OpenMW 0.13.0

[werdanith]

Death will also have to interact with the physics system too. I think it is going to be an extremely hard feature to implement, simple idle ai would be easier for now, the npc/creature stays in the same position. With death the creature may lunge forward or backward and may need to end up colliding with a slope. There may be a rock/boulder in the way of the npc/creature and the npc/creature can't just float through it. Plus, once the creature is dead, you have to make activation work on its dead body, which also may require some big changes.

Well if we are aiming to replicate Morrowind behavior we don't have to worry about most of that because the original game didn't. Opponents' corpses ended up floating or submerged in rocks quite a bit. The only physics that was relevant from what I can remember was flying creatures ending up on the ground and that doesn't sound too hard. Unless we aim to implement ragdoll physics I don't think there is much point trying to correct vanilla behavior. For example, imagine an npc dying in a tight space that has no room for him to lay down, what would then be the appropriate response of the physics engine without deforming the body?

[jhooks1]

Animation alone is not enough for this, we need physics too. Sometimes yes, npcs will get stuck floating, but not every time. Most of the time from what I've observed npcs rest on approximately the slope of the terrain/ground when they die. With animation alone in openmw they would always rest at 0 degrees.

[werdanith]

Well, I can't say I've noticed that behavior, but I won't argue it isn't there.

[jhooks1]

It seems that parts of the npc do sometimes get covered by the plane that they lie on or other objects. I have not seen an npc die though and go through a wall entirely and rest behind that wall in my recent tests in morrowind.

EDIT: Also we need physics for npcs anyways, most of them right now are actually in the air.

Some of the death animations basically cause the npc/creature to fall down and die. Others cause the npc to stumble forward/backward quite a bit then die. Perhaps even greater 20 ft/5m if the hill was big

[raevol]

I have not seen an npc die though and go through a wall entirely and rest behind that wall in my recent tests in morrowind.

I have. It's also just about one of the worst bugs of the original engine. I don't know how many times I have lost cliff racer corpses in boulders, when i was hunting for cliff racer plumes.

[jhooks1]

How often does that happen (like 90% of the time)?
I think what would happen with animation alone in openmw, if the npc was at the top of a slight slope/hill the npc would die but it's final stumbling steps would be in the air. The npcs dead body could end up entirely in the air with the ground like 4 feet or a meter below it. Perhaps even greater 20 ft/5m if the hill was big

[raevol]

It happens 100% of the time that a cliff racer is on top of a boulder when it dies, like an actual boulder, not just a lump in the terrain. I have seen NPCs stumble through walls with their death animation as well, it happens very predictably when you kill them and they are close to a wall and their death animation takes them into the wall. I would love to see this fixed, it's really hard to loot corpses when they are almost completely clipped through some solid object.

Planking (corpses suspending in the air when dieing on slopes) was a notorious bug left in engines from this era, so I think it's perfectly acceptable to leave it in the engine for 1.0. If course if we can fix it with ragdoll or something similar that's nice too, but at least plank bugs don't prevent looting like clipping bugs do.

[jhooks1]

I still think it is going to be a challenge and npc physics will be required for a solution like the one present in morrowind. Right now many npcs are completely up in the air. We already have actor physics, collisions just need to be enabled for each actor, and a proper offset needs to be added to the scenenode. I think idle AI would be much easier to implement right now, the npc stays approximately in the same position and the npc just needs to collide initially with the ground below it.

[Zini]

I added the feature under the assumption that we can get away with a very simple MW-like implementation, that has all the problems mentioned above. But okay, I think you have more experience with in this area of OpenMW than I. Therefore I will remove the feature from 0.13.0 again. NPC Idling isn't really an option yet. First we need a proper framework to handle AI packages.

[Zini]

But if you are still looking for a task, we have this bug report here: http://openmw.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=553

Seems to fall into your area of expertise.