Players often think it's Animated: "Just like that Pixar Logo".
It could not be further from the truth.
This is live, this is not animations. These are characters you can play with in a game. The Pixar-lamp is just an animation, it can not react with anything a player does.
100% physics driven animations can take longer time to develop than ordinary animations, but the time spend is usually rewarded many times in the later development stages
Opposed to many programmers who prefers "to be in control as much as possible", I just absolutely love to make drifting, uncontrolled stuff!
It doesn't even have to be a complex programming task when making good use of the Physics Engine.
When speed in development is of essence, and all you need is something that looks like if someone is driving the other cars, a few lines of code can get us as far as these ball playing drifting AI cars:
Neural Networked Machine Learning Agents are able to do anything from driving cars to Speech recognition, so many people think this form of AI is also the next big thing when making games.
As an example here's Unity's praised tutorials, in which they teach people how to use Machine Learning Agents to drive NPC's in a racing game.
When developing NPC's, AI, interactive Game assets, you want:
- Basically everything Machine Learning is not!
The situation is similar to when people figured that 3D printers would end world hunger..
(Just like some people said "Smart new technology, now you can just print the food" - some people think "Smart new technology, now we can just train agents to be NPC's")
In many situations it's most fun for the players of a game, if AI appears chaotic at first, but then they realize that they can "trick" the AI, because it is somewhat predictable.
This should IMHO be accounted for and encouraged, to support emergent gameplay.
As a bonus this mindset often also leads to more readable, controllable code for us as developers. Have a look at this example. These are not the overly complex "Boids" algorithms.
The way these navigate is actually just a simple hack: Not visible for the player is a zero-gravity ball flying around in some obstacles. They just either follow that, or the visible green circle.
The running robots in this video are animated, but at the same time they are wrapped in physics, so they actually react to any situation, for examle when having beach balls smacked into their face.
If this was pure enimation-based, the reactions would monotome. If it was pure Physics driven AI, it would lose a game-feel.
In this little demo, I wanted to show how a 100% physics driven world does not have to be sloppy and out of control, even though everything is fully interactible and emergent.
(Please enable sound for this demo)
Note how it is not the Jumping up in air that is on beat, but actually the later landing.
The rabbits performs this little trick sharply on beat, landing in pose no matter if they are thrown off course, or when they are spawned:
Everything will self-correct.
Tricks like this gives a Game Designer a ton of freedom for designing interesting gameplay!
Well, I did do this in 2008 when I was into building robots ;)
Together with millions of Very Talented Persons from all over the world, we made thousands of fun robot- and AI projects
Here's a drifting car video I did for Make Magazine in 2011 ;)