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Gabe Newell Talks Half-Life 2
Thanks to Voodoo Extreme for pointing to GamingNext's new interview with Gabe Newell of Valve Software - he's the managing director and co-founder of the company currently working on Half-Life 2. Topics include the scalability of the Source graphics engine: "A lot of the tricky work in Source is getting it to work across a wide variety of scenes (indoor, urban, outdoor) and across a wide variety of hardware. Not only do you have to run acceptably fast on a TNT or an Intel 810 based PC, but you have to fully exploit the capabilities of the current and next generation high-end cards." On a related note, the 500+MB Half-Life 2 gameplay/engine demo (BitTorrent link) from E3 is a must-download if you haven't seen it yet.
You might be right. We'll see that later.
But throughout the day I've found myself thinking how to optimize those physics calculations. Or rather how to cut down them.
It's quite certain they aren't calculating physics for all moving objects in the world (or the current level). Probably calculations are cut down also for objects that aren't visible. So suppose I shoot the wooden platform with barrels on top seen in the demonstration and the barrels begin to move. Then I immediately run far away from this place. And after a while I go back to check how those barrels fell down. I wonder if the barrels have really been simulated properly or are they placed really weird.
Oh crap, HL2 is supposed to be "just another" FPS, why do I even bother thinking these physics... Well, what can I say. I was _really_ impressed with the demo. Gotta watch it over once again.