VR-Mess/research/sources/nimso-transcripts/_ByrqrCSh2w.txt

# PROJECT TX - Next-Gen Physics NPCs get EVEN BETTER! (_ByrqrCSh2w, 1675s)

[Music] It's me, M. So, welcome back to another VR video. Today, we are back in Project EX and we're back in VR. Finally, we get to actually see the game from my view or from your view, in fact. Um, yes. So, I'm continuing the talk about uh about NPCs and physics-based this, that, and the other and nonsense and blah blah blah. Here we go. We have the dude walking around. Here we have the NPC uh waddling as he wishes. He goes wherever he wants to. He's in wonder mode. I shall probably zoom you out a little bit there. That'll be easier to see uh this dude waddling about. But primarily a few things that I have to talk about beforehand. Um there he is. He's just walking around. Um in the previous video I mentioned that uh there were some advanced things going on under the hood. It was kind of a multiple state machine thing going on wherein the character would uh handle all of these actions. So right now he's got an idle action and then he's got a walk to action when he decides to There we go. He's got a walk to action. He'll handle all of his actions separately to the decision making. The decision-m is handled by the goal system. So currently he's in a goal state called wonder and all he's doing is wandering around, right? Uh but that in itself is still not complicated enough for the kind of decision making that you kind of want him to do because yeah sure he's going to wonder but other characters should be able to wonder as well and their responses to seeing me for example should probably be different depending on um dep depending on their overall role. So what I added of course was something that I call a role. Now currently this character's role is just basically you know civilian you know wanderer. Now as part of that role his uh movement system is not simply wandering around. He will also walk towards the player if he sees the player. Right now he's not seeing the player because I have my uh self set as a civilian. So, what the other thing to add to mention here, um, he has an underlying sort of friend detection system going on. Why does he keep wanting to look down? I don't know why he wants to keep looking down. Uh, but yeah, he should look around. Um, he's got an underlying friend detection system, which of course is based on something that I call a team. Now, I have my own team. This the player team is just the player, right? And then the character can be in civilian team or guard team. currently a god being, you know, the kind of typical security guard, enemy type. Um, right now he's just civilian mode, so he's just waddling around uh doing whatever he wants. So, if I were to switch my team to civilian, uh, not civilian, I'm currently set as civilian. So, here we go. I'll switch my team so that I am now player. So, now he had already seen me. So, he knows that I'm there. So, he turned around to check where I was, and now he's just going to follow me. Here we go. Uh, wherever I go, he shall follow. And you'll probably want to zoom out once more. Boink. Wherever I go, he shall follow. Now, here comes the nice part. Um, the cool stuff, the stuff that people have been waiting for. Uh, a lot of people asked the question, uh, can he run? This is a this is a standard question being asked when it comes to uh physics-based NPCs, right? Uh can they run? Well, if I just simply run away from him, we'll be able to see that he can actually run. He shall try and follow me. Come, come, come, come, come. Look at him. He's running. Actually, it's even better than this. Right now, I just have him kind of follow with the run. But I have another role for him as well. I have another uh state for him which tests this quite well and that's actually the patrol state. So this is this is the one that allows him to actually patrol an area. Right now he has wonder set and then if he were to uh patrol an area if he was a security guard um then this is what he would do, right? So here we go. I'm going to switch to NPC. Well um in fact I might switch to my camera here. Yep. You should be able to see from my view. Hello. There we go. Now he's looking at me, but we can ignore that. Let's have a look. Here we go. NPC. I'm going to set his patrol setting to zero, and that will make him switch to a patrol route. So, now he's just going to waddle around. He's going to follow this path. He'll go over to here, and then he'll walk up here. And you can see no trouble with ramps. He'll turn over here. Now, I do want to smooth out the way that they handle patrol routes, but right now he's simply just going to follow the patrol route. He does use the um pathing as well. So, if the patrol route goes through a wall, he will find his way around the wall first. Uh the other thing, of course, he's going to probably not see the tire and then he'll stumble. And he managed to survive. He's perfectly fine. There we go. He'll follow the route. He'll walk down this ramp and then he'll come around here through the maze and waddle past here. Yep. He doesn't care about this little gap here. He'll waddle over there and he'll walk around and