Working tirelessly to improve your gaming experience

It's a fact that as game graphics and environments become more and more realistic, more and more art resources are necessary to create them. No wonder, then, that even the largest of game developers are beginning to outsource individual art tasks to dedicated specialty businesses, similar to "special effects" houses used in Hollywood.Sadly the work of many of these small studios goes unnoticed. It wasn't until a brief email exchange with one Doctor Steven Moore that I got a grasp of the real art and science that goes into the creation of, say, a fighting game these days. Dr. Moore heads up the technology group at a company calledin Hermosa Beach, California. While not a game developer, the company has enhanced the character animations for dozens of games over the past couple of years, with fighting games as their specialty. In the interests of science Dr. Moore allowed himself to be interviewed here.Hello Dr. Moore! My understanding from our brief discussion earlier is that your group is responsible for some of the animation in today's games. Could you give me more details?That's right. Let's say you're making a fighting game such as, and -- for argument's sake -- your game is, as we like to say, packed to the gills with the hooches. You would send your character models and their fight poses over to us here at T&A Imaging and we'd apply our advanced physics to various body parts, delivering you eye-popping animations.So, hang on, you do all the complete animations for the character models in a game?Well, our staff is capable of doing that, but typically we just animate certain fleshy parts of the anatomy. See, the current generation of computer 3D animation software has processes and shortcuts in place to render joints and bones and linear movement like that, but there's no simple way to capture the jauncy bounces of succulent fleshy bits, so ripe and firm you just want to take them in your mouth and suckle 'em like a creamy choc-o-pop.You lost me, Doctor. Are you saying you just animate ... breasts?We like to use the term "gazongas." But that would be an oversimplification. We also do up butts real good. It's the next great frontier in fighting game technology.But how difficult could that be? Why couldn't the work be done in-house?As I said, the tools aren't there. An artist could work for a month trying to animate a firm C-cup and not get it right. And, a double-D behaves tremendously different in a midriff tank-top than it would in a tight tube-top -- try it someday! Can you draw for me the difference between the bounce of a B-cup in a moist tee-shirt vs. an A-cup that's using a wonderbra? You need expert physicists to unravel these mysteries.Physics?Right. That's our specialty: Applied anatomical physics. For example, take a good look at this picture of a woman endowed with a tremendous set of martial arts abilities.I find it difficult not to.Good. Now, as she bends down to make her move, you can see several forces being applied to her plump, firm, ripened melons. And there's inertia to consider, plus the make and cut of the fabric and, of course, the cold weather. Newton's second law tells us how to calculate the acceleration of a body once we know the forces acting on it. The forces may vary as the body moves, but, provided we can write explicit expressions for how the forces vary with time, position, tautness, and velocity, we can determine the delicious acceleration of the body at every point during its motion, as well as whether or not it will "pop out," jeopardizing the game's rating. See here:Now all we need to do to locate the body at any given point in time is to simply substitute the appropriate data into the kinematic equations. Here at T&A Imaging we've put together formulae for everything from underwire bras to spandex. And I, personally, have put in hours and hours of field research. As you can see from the final results, hard physics -- oh so very hard -- pays off again with the convincing illusion of mammary motion like a delicious quivering zip-lock bag fulla chocolate puddin'.Impressive.I'm typing with one hand!Certainly this can't be the whole basis for your business model?No, as our name implies, T&A Imaging also services firm butts. You would think that tight buttocks shoved into denim wouldn't jiggle when dropping into a fighting stance but you'd be amazed what our scientists came up with. The radial component of the force provides the centripetal acceleration, and this makes the frictional force in the tangential equation velocity-dependent; we like to call this "getting down in the juice all oompah-loopah style." Take a good look at this picture:...and what can we conclude from this?What? Oh, nothing at all, I just wanted to look at it.In your expert opinion, what do you think is the future of this science that you've devised?Oh you haven't seen anything yet! Zoomers and money-makers are only the beginning. We've got a division right now working on panty-lines. It's not more than three years before you'll play fighting games where you can see panty lines that actually traverse the buttock during combat, giving the combatant a true-to-life wedgie. The technology is within groping distance!Have you ever touched a girl?...no.