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It's kind of embarrassing to admit it in this age of zillion-processor, multi-gigabyte, atomic-powered game consoles, but the coolest new thing in game animation today comes in a mere 96k. Sumotori Dreams (see Figure 1) is a surreal little byproduct of the European demo scene. Hungarian gamemaker Peter Sotesz created this sumo wrestling game in which two robots face off in a simple ring. What makes Sumotori Dreams so compelling and so hilarious is that all the motion is generated by a physics simulation, not by conventional keyed animation or motion capture.
This tiny game is impressive due to the subtle ways in which the characters interact with each other and their environment. When a wrestler falls out of the ring and smashes through one of the surrounding walls, the chaos feels altogether right. It's solid in a way that few games can manage.
The hilarity comes from the fact that the characters' efforts to balance and propel themselves are, let's just say, a praiseworthy early attempt at fully procedural animation. The wrestlers are rarely able to respond precisely enough to stay on their feet for long once the match begins-they are always just a tad too slow to compensate for uneven footing or an awkward pose. The result looks like the tail end of a GDC after-party-un-damped physics reactions occasionally send a wrestler floating into the air as majestically as a triple-A shooter budget.
Sumotori Dreams is a great way to waste some time (amazingly, the game supports a multiplayer mode and large screens, despite having a smaller memory footprint than the YouTube videos of it). More than that, though, it offers an opportunity to ponder exotic animation technologies and what they might mean for the future of games animation.
A DECADE (OR TWO) BEHIND
Out of all the game arts, the most technically oriented is, surprisingly, also the most conservative. Pretty much all the core game animation technologies date back to the mid 1990s. Any artist is aware, often painfully so, that 3ds Max and Maya are both products of the last millennium. But skeletal animation itself is equally creaky-it has been around in one form or another since Infogrames' Alone in the Dark (1992).
There have been a lot of technical advances...