Analysis of Active Ragdolls in Games
Part I
Ragdolls have always intrigued me in games. Its just funny to see bodies collapse upon a car crash and fly through the air in GTA or lose balance in Steep and fall down a sheer endless cliff.
But that’s not what this series shall be about. We are going to look at active ragdolls.
Active Ragdolls
Ragdolls like the one shown above have been a thing in the video game industry for almost 2 decades now. Hitman: Codename 47 (2000) or Max Payne (2001) already had similar implementations (less complex of course).
But in recent years more and more games have gone even further. Games like Octodad, Gangbeast or Totally Accurate Battle Simulator (T.A.B.S.) have made use of so called active ragdolls.
They don’t just use physically constrained rigs to simulate dead bodies flying through the air and smashing into walls, but rather they use physical forces and joint motors to actively influence said ragdolls. Hence the term active ragdolls has been established.
If you want to dive deeper 640 Lab has some more technical posts on how to build something similar yourself. also Nimso Ny has made some videos on his active ragdoll system and also answered some questions
Although all these games do many things different from a technical and from a game design stand point, they all still have one thing in common. All of them use physical forces to manipulate the rigs of the characters. And not only do these forces affect the visual appearence, but they also drive gameplay.
I think this is a pretty interesting topic from a game design perspective.
My Own Experience
During my studies in game design we (Denise, Nathalie and me) created a small adventure game “Real Guys Wear Ties” where you play as a parasitic, sexist, power-hungry tie.
You can pull around the people that are wearing you (your hosts effectively), make them talk to each other, and try to eventually controll the CEO of a bank. We tried to embrace funny physical movement and there is a lot of symbolysim and criticism on patriarchal and capitalistic structures.
Amongst other things I worked on the active ragdoll system for the game. It supported animation and movement based on the pulling of the tie.
While working on it I learned a lot about the technical requirements and implications such a system has.
Although we were pretty happy with the prototype that we managed to create, we realised nontheless that there still is a lot of stuff that would need to be reconsidered.
Lookout
Currently I’m reworking and rethinking the whole game concept as part of my bachelors thesis. I want to dive deeper into physical animation systems and active ragdolls and create gameplay that is more based on this physical interaction with the world.
Thats also the reason why I thought i’d share my research and do these little writeups. In this series we will analyse different games that made use of active ragdolls or physically animated characters. We will look at technical details on how they solved certain problems and also see how all of that affects gameplay.
