Comparing PC Game Physics 217
John Callaham writes "On Wednesday we posted up comments from Havok about rival AGEIA's use of their physics processor in the PC version of Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter. Today we have an expanded article with point-to-point comments from AGEIA that address Havok's statements." From the article: "How much interaction do you want in your PC games? It used to be that graphics were the number one factor in picking up a new game but now players are asking more and more about interactions in the environment. One company that has provided such interaction is Havok. They have developed a physics engine that has been used in a ton of games, including most famously in Valve's first person shooter Half-Life 2. Recently, Havok announced plans for a new physics engine, Havok FX, that would use Shader Model 3.0 graphics cards to further enhance game interactions and physics."
On physics (Score:3, Insightful)
Interaction is great and all, but please give humanoid NPCs more rigid joints! It looks silly seeing them flopping around with elastic joints, or doing backflips after being shot in the face.
That, and being able to move enormous metal crates simply by shooting them, breaks any immersion the game has created.
Re:On physics (Score:2, Funny)
Re:On physics (Score:2)
"more rigid joints!"
Telivision actors don't go limp enough when they pretend to get knocked unconcious. Which is why many people don't seem to realise someone who is really knocked out is all floppy.Re:On physics (Score:5, Interesting)
I disagree, to a certain extent.
When it comes to NPCs and enemies "reacting fo' realz" - I disagree. Sure, give them better AI (so long as "better" means "less predictable" and isn't a codeword for "can spawn other enemies to hate-rape you on sight, and requires so much processor power that there is only one enemy per stage"). But frankly, attempts have been made to make realistic physics, and without exception these games always feel muddy and unplayable. Give me Burnout Revenge over Flatout any day of the month of the week's year, kthx.
What works in the real world, with near instantaneous brain-body 3D real time control, and TOTAL SENSORY IMMERSION(TM) (note - I've patented that trademark, so now everyone has a damn good excuse to avoid the outside world) tends to take a bellyflop when you're interfacing via a mouse/keyboard/gamepad/John Romero's Magic Glowing Orb, looking at a monitor that, at best, does a good job at tricking your eyes into 2.5 dimensions.
It's been proven that people do not want "real physics" - they want "Hollywood physics". When they say "better physics", what they're saying is that they don't want paper-thin enemies who fly at 100 MPH from a shotgun blast. They want ragdoll dudes who will spin 1080 when you blast off an arm, then look at the stump, still gushing blood, and fall face-first, even though real people would scream in pain and probably not do much after the blast.
HOWEVER - when it comes to scenery physics, HELL YES. Nothing irritates me more than the Magic Unbreakable Door, found in virtually every 3D shooter. I've got rockets the size of a HUMAN BEING here. You mean to tell me a wooden door will take five of them? Other objects of note:
* - Telephone poles OF DOOM (found in most racing games, Grand Theft Auto)
* - Wooden Support Planks WITH ARMOR-ALL (found in a lot of shooters - okay, one or two shots isn't going to do much, but if I take a tommygun to a 2 by 4, the tommygun wins)
* - Ground of SOLID STEEL (almost every FPS - see my next point for more)
Dirt mound OF GOD (if I hit a dirt mound with an RPG, it should fly apart. I think that games should be REQUIRED to accurately simulate the effects of RPGs on scenery - and maybe this will keep the next five or six clone-developers from adding the damn thing. When I was in my formulative years I never imagined that I'd be saying this, but I am sick and tired of Rocket Propelled Grenades, Rocket Launchers, Giant Phallic Things Which Explode On Impact, and/or "Bazookas". They are done in every action game. They are always virtually the same. Once I play a game where a hit with a rocket will cause buildings to explode, key cards to become redundant, and mazes to be a thing of the past, I will buy back into the "Bigger and more explosive is BETTER" philosophy. And I'm not talking about Zombies Ate My Neighbors or Duke Nukem style "oh look, it's a suspicious crack in a wall, PERHAPS A ROCKET WOULD LOOK NICE HERE" linearity. I'm thinking more along the lines of the (criminally underrated) Future Tactics, except more brutal).
