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Is this sort of stuff applied to biped humans in sports video games like football? I have long found it notable that those games have for years achieved near photorealism for _static_ imagery but never seem to get convincing _dynamics_. Pause the game and it looks amazing, but unpause and the players bounce off each other like billiard balls, defy conservation of momentum, momentarily occupy overlapping spatial volumes, and just generally make their motion-capture origins readily apparent.
I heard someone who worked on a big budget sports game discussing this once. In simulating movement, there's a tradeoff between realism and responsiveness to player input. If you try for perfect realism, the controls will feel laggy and frustrating, because 100kg bipeds don't start, stop and change direction as quickly as we wish they could. On the other hand, if you decide to tweak things to increase the responsiveness, physics goes out the window and our brains can immediately tell that the resulting movements aren't realistic.
Witcher 3 notably had quite laggy controls because they sort of simulated momentum of the main character. If you were running to the right and suddenly moved the stick left, you’d have to wait a bit. It looked very realistic but they eventually added a “responsive movement” toggle in response to some player complaints.
Oh interesting, that sounds very plausible to me. It's notable though that even the NPCs (characters not being controlled by the user) seem to suffer from the unrealism. Maybe it's important for visual consistency that the same rules be used for characters regardless of whether they are under user control.
I find the "cave flyer" game SFCave to be very engaging for its simplicity. (
https://www.google.com/search?q=sfcave&sxsrf=AOaemvJ8OME1iEW...
) In it, you control acceleration, not velocity. Slow responsiveness is basically a defining characteristic. I wonder if it would be possible to mimic that feel inside a football game (on a shorter timescale). Maybe it would be too much of a distraction from the game's main draw.
The controller input necessary for generating blue sparks in Mario Cart also requires some "planning ahead".