Question
Hey rEAnimator good to see you back on here, anyway I was on the 2k site the other day and one of there mods who is very anti live/elite was saying that he did not think that elite was using true real time physics, that it was just a buzz word and that elite would use something that tried to sim rtp but not the real deal.
Could you clear this up for me, because rtp does get thrown around alot but I don't see true physics in these games.
Answer
Real time physics is a buzz word, no question about it. But it's the best buzz word to describe what we're doing.
Are we doing real time physics? Absolutely.
Are we doing real-life physics? No, we're using real time physics calculations to best simulate the physical contact between players with the goal of eliminating two player animations in favor of dynamically chosen and modified animations that respect physical constraints and user input.
Doesn't sound as good in a marketing video though does it? The casual fans may not understand what that means. So we say "real time physics" instead. It's truthful, it describes what we're doing, but it is open to interpretation which is unfortunate.
But that's one of the main reasons I wanted to post on the forums, to make sure there was no misunderstanding and you guys know exactly what we're doing and why.
Bottom line, there is no physics whatsoever in playing a two player animation. Everything about the animation is predetermined. It will always play the same every time. The "physics" is canned and baked into the animation.
We're moving away from that, releasing aspects of the animation to real time modification though physics calculations.
Lack of power in the systems is definitely a limiting factor. There's no way we could run, say, the Fight Night physics engine on all players in an NBA game at the same time.
But even if you have all the power you need, the biggest challenge is getting the physics to work well with gameplay and making it look good with the animations.
For this year we have focused 100% of our efforts on integrating physics in ways that affect gameplay.
People have asked if the head of a player could still clip through the backboad, and if arms will still clip through other players a little bit. That is not where we've focused our energy because those are visual problems and don't affect gameplay. We will get to those in the future no doubt, but this year was all about gameplay.
So things like in air collisions for dunk-ons, rebounds, blocks have been focused on because we wanted resolutions to those in game moments that were physically realistic and dynamic.
Things like using your body on defense to stop your opponent from penetrating, using your size and strength in the post to push people around.
We made the locomotion physics driven so it is consistent and responsive no matter what animation you're playing.
That has been our focus, and the biggest challenge has been maintaining high visual quality.
Fortunately we've nailed the controls and the gameplay. The game is fun and feels AMAZING.
We're now focusing on bringing the visual quality up. We'll fix as much as we can between now and when we ship the game (while tuning and tweaking certain gameplay systems along the way) but the good news is that the controls and gameplay are where we want them.
And we'll fix as much of the visual stuff as we can in the time we have left.
We've already made huge strides since the last gameplay footage you've seen and it keeps getting better every day.
I kind of got off topic there for a bit, but I hope I answered your question.
If not feel free to follow up with more questions.
Not the end of the world for me, but this was my selling point for Live, I mean Elite......I wanted to have a play happen on screen that no one else will ever see (like backbreaker) even if it was small stuff like 2 players colliding. I'm just disappointed that I got my hopes up for it.
