Little Big Planet Character Mechanics

I’m sure everyone has seen the demo of Little Big Planet for PS3 and if you haven’t then you should check it out. I was wondering how this kind of character control could be done in Unity.

Early Prototype

GDC Demonstration

I am particularly interested in how they got the legs of the character to do the splits while standing on two separate objects and the grabing action. Is this done with some sort of Keyed ragdoll? Any general insight into how this may be accomplished would be greatly appreciated.

Cool!

I haven’t seen any animations so far from the game. The art looks fantastic. Regarding your question i just would say ragdoll characters were you detach the different body parts (physically) and connect them physically with each other and then rebuild the mesh according to this. Or i guess this could also can be done more automatically with softbodies…

Ahhh that’s what i love about the PS3. It enables such new concepts and visuals due to it’s power. I suspect you won’t see such stuff on the Wii. Is the game a PS3 only or will it also show up on the XBox360?

If this is a PS3 only, man this will sell a lot of PS3s! :O) fantastic Woohhhh!

Yeah I saw this a while back - its awesome.

Along with Sony’s new HOME concept - check it out, it looks like a ball-tearer of an app.

If this steers well i’ll buy a PS3! :O) Woooohhh!

What they have done right is to make a 2.5D game. Platformers just don’t work in 3D in my opinion with the controllers you had so far. It’s always more work than fun and totally unimportant for the gameplay.

Im a huge fan of 2.5D - i think its great for visualizing a complex environment and very easy for non-hardcore-gamers to get into quickly.

Im definitely going to be on the PS3 bandwagon, just for this game - hope Unity make a port to PS3 - that would be cool.

Yeah exactly!

F§$" this is just great! You feel younger already watching the video… :O)

That kind of interaction is very possible in Unity, but don’t expect to have as many interactive bodies and complex stuff like they have. All you would have to do is write some very complex scripts that do things to rigidbodies.

This is the first PS3 game that I think really uses the extreme hardware power in a good way. Little big planet deserves a :smile: :smile: :smile: :smile: :smile:

By the way, does anyone have the slightest clue how they do the stickers functionality? I am assuming that it is something like multiple UV sets and they add a shader pass for each sticker with the uvs distorted depending on the sticker orientation as it as placed.

My guess is that it’s one of two:

Either they do “decals” - when you place the sticker, you collide it’s volume with the level and costruct geometry that is “for this sticker”, with it’s texture, raised slightly above the level (or other stickers). This gets more expensive as you place more stickers of course.

Or they have everything uniquely UV-mapped, and they just “splat” that sticker into the texture. Much like our paint textures script in Procedural project.

That would be easiest, but it requires each texture pixel on the screen to be unique. That seems like it would get really slow really fast. I guess he PS3 has a gig of vram or something :roll:

Actually PS3 does not have that much, it has 256MB of system RAM and 256MB of video RAM. It does not require each pixel to be unique though, the resolution of the “splats” could be lower.

And they could page out the splat textures that are out of the screen, and only regenerate them (from splat positions/orientations) when you’re just about to move into them. So that would require memory that could cover splat-able surfaces of about a single screen size, at the splat resolution.

…but I actually don’t know how they do it. Just guessing. Decals are probably way easier to get up and running.

Pretty sure they don’t do mesh generation because of how it works on softbodies too…

I tried to do decals in unity once where your grab the surrounding polys and project the decal image onto them but never got far… The problem is grabbing all of the triangles touching a sphere area takes time. I never really figured out a good way to do it either :frowning:

I suppose it is possible but either way beyond me or too much processing to do in Unity’s javascript.

That game has to be the best trailer and concept I’ve seen for a game in I have no idea how long! I am sitting here simply stunned at how wonderful that game looks. Blown. A. Way.

Wow.

That very seriously has put the idea into my head to save for a PS3 starting right now (and I thought I’d never ever hear myself say that being a Wii fan).

Wow.

I can not wait to show that to my kids tonight.

If you guys enjoy physics games you should check out Fun-Motion, a site I run dedicated to the genre. Granted, most of the games are Windows, but I compiled a list of games with Mac ports awhile ago (needs to be updated again):

61 games in the master list: Fun-Motion » List of Physics Games

[/shameless_plug]

I think Little Big Planets looks great.

One thing i noticed is that the animation of the characters does not seem to be key-framed but rather is procedural.

Thus not only are the objects in th scene dynamic, but the character’s animation itself is as well.

Wow, I didn’t realize that so many people hadn’t seen this game. I’m glad to of shared.

Buying a PS3 never even crossed my mind but I would almost buy one just for this game.
:smile:

Yep, well done! I once read about the game and saw some screenshots but then i forgot about it again. So great that you brought it up again! :O)

By the way it’s a PS3 exclusive and done by some old Lionhead chaps ( www.mediamolecule.com/ ) who worked very tight together with Sony and also did the RagDollKungFu ( http://www.ragdollkungfu.com/ ).

OH MY GOODNESS… i haven’t been this excited about a PlayStation game since the first TombRaider! :wink:

Cheers.

@Matthew
It’s not only about the physics, it’s more the overall impression that the game offers but thanks for you list, i’ll check some out.

I’m in contact with Media Molecule’s technical director, David Smith–he did the physics and designed much of LBP. I’m trying to get him to do an interview on Fun-Motion, or somehow talk more about their whole process, but he’s behind the wall of Sony PR. Hopefully, though!