A New Zero Video Update 4/20/12

This is the reason why I've been working on human physics so much: ninja rolls.  Back in the mid-nineties I was trying to make an FPS with some friends, around the Quake 1 era.  We actually had some cool stuff, a 3D software rasterizer with 16-bit color, a voxel destructible environment, and some physics.  The one thing that I was never satisfied with was the player movement, I wanted the player to be able to do ninja rolls but could never figure out a good way of physically modeling that.  Looking back I probably should've just settled for the cylinder player model that every FPS uses, but I've always had an excess of ambition.

Now that I've had years of experience I'm finally close to realizing the goal of the ninja roll, and it was worth the wait.  In the video you can see how it's done, you lean back and then tilt forward to create rotation and jump a little.  The main thing left for the player movement is the feet/leg simulation, right now the waist is just a standard FPS non-physics movement, the rest of the body is simulated.

The boxman isn't final either, but I think it looks better than the sphereman.  It also kind of looks like a 3D version of Pitfall Harry which is cool.  I have some ideas for the player model, it will probably be polygonal but not boxes.