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Hi.
i need to know how physics animations work in the games.
for example, a car being driven by player teammate and it's sure that is moving to a certain path but it still has the feeling of right velocity or acceleration or a jet (like bf3) and moves in a certain path, and its like…
is it just done by pro animators or there are some techniques for this like pre-calculating the result of physics on an animation timeline and running the result on real-time gameplay?
The kinds of vehicles you're talking about, are simulated in real time.
E g, some programmer programs in how much thrust is in the engine, how much traction is in the tires, how strong the brakes are, how much lift there is in the wings depending on velocity, and so on.
Then, 60 times a second, the physics engine in the game runs a physical simulation, which takes the control input from the player into account, and calculates what the simulated outcome is, and updates the vehicle to match.
These simulations are sometimes simplistic, but the high-end racing and flight sim games use simulation models that are almost as accurate as the vehicle manufacturers themselves use in some cases.
There really are three kinds of programmers that need to be involved:
1) The physics/math programmers who know how to write code/math to simulate things like “friction” and “springs” and “mass” and “torque”
2) The model programmers who know how to take those basic features, and build a simulation that simulates “enough” of whatever vehicle you need, to make a “car sim” versus a “flight sim” versus a “snowmobile sim”
3) The gameplay programmer, who chooses the right parameters and tunes them to make the vehicle sim behave the way the designers want it to behave in each situation (or, at least as close as the technology will let them get.) Obviously there's a “realism” versus “fun” trade-off here.