then he'll walk over there and oh, missed. He'll walk up the ramp and then he'll walk back to the starting position. Right now, here's the cool part. I can switch him to patrol with different speeds. And there's another thing going on as well. First thing you'll see is him trying to run. Boink. So now he's going to try and run the entire way. The problem with that, of course, when he comes to a ramp, he's going to try and run and he'll stumble and then he's going to try and run down the stairs. And of course, we all know what's going to happen. We all know what happens there when he tries to run down the stairs or run up the stairs. He's always stumbling. He's stumbling around. He falls over. If I place the tire in the way, of course, it's even more fun because then he will stumble and fall over the tire usually. There we go. He's just going to try and run. He does slow down whenever he's reaching a corner. But there we go. And and what the crazy thing is if I try and follow him, you can see he's actually almost as in fact, he's fast. Oh, sorry. I pushed you over. Sorry. Sorry. He's You can see he's actually just as fast as I am, which is cool. Let me show you this from the outside here. Um, there we go. You are in zoomed out mode. So, there we go. And he's going to fall. There we go. Come on. Follow me. Follow me. Follow. Follow. He's trying to run. He's going to Oh, let's see him. Oh, he missed. He must have missed. Ah, he's a cheater. He is right. Hey, wait for me. Wait for me. [Music] Yeah, I'm going to cheat as well now. No, stop. Ah, you can't stop him. Okay, run, run, run, run, run. As you can see, he's actually as fast as I am, right? So, this is not usual for a character that's a full physics ragdoll, especially one that can fall over and stumble. And here's the best bit, of course. I can make them stumble. I can make them fall over by just grabbing the legs and sweeping. And man, do I love doing that. You can't beat me, mate. Right. But of course, as we can see, there's a problem, right? He shouldn't have trouble stumbling over stairs and this and that. And he still missed the tire. He still missed the tire. There we go. You stay there. I just I want him to fall over the tire. Oh, it's so much fun. Right. Okay. [Music] Well, oh, see, just trying to throw him over is not that easy. Uh, but there we go. Anyways, so before he does that, I'm going to quickly switch him to mode two. Now, mode two means what he's going to do is he's going to have a bit of trouble on this staircase. But there we go. He's actually going to consider now the step height of everything that he's walking on. And he'll slow down when it comes to something that has a bit of height. So, there we go. He'll try and run here. And then for the stairs, he'll stop. He'll slow down. Oh, and he'll have a bit of trouble. Come here. Come here. Come here, dude. Having trouble. You're so silly. Get up and don't fall over. He's going to fall over there. There. Okay, there we go. He slowed down and now he's not going to fall over the stairs. You see, he's actually trying and he's going to fall over that. Oh, yes. I got him. Huh? I got you, Embbecile. Right, there we go. So, now he's actually thinking about the way that he handles the ground. And it helps because he will actually fall over if the ground is unstable or if things push him over, right? It just makes perfect sense. Why would you want a system where the character just gets set into a mode where they magically can handle the ground better, right? Uh it shouldn't be like that. Instead, the character is actually thinking about how he makes the decisions and then those decisions affect whether he's going to fall or not based on the physics system, right? It's it's there's no no nonsense going on here. It's just There we go. He slowed down and he can handle it perfectly. Beautiful. Absolutely beautiful. Now, let's switch him to something a little different. So, here we So, if I switch him back to a wanderer mode, he will stop and he'll make his way back down here. Come on, make your way back. Oh. Oh. Oh, he uh he isn't using pathing for wanderer mode. He's he just kind of wanderers around in this area. Oh, hello. Yes, I am the player. Oh, I forgot. He's just going to follow me now. He's going to follow me now. But there we go. We get to also see Oh, it's so fun. He will trip over. But as you can see, if you kind kind of try and push him over, it's not so [Music] easy. Come on. Come on. Go. There we go. Now, let's have a look a little bit at the actual combat basics. Right now, we're not I'm not actually building the combat system yet. Uh this is just the basic concepts and constructs of actual combat. First off, of course, there is uh a response that's going on. Uh you'll have to ignore his legs kind of stuttering there. Uh we're going to need you to zoom in a little bit. In fact, how about you just switch to me, right? Uh you can see a little bit of response when I punch him. There we go. And you can see he he responds a little bit. Now, there's actually a fatigue system going on under the hood. This is uh part and parcel of all of the combat and health systems. There's a lot more going on than