Over at Develop, they have an exclusive excerpt from Ballistic Publishing’s ‘Art of Uncharted 2’, where they get very in-depth on the creation of some of the iconic scenes from Uncharted 2: Among Thieves. I really loved the opening where they discuss the marriage of presimulated physics run in Maya to real-time physics done via their in-game Havok engine.
We also wanted to increase our use of pre-simulated physics so if we had a major destruction effect like a building collapsing, we’d pre-simulate all that in Maya, bake all that animation down, and then run that through the game engine. So you’d have real-time control of the player, but the building collapsing is a pre-simulated event.
To push things further we also wanted to layer our real-time physics objects over the pre-simulated events. So in the collapsing building sequence we’ve also got computer monitors and plants that are rolling around in real-time reacting to the environment.
To add a third layer on top of that, we also added physics-driven particles, so we have sparks that are coming off the light fixtures, that are particles hitting the ground and bouncing. It’s pretty amazing that it actually works.
To complete the effect you’ve got enemies that you’re shooting while the building is collapsing, and when they’re killed they turn into rag-dolls flopping around the environment.
The overall result of all these effects is to overwhelm the player so that they don’t really have time to pick it apart and figure out: ‘Hey, that’s pre-simulated, and that’s real-time.’ We just want them to get caught up and pulled into the whole experience. All they know is they’re controlling Drake and trying to survive.
via How Uncharted 2 set the technical benchmark | Game development | Features by Develop.