Anyway. Instead of worrying about the Next Big Thing, and bitching about how all games are the SAME, and becoming suckers for arm-deadening, fruitily-named attempts at brute-force "innovation" (like, uh... gee, nothing's coming to mind, so I guess this is strictly hypothetical
Re:On physics (Score:2)
Your sports game scenario won't work well either. You put your backup player in the game and have him violently take out the other team's staring QB. The other team is screwed for the season, but you're simply out your worst player. It's something that's cool once but takes away from the game past that.
For your car crash
Re:On physics (Score:4, Insightful)
If you give the player rockets, then a simple way to encourage them to use them properly is to ensure that they don't have enough to waste taking out scenery. If you make sure resources are limited enough to force the player to use them only where necessary, then you can still have your godawful keycard puzzles.
Re:On physics (Score:2)
Re:On physics (Score:2)
Re:On physics (Score:2, Interesting)
Or you can go the Crusader: No Remorse route. A rocket will take out any door that isn't made of Sci Fi Future Alloys (from the Future). A significant portion of keycard-doors are regular old doors. Should you choose to blast them, however, alarms are going to go apeshit, and you may not find an off-switch for quite some time.
The game worked well.
Re:On physics (Score:3, Insightful)
And yet again, allow me to restate my central point: the genres aren't stale. The minds behind them are. R
Re:On physics (Score:2)
The problem with that game was that although it quickly got a dedicated follow
Re:On physics (Score:2)
The thing that really held Flashpoint back was the lack of support for joining a game in progress.
Note: The developers are working on a sequal with MUCH better graphics and engine, but as they are no longer under codemasters they lost the Flashpoint name (beware of a Flashpoint 2 - it's an imposter). Check out:
http://www.bistudio.com/games/ofaa.html [bistudio.com]
Re:On physics (Score:2)
Err... ever hit a telephone pole in real life [google.com]? The only reason GTA is playable is because the majority of street-lining utility poles don't completely destroy your car! (Why they were inconsistent about how much stopping power various poles have, I'm not sure...)
Re:On physics (Score:2)
Which also brings me to the second point that is creating physics thats complex enough to simulate real life does not necessarily mean you are going to use it to simulate real life.
Kind of like CG, my mum asked 'Whats the point of getting all these computer effects to look like real life when we already have a real world.' but it wa
Re:On physics (Score:3, Insightful)
Hear hear!
I was watching a coworker play Unreal Tournament, and I had to work to keep myself from laughing every time a player got killed. It looked like someone tossed a dummy.
Also, don't forget that every person in a modern shoot-em-up is nothing but a bag of blood. They must be - it seems like 25 gallons get spilled
Re:On physics (Score:2)
For the vast majority of people, things like tactics, team play, 'fun physics' and humour are more important in games than realistic deceptions of human suffering.
I find the notion that some people would like to play an accurate murder simulator (with detailed and
Re:On physics (Score:2)
Re:On physics (Score:3, Interesting)
Better yet, no crates at all. Every bloody first person shooter has crates, more often than not because it's about the only thing you can move. They also happen to be cuboids which is rather convenient for simplifying any gravity calculations. Some games like HL2 & Far Cry try to be a bit more imaginative and you'll also see barrels and some more complex objects, but it has a way to
Re:On physics (Score:2)
Re:On physics (Score:3, Informative)
Only in Hollywood.
Re:On physics (Score:3, Insightful)
game physics advances (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:game physics advances (Score:2)
Gameplay is more important than Graphics and Physics combined.
Re:game physics advances (Score:2)
Re:game physics advances (Score:2)
When I LAN, we usually play CS over CS:S, too.
Re:game physics advances (Score:2)
Missing the point? (Score:5, Interesting)
I find myself buying fewer and fewer games as time goes by, and I believe it's thinking like that that really shows why.