that. Um, let's have a switch over to the health bars here. So, you can see the blue health bar and the green health bar. This is somewhat reminiscent of something you'll see in, I don't know, The Elder Scrolls. You've got a fatigue bar at the bottom and a health bar at the top. The health bar, you can ignore it. Doesn't do anything right now. The fatigue bar is important because as you can see it actually gets affected by a punch. It's not really a fatigue bar in terms of how much your muscles are being used but more a matter of uh a matter of uh how much energy you have uh based on how much you've been hit. Um it's more of a stumble bar if anything. Come on. Come, come here. Oh. Uh, effectively it weakens him up slightly um while he gets kind of knocked around. So, it's it's really cool because actually it affects things beyond [Music] just So, now you can see his fatigue bar is actually quite low. Um, oh well, there we go. Oh my god, this is tiring. Let's switch him over to combat. Um, and all we have to do to do that is give him the role of god. Right. So, here's where things get really cool. He is in combat mode. He's kind of in a combat pose. It's not brilliant, but uh, but there we go. Switch you to camera mode. Have a look from the outside. Right. So, there we go. Now, here's the cool stuff. Right. So, right now, he's just going to be defensive. He doesn't actually have a block. Even though I did add a blocking pause, I've kind of removed that for now. One thing that he's actually figuring out is is the person that I'm that's my enemy attacking. Right. So, here we go. Watch from the side. As I lift my hand, I place it out and you can see he's actually stepped back. Right. I can reach his face right here. I can reach his face just about, right? But if I swing, he actually dodges, right? Which is really cool. So there we go. I actually have to step forward to get him in a in a punch there. Yeah, there we go. We knocked him out. So now when he tries to get up, he just can't because uh because his fatigue bar was low, but it recharges really really fast, right? But uh but there we go. Boom. Yeah. Come here you. There we go. You right. So that's one of the things you can do. Oh man, it's it's all about just and you can see he actually dodges my my attacks as well a little bit. So here if I if I swing from the left I swing from the right, he actually leans away from the attack which is really cool right here. Come follow me. Come here. There we go. We'll get a tire and I knocked him out. You're stumbling now. You'll have to ap uh you'll have to uh you'll have to apologize. Yeah, that's that's how how it was supposed to go. Um, you'll have to excuse the structure of today's video. It's more just me showing off uh the the sort of stable stability of these uh of these NPCs. Let me push you over the All right. Okay. Okay. Come here. Come here. There we go. And of course, the cool stuff is if he tries to get up, I can keep him down, right? He can't get up. I can I can keep him down. Oh, how dare you. If he tries to get up right now. Yeah, he's going to he's going to Oh, he managed to. Well, well, well. Go on. Try and get up. Try and get up. You can't do it. Right. And and it's just it's it's so much better than than you might expect. Uh we take a broom for example here. Now that fatigue hit is actually dependent on the the strength of the the thing hitting as well. So of course it depends on that completely zeroed out his fatigue bar, right? It also Oh, the broom stayed alive. Nice. And that gave him a knockout as well. Right. So, of course, it depends on the actual weight of the object and the type of object and the the material that you're hitting with. There we go. Uh, so yeah, here we go. Wooden bat here. Oh, he's really struggling. Come here. You keep hitting your head on the wall. That's so silly. Come here. Right. Okay. So, if we move the camera out here, in fact, if we zoom it in, you can see here a nice quick knock with a bat on the head. And of course, it depends on what zone on the body I hit as well. So, of course, if I just hit his arm, if I just hit his arm, it's not as painful for him, but if I hit him in the head, it just knocks him out. And of course, we've we've got uh something like a sledgehammer here, which is much more fun because Hello, dude. Uh stop standing in front of the camera, dude. The sledgehammer is always more fun because it's so heavy and it's metal, which [Laughter] means and you can see that his bones have kind of weakened up a little bit while his bar has lowered. Right. So, he's still Oh, there we go. He's trying to get up and he's stumbling around. He's he's really really weak right now. But that bar will charge up over time while he's uh while he's getting up. And of course, we can do this. This is all physics based. It's not like I'm I'm I've not programmed tripping over or anything like that, right? It's just it just works. Oh, it's so freaking beautiful. I love this, man. Yeah. Get out of the way, camera. There we go. Beautiful, man. It's so fun throwing this dude about, right? Come here. So, of course, we can do other things like uh we can trip him over with with the rope. Come on. There