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3D Realms Buys Physics For Duke Nukem Forever

Posted by Zonk on from the don't-hold-your-breathe dept.

sp00 writes "In a press release, Meqon announces 3DRealms has purchased the Meqon Game Dynamics SDK engine for the upcoming title Duke Nukem Forever. There are some neat demos of the engine here. Is DNF finally a reality?"

2 of 76 comments (clear)

  1. Heh by cjpez · · Score: 5, Insightful

    While not really knowing much about typical game development processes, I imagine that getting the SDK to your basic game engines would be some of the first steps you'd take before development. Wouldn't that imply that development on DNF, er, has yet to start? Or is being restarted again to use yet another new engine? Too funny.

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    1. Re:Heh by cgenman · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Yes, but you don't bolt on your physics engine late in development, because physics affects so much of the gameplay. It needs to be integrated with the rest of your engine. Game and level design needs to take it into account.

      If you're talking 3rd party rigid body and ragdoll physics solutions, you're not talking about how far the character can jump, or gets blasted by rockets, or most of the other things one would normally associate with physics. You're talking about kicking around chairs and tables. In Doom 3 there are roughly four places where you can get bonuses by kicking rigid objects near other objects. Other than that it just serves to increase immersion and make explosions more fantastic... not to mention get in the way of the player and be annoying. The same was true with Max Payne, the hallmark of the Havoc engine: beautiful physical movements with little gameplay relevance. Even Deus Ex 2's physical model was functionally gratuitous, as the game would have worked just as well if the crates didn't have a coefficient of friction

      Actual freeform physics with gameplay relevance is pretty rare. 1: They are unpredictable 2: They are computationally expensive 3: QA will find a million ways to break it until you have to completely neuter the process. I don't mean to disagree with you... stronger physics engines allow for a tremendous amount of freedom for the player, and as such should be integral to the design rather than bolted on afterwards. But quite frankly, right now they're not.

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