It's not graphics that are the number one factor, it's gameplay. There's no debate here. I want pretty visuals from movies, and I want great gameplay in my game. Don't get Blink 476 or whatever's popular for audio, either. Put your money towards making a non-buggy QUALITY gameplay experiance!
Fuckdamnit, that pisses me off.
The only people who say "How are the graphics" are going to be buying "EA *SPORT GAME* 20XX" every 9 months, anyway. So, they don't know what they're talking about.
Lets get another Fallout or a Starcraft. The graphics can be a generation or two behind as long as it's fun to play!
Just look at the Revolution and what it has to offer. Graphics aren't very improved, but the chance for gameplay being amazing is there, and that's what's important.
/rant
Re:Missing the point? (Score:3, Interesting)
1. The writers of the story didn't pretend they were some lofty gods obsessed with staying true to the theme of the world environment, they joked around with quests and put in blatant references to monty python, mad max, etc. These made you want to pay attention to what the npcs were saying. Did that group o
Re:Missing the point? (Score:2)
There is a debate. Graphics are the number one factor in picking up a new game. By the time the player gets to the gameplay, the it is already off the shelf and paid for.
The only people who say "How are the graphics" are going to be buying "EA *SPORT GAME* 20XX" every 9 months, anyway. So, they don't know what they're talking about
However those types of people are the majority of consumers. Doesn't matter if they
You Missing the point? (Score:2)
Thats the typical reason for such rants combined with the nostalgia reality distortion field.
True, fallout _was_ a once in an eternity game, but that doesnt mean the quality is correlated with the lack of graphics (which wasnt that bad, btw, back when i was released)
In defense of graphics (Score:3, Insightful)
Look at Oblivion. (Score:3, Insightful)
What could make Oblivion better, or at least equal to Morrowind?
These:
Better grass distance?
More details in the LOD (distant textures) area?
More objects covered by the physics engine? (furniture, rocks, plants)
Items possible to shatter, smash, break, dent?
Containers displaying their content in 3D and not in 2D menu?
Better voice acting?
Books that burn?
Or maybe these:
Less linear quests not forcing the next step on you?
Shorter load times of locations?
Re:Look at Oblivion. (Score:2)
The people that implement list 1 are generally not the people that implement list 2.
Re:Look at Oblivion. (Score:2)
Re:Look at Oblivion. (Score:2)
Less linear quests not forcing the next step on you?
Shorter load times of locations?
Not removing levitation, slowfall and a dozen other classic spells?
More factions to join, interesting quests?
Dialogues and text that always makes sense, never seeing hearing the same thing less than 5 seconds apart?
New, interesting books you haven't read in Morrowind already?
Perhaps you and I played a different game.
In Morrowind, I was running around never finding out where the quests went until I got sick of
Re:Look at Oblivion. (Score:2)
Re:Look at Oblivion. (Score:2)
Re:Missing the point? (Score:2)
Naaa...you're just getting older. Just like the rest of us. Life intrudes...
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Missing the point? (Score:2, Insightful)
Yes, and these games SOLD because there are still MANY people out there who DO think graphics make the game.
Not that I do, but you certianly can't say that graphics isn't the most important factor to some (if not most) people. Don't be daft.
Re:Missing the point? (Score:2)
That was the same back with doom 1 and ultima unterworld "Wow, look at that great graphics!".
Same for strike commander and comanche.
Or wolfenstein / Indy4 (those 2Ds)
Just because it looks like crap NOW doesnt mean those games werent "hot! look at those awesome graphics! Must buy!!!" back in their days
Re: (Score:2)
How about we just go back to pong. (Score:4, Funny)
Another note: STOP the POV summaries. (Score:5, Insightful)
growing older (Score:3, Insightful)
mmm... have you controlled for 'growing older'?
quite a significant variable
btw, those games you think were so great? they aren't.
