BioReplicants BioReplicants are a proprietary technology of Action = Reaction Games, the creators (Omar Ahmad and Jeffrey Anderson) behind Aves. In short, it is a dynamic muscular-skeletal physical simulation which will replace the standard 'key-framed' animations found in games. It is the culmination of over 7 years of rigorous scientific thought. The bird in Aves is really 'flying'. Its flight is modeled with lift, drag, gravity, and a very realistic approximation for avian flight dynamics. Virtual muscles are tightened, released, in every frame. When the arrow hits the bird, the system is simply reacting to external forces - there is no 'scripted' reaction - what you are witnessing is simply the natural reaction to the arrow. There are myraid 'secrets' of biological motion which will go unpublished, but which you will be able to interact with when playing with any BioReplicants. When you play Aves, you will see what I mean. BioReplicant-1 is the bird in Aves. BioReplicant-2 is a simulated humanoid-like biped creature. Other BioReplicants include fish(3), snakes(4) and spiders(5). When BioReplicant-1 (the bird in Aves) is pinned against the wall, its brain is simply telling it to regain stability - with the added constraint of having infinite friction at the impact point. the muscles in that area tighten and you witness the frantic flapping as a reaction, once again, with absolutely no scripting. BioReplicants far surpass any existing dynamic, procedural animation technology because its underlying mathematical model is a highly non-linear system with over 100 muscles, wherein the muscle parameters are calculated, every frame, in a Hausdorff dimension (non-integer) space. In this way, the system is extremely adaptive and reactive to ALL external forces. It is our tested hypothesis that complex biological motion can be dimensionally reduced by fractals. (This is effectively why you can compute these incredibly complex things on an iPhone). Other systems are not truly dynamic because they rely upon linear approximations for coefficients garnered through 'genetic algorithms' which are precomputed. The underlying mathematical models in these simulations are deficient, and even slight purturbations from the recorded motion results in system instabilities. Thus, you cannot truly interact with these systems. They are little more than physical models mimicing key-framing and then a rag-doll fall at the end. BioReplicants are "Alive". You can push them, pull them, collide other objects, and they will react, and more importantly recover, completely autonomously, again, with no scripting, or interpolation between recomputed physical motion. Play Aves to level 24 (if you can) and you will think the bird is just that, alive. In many ways, it is. video of BioReplicant-1 (the bird in Aves) can be found here: http://www.audioghost.com
This is seriously impressive. It sounds ground-breaking in terms of gaming, and more specifically, iPhone gaming. This has amazing possibilities, and i'm eagerly awaiting another game release from you guys.
Are there any serious limitations to your tech? I mean does the number of onscreen characters, or number of interactions, affect performance on an iPhone level? For example if you have a football game with a bunch of characters doing different things at once as opposed to one man running around. I'm not a programmer, so I'm just talking what comes off the top here.
At some point of course you will bottleneck with even the fractal-reduced calculations - but for the iphone, I think our subsequent games will squeeze astonishing power out of it. Definitely 3 or 4 creatures simultaneously interacting and even w/collision testing wont really dent the 3GS or iPod touch, and will still run fairly smooth on the 3G. The CPU on the iPhone is very impressive, and very underutilized in most games. I've tested multiple BioReplicants and it runs smooth, totally fluid on 3Gs and iPod Touch.
I'm going to post a video soon of BioReplicant-2 (walking biped humanoid) in a little demo I did. In it, a missile launcher shoots heat seekers at him and he will turn around and shoot them out of the air. However, if too many are fired, he cannot move his arm fast enough and he gets it, disrupting his motion, but he then recovers. Hell, I might just put the simple demo on the iPhone for free. I think the most amazing part of using them is that I dont even know what they will do after setting them loose. I give them simple rules, but their interactions and reactions are totally autonomous -- in a funny way, it makes development quicker and easier because you dont have to store thousands of keyed animations (such a stupid way of doing things... sorry). The more you interact with BioReplicant-1, you'll be surprised. Watch for the following in Aves: - When you pin her to the cliff by one wing-tip, and then the furthest most wing tip. Watch how she tries to prop herself up. - When you pin her tail to the cliff. Watch the change in the intensity of the wing flap. She's calculating this by herself. - Do a head pin to the cliff (this is a very hard shot) She will try to fly backwards, again from her own calculations to regain flight control (which she wont because her head has infinite friction). The myriad combinations of pin-to-cliff hits will generate very different reactions on the part of BioReplicant-1. None of it, NONE of it is pre-scripted. You're really witnessing a monolithic revolution in Artificial Intelligence and Muscular-Skeletal simulation.
Hello, while I really salute the effort on this project, I'm simply wondering how this can "far surpass any existing dynamic". For example, in Nvidia Ageia PhysX (available for iPhone too via Unity3D engine), you can create as many reactions as you want with any physic body, with simple onCollide functions. Those bodies can be boxes, spheres, capsules, or even meshes. They can generate realtime physics, like bounciness, gravity, friction, velocity, etc. You can use them on classic meshes, but also on skeleton driven skinned meshes. While every physics engine is pretty cpu intensive, I've seen PhysX demos running very smooth on 2nd gen iPod touch (or 3G), which can be partly explained by a clever wakeup system. In short, the action-reaction feature you're highlighting here can actually be created easily with PhysX. So would this "far surpassing any existing dynamic" just mean "surpassing any existing user created dynamic" ? Please do not consider this as a provocation, it is just that I'm so interested in your concept that I want to know what are the big evolutions from existing strong, big team powered technologies. Cheers
Core, No, this is a very legitimate question. When I say "dynamic-reaction" I specifically mean a dynamic reaction to a Muscular-Skeletal system which has some underlying mathematical model to dictate balance, motion, flight, etc., Creating objects, rigid or deformable, and using a physics engine is complex enough but entirely doable. Here we are talking about Biological simulations. Birds flying, which are then perturbed by forces and must 'recover' to their flight state. Its a far, far, more complex problem, and has never, ever been done before.
Very cool stuff... this reminds me of those robots that can walk, and manage to keep their balance even if they get kicked around. I would love to learn more about this... are there any white papers, or is it mostly 'secret proprietary' stuff? cheers -marc
This is fascinating and really impressive. I am going to pick up Aves just to play with the tech, but would be excellent if there were other demos available on the iphone too.
It sounds great on paper, but still Aves is nothing more than a relatively unimpressive tech demo. Bring more thought into the product than into the technoligy itself. I prefere playing stunning games with more stupid technical background than a work-in-progress thingy which isn't impressive at all. So I really hope, your future output is transporting your "revolutionary" in a better way. I don't want to read interesting stuff...I wanna experience it. Good luck!
