TGEA Rag Doll working using Tokamak

I used the Tokamak physics library to implement Rag-Doll behaviour for death scenes.

It is animated client side only because we don't care if the body falls in different locations on various clients. Its visual eye candy only.

I still need to fine tune the joint rotational limits so that it mimics human behaviour more realistically and I'm having to locate/fix some collision bugs. Excuse the low-res weapon, its place-holder art. The good stuff is still being worked on.

The biggest problem I had was with trying to get/understand data matching between TGE world and Tokamak because Tokamak uses Y-axis as up and it's matrix data is also stored differently, plus, its not documented to that level of detail, but once that was ironed out I modified the TGE matrix class to import and export a Tokamak matrix and after that it was conceptually straight forward to implement the changes. Thanks also goes to David Lam, creator of Tokamak, for pointing me in the right direction with understanding the matrix differences.

I say 'conceptually' straight forward but as usual it's the finer details that turn into land-mines and headaches that consume many days and late nights.

I chose Tokamak because it comes with free source code and license and a very small footprint of only 943K for the compiled lib file. It has built in opcode functions as well but I used the existing Tokamak collision routines.

Other physics libraries apparently require you to feed them all the data upfront, meaning you need to tell them about every collision poly on every object in the game world and they handle everything from there on, which can be a good thing but there are pro's and con's to everything. Tokamak has a callback which allows you to provide your own pollylist of collision triangles which makes it easy to use in TGEA because the engine already has function calls for getPollylist and so on. The only TGEA enhancement I can still think of is to cache polly lists per bin for static objects but I have not really investigated that option yet.

So the implementation consists of an enhancement to the Player class and small changes to the animation code to allow for direct bone-control. On death, instead of firing off a death animation, we switch to ragdoll mode which will create rigid bodies and joints for each of the player limbs and orientate them the same as the current player pose and velocity. We then grab collision pollys from the surrounding area and advance time on the ragdoll, updating the pollylist if the ragdoll has fallen outside the bounds of the original polly grab area. That's the concept in short.

Now I'm sure GG staff can "roll their own" version in a day with one arm tied behind their back while solving a rubix cube with the other while delivering a lecture on the calculus of deep space gravitational field nano impulses from sun spots... but, it took me longer than that to get this far.