I still have fond, fond memories of the original UNREAL TOURNAMENT and have been sorely disappointed by subsequent releases... and yet when I go back to play UT1 I can't stand it... it pales in comparison to the more recent versions, even though the underlying gameplay is better.
Re:growing older (Score:2)
I dunno, I've been enjoying the fuck outta Pin*Bot on the NES lately. Pirates! also is a really damn fun NES game. I never played it till just recently. MegaMan is still fun. Meanwhile, all the hott PC games I've bought in the last few years collect dust. I suppose it's just a matter of taste.
Re:growing older (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:growing older (Score:2)
I've no doubt it's in the top 5 games of that year... for example, I think Dune 2 was undoubtably the best game of its year. But I've also realized that when it comes to "all time", you tend to make everything relative. I think there's at least 25 newer games and clones thereof now that are all better than the
Re:growing older (Score:2)
Fallout was the most non-linear graphical RPG when it came out, by far. Starcraft beat TA in the one way that has kept it alive... custom scenarios. TA's custom unit system doesn't compare to SC's map scripting system (despite it being a pain in the ass to
Re:growing older (Score:2)
I'm not that old.
Re:growing older (Score:2)
I remember being absolutely blown away by Doom. Wow, you could have 3D graphics, and travel vertically in the level as well? I mean, how cool was that? We played that game for months. AFAIK it's where the term "heroinware" originated. Doom II? Well, same game, different levels... Oooh, Duke 3D had better graphics than Doom, (and jet packs!) but it was still kind of the same game, with a couple of O.J. Simpson jokes thrown in.
Far Cry, F.E.A.
Re:growing older (Score:2)
Re:growing older (Score:2)
Both System Shock [wikipedia.org] and Descent [wikipedia.org] were released two years before Quake. Both featured a 3D enviroment (and not "2.5D" ala Doom). Descent even had 3D enemies like in Quake.
Re:growing older (Score:2)
Descent wins
Re:growing older (Score:2)
Re:growing older (Score:2)
Wow, how many people can misinterpret a simple comment? Where the hell did I say Doom was the first 3D game? I said "You never forget your first." MY first 3D gaming experience was Doom. I'm really glad you liked Ultima. But I never played it -- the first 3D game I played was Doom. Thus, it stuck in my head as "the best." It's a reference point.
Try this thought
Re:growing older (Score:2)
2k4 brought back the less harcore agressive feel of UT with the change in models, it made the sniper's rifle powerful in close combat, like in UT, it brought back the modes that were sorely missing from 2k3 like assault and also nerfed the adreniline combos somewhat and made them less influential in the gameplay.
I'll agree that 2k3 was inferior gameplay wise to UT, but 2k4 had everything th
Re:growing older (Score:3, Insightful)
Not too shabby for a game that's what, 7, 9 years old?
Gimme interaction. (Score:4, Interesting)
As a 13 year old, I figure I represented the "market" a lot more accurately than I do in my wiser (and more bitter / broke) years. It was Duke3D all the way for me, and I didn't think twice about it. Sure, Quake had better multiplayer (according to PC Gamer at least), but I was still netless at home. The novelty of shooting a wall and leaving actual bullet holes was thrilling. Getting to "play" pool, leaving footprints in the bloodstains left behind... all of this added up to a game that was fun way beyond the point where it should be. I don't mean to knock Duke3D, of course, but after the first episode the level design took a nosedive. Compare anything from the second episode to, oh, how about Healing Vats from DOOM. For me, it's a no brainer, at least when it comes to the simple question of "which of these levels is better, from a strictly looking-at-it-in-the-automap perspective". However, Duke3D's interactions had me playing, playing, playing, searching for the next deadpan line, or little "extra".
Also, this was the time when I became disillusioned with PC Gamer. I recall Duke3D edging Quake out in the ratings by about a percentage point or two. Heck, an issue or two later, Duke3D beat Quake in the "Best games of all time" list. Then, a year later, once the PC Gamer staff saw which game was completely dominating the online world, they scrambled to look "all knowing" by handing Quake the Best Game of the Year award. It'd be one thing if they alluded to some lasting value, but really it was your typical "press release" copy-paste. Fucking PC Gamer. I wipe my ass with that magazine now. Anyway...
