The latest Question of the Week has been posted on the official Earthrise forums. This week's question deals with jumping and hopping and the physics involved in those pursuits.

There's been a fair bit of discussion about jumping and physics. Can you tell us a little about the type of physics we can expect to see? Will there be ragdoll style effects? What about jumping? Will we be able to jump in combat?

Physics

While designing Earthrise engine we tried to build the best realistic experience and in the same time balance client requirements and server load. The physics engine will run simultaneously on the client and on the server. The server will ensure that the physics results from the client are feasible and prevent cheating. We are using a 3rd party physics core, which can take advantage of hardware and GPU acceleration and also have some internally-coded subsystems. Player movement and control is governed by the physics engine - forces such as gravity or wind (and other) will affect players, NPCs, and other game objects. Player mounts (vehicles) have mass and their movement and collisions are generated by the physics engine. Visual effects, such as particle systems, explosion blast waves, and projectiles will use the physics engine too, on the client side. The audio subsystem will use physics world and object materials to generate proper sound effects.

A ragdoll system will be used for players, NPCs, and monsters. It will augment animations to ensure good foot to surface contact, maintain player look and pose, provide realistic hit, knockback, and fall movements. The level of the effects of the physics system that the players will see will depend on the player hardware, allowing an essential set to run on hardware with the minimum Earthrise requirements. Many other effects such as object destructibility and buoyancy are planned with subsequent patches.

Jumping

Do birds fly? Does grass grow? So do players jump in Earthrise. We're still working on many aspects of movement and dynamics, by considering the combat system in every aspect, as well as realism. Presently, jumping will require a small expense of stamina, so "bunny hopping*" will be limited in activity. There are numerous abilities planned that will modify jumping in order to suit it for different situations.

Jumping will also solve environmental problems the players might face, and it will be on par with most other games in the genre.

Sounds like they've got things well in hand. Jumping is GOOD!