Indy Feels Euphoric
And it's because of all the whipping and enemies he faces. Or, um... something. Fine, it was a crappy headline.
Published: April 27, 2006
As much as animators and programmers would love to think they will always be the source of their creations' personalities, as next-gen development cycles get longer and the games themselves become increasingly complex, it's going to get harder and harder to inject all that personality into every character. It'll never really disappear, of course; Naughty Dog's animation teams -- arguably the best the industry has ever seen -- would be stupid to stop work entirely on their projects, but something will have to be implemented to help streamline things.
NaturalMotion's idea is simple: let the characters think for themselves. It's the core idea behind their Dynamic Motion Synthesis tech, and as we explored exactly a month ago, the idea is to let the characters' own digital brains determine how they movie. Someone at LucasArts seems to fancy this approach, so much so that they're including NaturalMotion's euphoria tech into the next Indiana Jones game.
“With euphoria, A.I. drives character behaviors so that there’s a different payoff every time. The depth of this character interaction gives us true next-gen gameplay that you simply couldn’t do with earlier generations of hardware,” explains LucasArts' VP of product development, Peter Hirschmann. “We’ve been working with NaturalMotion since 2004 to help bring their groundbreaking technology to games, and there’s no better character to demonstrate it than Indiana Jones.”
“We have big plans for euphoria, and we are absolutely thrilled to be able to show it off in the first next-generation release from LucasArts,” added Torsten Reil, CEO of NaturalMotion. “LucasArts is an excellent partner with a real passion to raise the bar for next-gen games, and we look forward to working with them to apply euphoria technology to its games for years to come.”
The example that LucasArts and NaturalMotion gave was a rope bridge where all the characters on it are reacting based on euphoria. If you run the simulation a couple dozen times, the outcome will always be different, because the characters are trying to catch their balance, causing some -- or all -- the characters to fall off the bridge or stay on it. The idea is that no (or little) scripting is needed and that the game changes every time you play it. Whether or not this holds up will be something we'll see first-hand at E3. We'll report back with the results then.
NaturalMotion's idea is simple: let the characters think for themselves. It's the core idea behind their Dynamic Motion Synthesis tech, and as we explored exactly a month ago, the idea is to let the characters' own digital brains determine how they movie. Someone at LucasArts seems to fancy this approach, so much so that they're including NaturalMotion's euphoria tech into the next Indiana Jones game.
“With euphoria, A.I. drives character behaviors so that there’s a different payoff every time. The depth of this character interaction gives us true next-gen gameplay that you simply couldn’t do with earlier generations of hardware,” explains LucasArts' VP of product development, Peter Hirschmann. “We’ve been working with NaturalMotion since 2004 to help bring their groundbreaking technology to games, and there’s no better character to demonstrate it than Indiana Jones.”
“We have big plans for euphoria, and we are absolutely thrilled to be able to show it off in the first next-generation release from LucasArts,” added Torsten Reil, CEO of NaturalMotion. “LucasArts is an excellent partner with a real passion to raise the bar for next-gen games, and we look forward to working with them to apply euphoria technology to its games for years to come.”
The example that LucasArts and NaturalMotion gave was a rope bridge where all the characters on it are reacting based on euphoria. If you run the simulation a couple dozen times, the outcome will always be different, because the characters are trying to catch their balance, causing some -- or all -- the characters to fall off the bridge or stay on it. The idea is that no (or little) scripting is needed and that the game changes every time you play it. Whether or not this holds up will be something we'll see first-hand at E3. We'll report back with the results then.