Research: exhaustive Nimso Project TX study (82 video transcripts) + Boneworks/BIMOS rig reference

- research/nimso-project-tx.md: chronological per-video notes 2017-2026, topic synthesis,
  VR Messs scope, proportions & calibration (Winter/Drillis-Contini/Dempster tables verified),
  open unknowns
- research/sources/nimso-transcripts/: yt-dlp auto-caption transcripts + dated index (re-pullable)
- research/vr-physics-rig-hexabody.md: BIMOS/HexaBody/Boneworks reference, Box3D native joint
  mapping (spherical/motor/prismatic/distance), superseded-as-target note
- AGENTS/HANDOFF research pointers

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>

research/sources/nimso-transcripts/0R8Q96ukYeo.txt

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+# PROJECT TX - Possibly the MOST ADVANCED PHYSICS NPCs in VR! (0R8Q96ukYeo, 1933s)
+
+[Music] It's me, Ninso. Welcome back to another video. Today we are back in Project TX finally. Um, actually I'm not actually in VR today. Uh, which is an unusual one for a VR game video, but there we go. This is how it is. Um, people have been waiting for this one for quite a while, but it's not entirely like the Hold on. Let me just reset my head a little bit. There we go. It's not in the entire video. This is kind of a part one kind of thing. Uh, it's not going to be super long because this is there's so much of the behindthescenes stuff and under the hood stuff that I needed to get done. uh that uh I just wanted it to to be done first before I start building on top of it. And I have started building on top of it, but this video will showcase a little bit more of the the grunt work under the hood. And uh yeah, so let's get into NVCs. What we're looking at in the in the actual scene is not going to be very complicated. It's just going to look very simple and uh not stuff that you're you're used to here. But let's have a look at it very quickly. Uh just quickly running the game. And there we go. Right. Okie dokie. There we go. And uh what we're looking at here is just an NPC following this bowl. Right. So this is this this is just a target bowl. This NPC here is an actual full ragd doll. Now, let's talk a little bit very quickly about how uh how ragdolls are built in in VR physics, right? Um when it comes to VR physics, you'll you'll have seen in plenty plenty of games that characters have and I've mentioned this so many times before, characters have a bit of a flimsiness to them, right? Either they are very very ragd doll accurate and they're able to kind of stand on their own and they waddle about and they kind of very very mildly walk and trip over basically everything including ramps and stairs and everything. Or the alternative being really really cheaply designed rag dolls that are effectively not true uh rag dolls in terms of their joints and everything. They kind of look like ragdolls for the most part. And this is this is very very common, especially in VR. And in reality, they're just using what is normally called an animated ragd doll or something that I think we were calling partial ragd doll in in my previous job. Um, which is where you have if all of your bones kind of pinned in place in the world space. And when you push an arm, for example, it kind of flexes weirdly where the hand stays in pivot position and the arm kind of moves out of way. Everything looks like all of the bones individually are trying to get to their positions, which is very, very awkward. That's not the case with my ragdolls, right? What I'm trying to do here is the the more accurate full physics ragdolls. These are driven by muscle systems which means each and every bone here is actually driving itself. It's uh it's moving itself. This here ball I can move via this uh internal internal ball which I can move and uh this character will literally follow the the ball. Right now, when he walks around, he's actually driving himself using not just the not the feet aren't directly driving his motion, but they are holding him up, right? Which means I can push him around. This is an actual he does walk away from things as well. This is an actual physics character, right? He can be pushed about and you can see here he's actually waddling about and he actually does kind of stumble and everything, right? And this is this is really nice. It's very standard stuff. You've seen this plenty of times before. But of course, he's also able to tip over and get knocked over. Right now, this is very again very standard stuff that you've been seeing on my in my Ragdoll systems, but under the hood, there's actually a lot more going on. Now, when we look at this character here, I'm going to close up everything except for this here. Now, actually, yeah, this will show you a few more things, but you'll notice here there are three points. Uh, three, let me just make sure I'm not covering them up. There we go. There we go. Beautiful. There are actually three sets of IDs under this debug text here. Now, when I move my character, when I force him to move, here we go. Just make him walk. You'll notice that the action state has changed to walk to, and then it's now changed back to idle. Right. What's actually Oh. Oh, I've I've just told him to tip over. Whoops. Sorry, dude. Sorry, dude. I I I was supposed to disable that. I just made him fall over. Right. Okay. Um, so under the hood, what's actually going on, if you think about the physics based uh physics based ragd doll, it ignore the ragd doll. In a normal NPC system, what you want to do is you want to have your character Yeah, I probably should have taken out the console. You want to have your character um basically perform an action and then make a decision as to what the next action you perform. Ordinarily with something that's a much more simple concept, for example, a very a straightforward uh bLine truncated