Gamasutra spoke with EA executive producer Scott Blackwood about Black Box's surprise hit Skate and their upcoming sequel, Skate 2.
Quote:
What physics solution did you use for the game?
SB: It's actually a RenderWare-based physics solution. We did look at a lot of different physics packages... and now I'm going back over two years. Actually, at that time, RenderWare had a really cool physics package that one guy developed, and they were called Drives. Essentially what Drives were, was a hinge. It's a neat way to make an intensive thing like a saloon door.
Our guys took these Drives and turned them into all the joints in your body. So now with Drives, we can create a full, physically accurate replica of the human body and all the joints, and you can even... say, take your right knee, and we can weaken it by 50 percent, and your guy would walk differently, based on that. So we use Drives as the foundation for everything that we do in physics, even your skateboard. Your trucks are Drives, and your wheels and hinges. Everything's Drives.
In fact, the way you're popping your board off the ground, it's not animation-driven. It's actually real forces on that board popping off the ground. We'd never have been able to get the same feel without our team [taking the] foundation of Drives and [building] a lot on top of it. We did mocap, and we have all that animation in the game, but animation is a target.
