So Ragdoll is something I want to do in PoE 2 but we have a few issues we have to solve.
The major one is that we have a lot of skills in PoE that interact with corpses. This means that when you kill something, we need to know on both the client and the server where the corpse is.
For example, if you want to cast Corpse Explosion then it wouldn't be good if the explosion happened at a different place than the corpse was laying on your client.
So that would mean if we wanted to do it in a naive way, then you would need to do ragdoll physics on the server, and have it exactly sync with the client. That isn't really something we want to do because it's pretty hard to get right, and it would drastically reduce the amount of players we could get on each physical server.
Another issue is that there is a lot of "personality" that comes from death animations. Instant ragdoll for a monster is actually kind of lame from an animation perspective. Other recently announced action RPGs suffer a lot from this problem if you look closely. When you kill something it doesn't just instantly become limp. There is some motor control as part of the death.
So if we want to do ragdoll we would probably want to have it take over gradually at the point in the animation where the main "death" has already occurred.
Or, if we supported dismemberment, then we can have full ragdoll take over on dismembered arms / legs or whatever immediately, if you did enough damage or something. But we still need the "core" of the monster, which is the part you consume with skills to be in a pretty well known position.
However, something we have have discussed internally is having a really really simple physics calculation (basically ballistic trajectory) that we calcluate on the server. THen we can constrain a real physics engine to that location. So the core of the body kind of flys to the calculated position, with all it's arms and legs flailing, and when it hits the location, we turn up the friction on the core of the body a ton to make it stay there.
That will mean we will know on the client and the server where the body basically is so that we can still use corpse skills on it well. Hopefully we can get something that both looks, animates, and feels good while still maintaining our gameplay constraints for PoE 2!
