread.

Please feel free to discuss below.
~ m.

me too, its great news

more information, and the game just keeps sounding better and better.

Great. Too bad the all-time rule of PvP MMOs... turn off everything you don't absolutely need to see, so if there's optional physics effects client side it's gonna be one week of PvE training with graphics goodies on then everything optional turned off to increase FPS


(actually, most systems these days can perform pretty decently even with some graphics goodies turned on, so hopefully it won't be a big issue)

on all that: I really can't wait for object destruction and bouyancy.  Interesting implication of that comment implies significant time in the water: I wonder if one of the eventual expansions will open up a secondary island and simultaneously release boats/swimming/etc

Wind. How will it affect ballistics? Except I guess for anyone but a long range sniper the question is probably irrelevant. Still, it'd be nice to know....

Given that they said the shooting system was "simplified, so you don't need a degree in ballistics", I would bet wind is going to be essentially irrelevant. And rightfully so, no reason to muddle both serverside calculations and gameplay by forcing us to account for the wind in firing. I know it's not "realistic" but there are places where drawing the line to make gameplay more straightforward counts for a lot more.

Sounds good, i am very pleased.

The physics engine will certainly be an upgrade to what i am used to! Also seems the game will be able to be played on slightly older systems if they allow you to turn off non-essential features client side.

as long as bullets hit the target when I fire at them, then i dont care about drop or wind values.