we go. Right. which is really it's a lot more fun when you uh switch him out of um so there we go. Oh, I am I am player mode as well. Uh let me just move the camera a little bit out so that it's not in the way all the time. He's trying to get up. He's trying to get up right now. And you can see he's just he's just not able to roll over you. Come here. Roll over. And you can see his arms are really weak. His legs are really weak. And now, okay, if I keep that bar zeroed out, his legs are just really weak. He just can't get up. There we go. You can actually see as the energy charges up. And then of course if I just fire at the leg there. Right. And then what the fun part is when he starts to walk. Oh, I love messing around with these guys. Come here. Right. It's a lot more fun, of course, when we switch over to the Master Chief. Get up. Yeah. You want to run towards me? Come here. Ah, you can't do anything. Right. So, there we go. Here we go. We've got a dude. And of course, as I move him around, he tries to struggle. Right. So, he looks like he's got quite a lot of strength. He's clearly able to actually animate and stuff like that. Right. All perfectly fine until I start smashing him around like I'm Hulk. Come here. And now you can see he's kind of all limped out. He's limped out because he's now much weaker. Right. Ah, there we go. Limped out. Where did he go? I love messing around with this dude. There we go. Right. Well, anyways, let's get him onto running mode. Let's get him running. Roll. Uh, no, not guard. There we go. Patrol. Off he goes. He's going to run to his next uh next waypoint. And now for the fun part. Let's mess around with him. Come on. Come on. I got you. Right. So, here's the fun part. We just watch as he he's stuck now. Cuz obviously now this thing is stuck behind the wall. The ropes don't uh don't have proper physics, so they don't work very well. And uh and as such, he's just going to keep trying to get up. He's going to try to run that way. And he just can't do it. He just can't do it. Having trouble there, mate. [Music] Huh? Oh, if you're wondering why the blue uh marks, these are just they're just the blood marks right now. It's It's very simple. Okay. Okay. I'll help you out. There we go. Now, he's going to try and run along. Run along, mate. Run along, little doggy. Run along. And off he goes. And he's going to get stuck again. Oh no, he's not. He's going to start running. A little bit of stumbling. He'll probably stumble a bit more because that controller is there. Come here. Bring that here. Stop it. Oh, I am NPC wrangling right now. Oh, it's so fun. It's so fun. Oh, it's absurd. There we go. Okay, I'm sorry. I'm just having a lot of fun today. It's It's one of those days. It's just one of those days. Uh so you can see now that the NPC is a lot more advanced than you might think. Come on, wrangle him. He's just He's a lot more advanced than you might think, right? Uh he's there. He's twizzling around right now trying to figure out where's he gone. Oh, he's walked downstairs. He chose to walk down the green stairs today. Grab him. Grab him. Come down [Music] here. Where's he going? Come back here. You have to put the tire on. There we go. Oh, he got out. How dare you get out? here. Anyways, so so that's that. Um that's the NPCs, right? You can see they're much more stable than you might imagine. They can run. They can move a lot more. Uh the combat is going to be a lot more advanced than you might think. It's it's it's really really capable of actually doing things. He's capable of pausing properly and animating. I've got some advanced things going on under the hood. I've got I've got some advanced things going on under the hood that allows him to do all of the lookouts and stuff like that. And of course, it it changes the body pausing. So that means when it comes to things like blocking, he'll actually target where your attacking position actually is. Uh, which is how he's he's determining when I'm when I'm punching to his to his left, he actually tilts over to the other side to the right. And when I punch to his right, he tilts over to the left. He's actually being able to do that because there are advanced things going on under the hood for for controlling his whole pausing structure. He's more than just a a pinned place puppet. This is all driven muscle system, and it's just absolutely brilliant. allows him to actually maneuver the way that you would expect, the way that a character should maneuver. Anyways, I think I'm going on about stuff that it's it's not available yet. Oh, I've got much more to show very soon. Right now, I see him run past there. Hey, come back here. Come back here and say bye to people. Yes. Stay. Stay. Stay. Stay. Say bye to the video camera. Anyways, thanks very much for watching everybody. Sorry this one's been a bit of a ramble, but I hope you've had a little bit of fun viewing NPCs as they should be, not as physics in VR always portrays them. So, uh, that's this video. Thanks very much for watching. I will see you in the next one, and so will NPC dude number one. Thanks very much for watching. I'll see you in the next one in Project EX videos. Bye-bye. [Music]