A new patent filed by Activision aims to improve the collision detection system by synchronizing it with the displayed frame rate of its games.
The virtual worlds found in video games are becoming more and more visually realistic. Many AAA first-person games have reached the point where the screenshots of the in-game environments are almost indistinguishable from the actual locations. However, once motion is introduced into the environment, it’s much easier to tell if that environment is real or not because of the subtle limitations of the game’s physics engine, which can be seen acting on moving objects.
Making the game’s physics engine realistic isn’t just about how the objects themselves behave, but also how they interact with other objects and the player. This system is called collision detection, and it can be quite taxing on a PC or console, especially if it affects many individual objects at once.
When players think of collision detection, it usually relates to the accuracy of weapons and attacks, and this can often be frustrating in games like Call of Duty. But collision detection is present in all games that contain individual assets that can be affected by the player. Activision has now filed a new patent that it hopes will make collision detection more realistic in games, while reducing the risk of lag or framerate drops when a large collision occurs at once.
Collision detection in video games works in two phases, the first of which Activision’s patent describes as “coarse” detection, which sets basic boundaries for all the different assets in the game and ensures that they cannot move through each other. The second phase is known as “fine” collision detection, and in this phase the points of contact with the player character are determined and the realistic movement of the object is calculated. Activision’s patent essentially hopes to combine the two phases and hide processing time by making the system run at exactly the same speed as the game’s displayed framerate.
If this patent is successfully implemented, the player’s interaction with in-game objects can become much smoother and more immersive without having to rework the game’s physics engine. This latest Activision patent periodically triggers the collision detection system even when the player is not interacting with an object to predict likely collisions and make them even smoother within the game’s frame rate.
Since this collision detection patent is directly related to the displayed frame rate of the game, it is possible that the drop in frame rate may become self-inflicted if the load on the system drops immediately when the frames appear. However, this could also mean that players with higher framerates could get an unfair advantage in collision processing in online games. Players of Activision’s online games like Call of Duty: Warzone are already quick to point out any unfair advantages they find in the game.
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