One other thing. Is it just me, or does Capcom really have a finger on the pulse of the "heart" of physics? Every single game of theirs - well, since about the third Mega Man at least - has this perfect "feel" to it, that even makes games from genres I normally don't give a crap about (3D platformers) addictive and fun. I'm thinking of Maximo: Army of Zin here.
Anyway, I know that sounds like a lame attempt to make sure I avoid the -1, Offtopic mod, but it's the first thing that popped into my mind when seeing this. Midway's another company - for the most part, excluding the budget line, their games handle very, very nicely. Compare Blitz to Madden - and yes, I am quite aware that one of them is arcade football and the other attempts to be a simulation. Crank the Madden settings until the players are fast and whatever, bottom line is that Blitz feels nicer. Hitz beats the EA and SegaSports hockey titles hands down, largely for the same reason (even though the last version of Hitz had the worst "player editor" I've ever seen - major flaw in my book).
For a counterpoint, try comparing Bible Adventures or any of the Color Dreams games to, oh, geez, any of the major platformers. Compare a shooter from the Action 52 cartridge to Gun*Nac. Move up to SNES, compare The Combantants with Final Fight, or Kyle Petty's No Fear Racing with Mario Kart, or the second Ken Griffey game to the first. Which games "suck" by popular consensus? (PROTIP: The first games mentioned). What's a major uniting difference? The physics, the handling, the speed of play and the "oomph" behind a home-run / tight turn / nick-of-time-bullet-dodge / enemy stomp. In the first games, these are always an afterthought. I imagine the coders just kinda throwing darts at a wall, figuring "okay, player jumps, lands - now make sure all the platforms can be reached from the player's height (last step strictly optional - Active Enterprises, I'm looking at you)". In the case of the second games listed, I could easily see whole months being spent on nothing more than making incremental number-changes, in the 0.000000004 range of things. And that's why (IMO) the second games have always not only sold better, but been a better experience than the other, som
Re:Gimme interaction. (Score:2)
Just out of curiousity, which one did you like better and why?
Re:Gimme interaction. (Score:2)
A few years later, we were still playing the Team Fortress mod for Quake, and a few others. Duke3D had faded into memory.
Now, I still have a copy of Quake installed. The same game I ran back in DOS runs happily on my Mac (on an OS that didn't even exist when the game was released) and the server r
Re:Gimme interaction. (Score:2, Interesting)
Agreed. It'd be one thing if it had been years since the reviews. But all of this happened within the span of about a year or so, probably less. And to declare one game a better game Of All Time - then give the other, longer-lived game Game of the Year - reeks of bullshit to me.
Duke3D was, IMO, killed by the delay of the 1.5 update. In 1.4, there wer
Re:Gimme interaction. (Score:2)
Re:Gimme interaction. (Score:2)
For a while I was a memeber of a Halflife clan, one which is still very active and supports multiple servers. Not one member was under 20, most were middle aged professionals with families. Don't kid yourself about 'target audience'.
Hello, Dr. Semantics! (Score:2, Informative)
Maybe it's not calculating momentum on the fly using real-time Einsteinian rendering, but I, the player of the game, could care less. "Simple gravity simulations", fo
Remember Bungie's "Myth"? (Score:3, Interesting)
One early player posted on a discussion forum that he wanted to incinerate a dwarf with the biggest explosion he could make just by surrounding it with grenades, and the resulting explosion dropped the dwarf's weapon back down out of the stratosphere several long seconds later. He did the math and calculated that the weapon was blasted straight up a couple of miles before coming back down.
Granted, that's not very realistic, but he was very impressed that the physics engine was willing and able to track a piece of debris for that long.
