This pack is the first step in a whole new line of development for Torque player animation. For the first time, Torque players and RTS Units can tumble and roll in realistic response to explosions.

What It Is: This initial Ragdoll Animation Pack includes 72 new animation sequences for the stock Torque player skeleton. The animations are arranged to provide responses to explosions of varying force, from any direction. In addition to the animations, the pack includes some significant code modifications to choose sequences and play them in your game.

What It Is Not: This pack is a collection of pre-defined ragdoll animations, generated using an external physics package. It is not realtime ragdoll in the Torque engine. While this may be a disappointment to some, this technique offers the following advantages over realtime ragdoll:

1) Network play: realtime ragdoll is notoriously difficult to handle in a multiplayer game, because the positions and velocities of all moving bodyparts must be transmitted across the network, vastly increasing the network traffic. The solution offered here involves no additional network overhead.

2) Performance: realtime ragdoll computes everything on the fly, which inevitably comes at a price. This system simply chooses precalculated sequences, meaning those extra clock cycles can be used for something else. While your FPS game on a fast system may be capable of handling realtime ragdoll, this pack works equally well in an RTS environment, with dozens or hundreds of units, which is something nobody can currently do with realtime ragdoll.

3) Aesthetics: because these sequences have been picked by hand, they all look right. A realtime system is far more likely to show flaws and visual discrepancies, things that just look dumb, because of the seemingly random nature of in-game physics.



Check out the video files!

QuickTime Format 3.8 Mb
Windows Media Player Format 3.8 Mb

72 New Animation Sequences

Animations simulate force applied from:

Eight directions.
Three pitch angles.
Three levels of magnitude.

Accompanying script and engine code sets up your torque player to respond to force from any radius damage weapon, using the force and radius values in the datablock, so you can customize your weapons and see the effects with no further work on your part, other than aiming and shooting!

The result is a series of animations that range from the player being merely knocked off his feet all the way to being tossed head over heels, each in eight possible directions.

Supported Models:
* Kork (the default Torque player) and other demo players with the same skeleton (blue guy, green alien, elf girl).
* Tank Girl (Jill)
* Adam Pack
* Soldier Pack

Additional Note: This pack requires minor engine changes to work in TGE, and some more substantial changes to work with the RTS pack. The rest of the changes are in script, but you must be capable of compiling your Torque engine in order to use this pack.

If compiling the engine is a problem for you, download the Torque Build Environment and get started. It's real easy, and you're going to need to do it sooner or later anyway!

Windows 95/98/SE/ME/2000/XP
Pentium II 300
64 MB RAM
250 MB free hard drive space
4x CD ROM Drive
OpenGL or DirectX Compatible 3D Graphics Accelerator
DirectX compatible Soundcard
Internet access