Physics engines are an essential component of any 3D game, and the more consistent they are with the real world the more believable the game is. You can throw everything else out the development window, I think, as long as objects bounce correctly under 9.8 meters per second per second of gravitational acceleration.
Re:Remember Bungie's "Myth"? (Score:2)
I remember the vids of of a ghoul (the slumping clever weilding guys) getting blown to smitherens, and then 20 seconds later after their clever richocetted around the map long enough, killing a zombie like character who was guarding the ball in a game, thereby allowing a single unit from the opposing side to claim it, winning the game.
Amazing physics, apparently a lot of their physics work went into Halo also, which is where the warthog videos came from
Re:Remember Bungie's "Myth"? (Score:2)
Been there, done that. At the 1997 Softimage user conference, we showed our physics engine, Falling Bodies [animats.com]. This wa
Re:Remember Bungie's "Myth"? (Score:3, Funny)
Dwarves were sort of the artillery unit for the 'good guys'. They tossed Molotov cockails, which could be annoyingly imprecise and prone to misfiring... b
AnandTech actually reviewed a card (Score:4, Informative)
Not much more needs to be said -- they tested and analysed it.
Multi-Proc (Score:2)
Re:Multi-Proc (Score:3)
Re:Multi-Proc (Score:2)
The things is now that I can, I find myself wildly multitasking. I'll be playing a game, talking on skype with others in the game, have defender and anti virus doing it's thing, maybe watching a movie on my second monitor.
There is a great deal of work being done to get multi-core systems to behave like different things( Cell-proc), but when it comes down to it I'd rather have 4 specialized cpu
Re:Multi-Proc (Score:2)
Wake me up when... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Wake me up when... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Wake me up when... (Score:5, Funny)
So, some counter-questions, in a manner that you'll relate to:
Instead of arguing, why don't you... read a book?
Instead of insulting people who care about things, why don't you... clean your room?
Instead of replying to this post, why don't you... eat your veggies?
Instead of sharing your views with people, why don't you... brush your teeth?
Instead of realizing that your fucking non-sequiter of an argument is -1 Flamebait, why don't you... say your prayers?
--
My MOMMY thinks I'm +1 Insightful
Re:Wake me up when... (Score:2, Insightful)
You want it all be simulated with physics so that you can interact with everything in a plausible way?
Well, I can tell you that any one of these things currently is a struggle to get to work at all,
even assuming you are willing to wait hours per frame. You want a pile of thousands of bricks
falling into a pile, with correct collision detection? This is an area of active research.
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~djames/ [cmu.edu]
Re:Wake me up when... (Score:4, Interesting)
Not because its not feasible (it is, although not in the near future), but it just doesn't pay off. Pay attention to the bump mapping effects. Normal mapping was introduced - BIG impact (lighting really looks quite different, and the bumpmaps add a lot to the scene). But parallax mapping and the like? Their advantages are not as obvious, sometimes you actually have to look for it (watch the Unreal3 video, they really had to emphasize the use of virtual displacement mapping, which is just another parallax/relief mapping derivative). The point is, the cost/benefit ratio becomes unacceptable after a certain limit. Choose the techniques that have a big impact, like: the aforementioned bump mapping, cheap non-physics-based refraction (like HL2 uses), some good skies, GOOD character animation. You would be surprised just how far you can get with this. In fact, sometimes you do want cheaper visual quality, for example when you want to draw lots of entities, because better visual quality means more expensive pixel shaders, which in turn hit the fillrate limit quickly. So, if you want a space shooter with 5000 ships, you should stick to simple bumpmapping (which really makes a difference in space sims, since the hard light in space outlines surface structures quite well) and leave out the fancy parallax mapping stuff out. These kinds of stuff will become easier once batching & instancing becomes easier.
For physics, the same applies. Previously, the game world wasn't all that interactive, now I can throw around stuff. Great! Has a huge impact, changes a lot. But now, as physics advance, the advances become less relevant. At some point, it just doesn't matter if I can collide 15000 boxes in realtime.
Re:Wake me up when... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Wake me up when... (Score:2)
Actually, when I first played F.E.A.R., that was the very first thing that struck me: Wow, craters in the walls!
Yeah it was slightly buggy, but imho it added a lot to the experience.
Re:Wake me up when... (Score:3, Insightful)
A bucket of sand is a bucket of sand, so if you get a bucket from the beach, it does not matter exactly which grains of sand wind up in the bucket, or on the NPC. Thus, you 'scoop', and wind up with x cubic centimeters of sand in your bucket. You dum
Re: Wake me up when... (Score:2)
Re:Wake me up when... (Score:2)
I heard those features are planned to be incorporated into Duke Nukem Forever. Does that answer your question ?
Re:Wake me up when... (Score:2)
Ultimate Physics Engine (Score:5, Funny)
How much? (Score:3, Interesting)
Or not.
Your call.
PhysX - mediocre technology, good business plan (Score:5, Interesting)
The real problem with game physics engines is that nobody is making much money. One by one, the physics engine companies have gone out of business or merged. Havok is the last one standing, and they're smaller than they were at peak. Game middleware just isn't very profitable. Havok charged about $60,000 per game title a few years ago, and you can multiply that by the number of games they're in and figure out their revenue. The numbers just aren't that big. Their user base expects lots of support and handholding, too, so the margins aren't all that great. It's not just Havok. Middleware vendors generally are at a poor point in the food chain.
But look at Ageia. They sell to end users. That has growth potential. This is Ageia's real breakthrough. We'll have to see where this goes.
Re:PhysX - mediocre technology, good business plan (Score:3, Informative)
Re:PhysX - mediocre technology, good business plan (Score:2)
My opinion is that it's not going to make much difference. The Register reviewed a physics accelerator card and basically thought it was meh - no game utilised it in a compelling way and the fan was noisy. I stick to my belief these things will not take off until they get stuck into graphics cards. It's not like Voodoo cards where the difference between accelerated and
Half Life 2? (Score:2, Funny)
All I've played so far is some demo for the Havok engine.
AGEIA PhysX and Havok are apples and oranges (Score:2)
PhysX is on a card, which means there's not really a fast way to send accelera
Re:Bullshit (Score:2)
Its actually the other way about (or will be)...
Well, I'm sure many things will be very different in the future than they are now, but at the moment, I'm pretty sure I'm right about this. The other scenario I can think of is that PhysX is currently not used for game-affecting systems is because developers can't rely on the existence of the accelerator on client systems. That, of course, is its own marketplace chicken-egg problem.
The whole point of the PPU is that objects
Re:The Physics of Brick Out (Score:3, Insightful)
If it weren't for these deliberate anomalies, Breakout, et al, would be thrown into "loops". I remember a port of Breakout for the TI-83 graphics calculator that suffered from this - you would eventually have the ball at such an angle that no matter how you hit it, it'd always travel along the same pattern.
Face it - even today, this applies. Would it really be fun if your character could only jump 6-
Re:The Physics of Brick Out (Score:2)
Problem though is that you're lumping all game players into one category. I personally prefer it to be as realistic as it can get. An indication of this is that I vastly prefer Ghost Recon to something like Battlefield 2. The ultimate game to me is the one that can come as close as possible to making me think I'm there. One where I truly may have to take an hour just to get into place for that perfect shot. One where planning has to be present instead of just fast reaction. If I move over a twig, I wa
Re:Crowded House (Score:2)
What I'd like to see is a computer which has a main general-purpose CPU, and a bunch of separate special-purpose engines to handle physics, graphics, sound etc. I'd put them all on a single chip with memory and interface controllers and enough cache so they could all work effectively.
If I had to give it a name, I think I'd call it the "Cell" processor.
Re:Crowded House lol yea, wait for mp processors (Score:2)
Re:Dear god, wrong direction! (Score:2)
Re:Dear god, wrong direction! (Score:2)
Re:Beyond gfx enhancements (Score:2)