Comparing PC Game Physics

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."

Comments

Crowded House

[micsco]

Man I really hope these things are only gunna get smaller cause as we branch out into the various streams of cards for different purposes we're getting more and more crowded...

Re:Crowded House

[Fyre2012]

What i'd like to see is a dual core video card where 1 processor handles the only the physics, the other handles everything else.

Re:Crowded House

[ozmanjusri]

What i'd like to see is a dual core video card

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

[KDR_11k]

Oh, come on, you know that not even Sony lets the Cell do the graphics.

On physics

[remembertomorrow]

How much interaction do you want in your PC games?

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

[Ugly American]

That reminds me of the F.E.A.R. demo. At one point, I lobbed a couple of grenades into an office to take care of the clones that were bunched up inside of it. After the incoming fire stopped, I moved into the office to investigate. One of the clones had actually been thrown up against the wall and was lodged against an off-kilter bulletin board, hanging head-down with arms and legs flat against the wall. I had to take a break until I stopped laughing.

Re:On physics

[acidrain]

"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

[Anonymous Coward]

depends. sometimes someone is knocked unconscious and their body goes totally rigid, the opposite of what you mention. Anyone who's seen a kick returner knocked unconscious in the NFL knows what I speak of. an arm or a leg will be suspended, rigid, in midair as the player rests unconscious, like a toppled action figure.

It depends.

Re:On physics

[insane_machine]

Well it does depend what you shoot the crate with, a pistol doesn't work. Now if you used a rocket launcher, than the crate had better shift unless its filled with lead or something.

Re:On physics

[nugneant]

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.

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 :-P ) - instead of this, how about we collectively lobby to get these things done right? An RTS with millions of genero-zergish units per side. A FPS with real-time rocket-based-dynamic-level-modification and death-physics so mind-jarringly violent (and bloody) that Jack Thompson and Joey "Senator" Lieberman simultaniously combust. A sports game where I can choose to attempt a brutal tackle tha

Re:On physics

[fabs64]

A backflip if they're standing on the edge of a building maybe, otherwise that's an intersting brand of physics you have going there.

Re:On physics

[Anonymous Coward]

Poster sounds like someone who has either never fired anything even resembling a gun in their lifetime, never given even more than a passing thought to the most elementary ponderings of pysics, or both.

Re:On physics

[Detritus]

Just for the record, a .50 caliber Desert Dagle will make you backflip if you're shot in the face - plus it'll take your head clean off at the same time.

Only in Hollywood.

Re:On physics

[Anonymous Coward]

"someone who has either never fired anything even resembling a gun in their lifetime, never given even more than a passing thought to the most elementary ponderings of pysics, or both."

You mean a CounterStrike player?

Re:On physics

[nugneant]

Just for the record, I like (and am strongly in favor of) hand-held guns that cause these reactions in videogames.

That said, I believe this was debunked on Mythbusters (though I may be wrong). Put simply, due to Newton's 3rd law (or 2nd, or 1st, or 4th - I Am Not A Physicist), a gun with this power would blow the person who fires it backwards in much the same manner. Sorta like hitting an imp in the face with a rocket at point-blank range in DOOM - the invisible hand of "okay, you two, back off, simmer down, enough", if you will. :-D

Re:On physics

[grammar fascist]

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.

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 every time a player gets maimed.

Re:On physics

[edwdig]

The inability to blow up scenery has more to do with level design than anything else. It's damn hard to keep things interesting if you allow the player to just blow up anything in their way.

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 scenario, that could be done now. You'd just have to sacrifice graphical detail in other areas to do it. Based on what sells, people would rather have better looking scenery or more detailed cars than more detailed damage.

With your RPG comments, I agree completely. But that seems to be the entire basic concept RPGs are built around. I personally don't see the appeal at all, but some people do. It's probably why RPGs are really popular with Slashdot type people, but very few of them get any mainstream attention.

Your comment on computer teams switching cities and changing logos probably won't ever happen. I doubt the licenses with the sports league would allow that.

For your platformer comments, branching level paths have been done plenty of times. Super Mario World 15 years ago was a rather prominent one. About a third of the levels had multiple exits, which opened up different branches on the world map. They also had a level broken into 4 parts. Each part had about 3 possiblies. Which one you were given depended on what you did in the previous one. It was a nice change, but would've gotten annoying fast if they did it often.

Re:On physics

[Anonymous Coward]

Put simply, due to Newton's 3rd law (or 2nd, or 1st, or 4th - I Am Not A Physicist), a gun with this power would blow the person who fires it backwards in much the same manner.

The solution is simple: have a gun which simultaneously fires a pair of bullets forwards and backwards. No recoil whatsoever: problem solved!

Re:On physics

[Khyber]

I own two Colt AR-15, several shotguns, and no pistols. I can bet if a .45 can make you spin circles by hitting you in the shoulder, a larger round with more power behind it could very well flip you backwards, depending on where you hit. Try firing an 8 gauge. If you can stand up to the recoil, that is.

Re:On physics

[Anonymous Coward]

I am also Not A Physicist, but wouldn't this result in an upwards recoil?

Re:On physics

[Anonymous Coward]

Parent wrote: "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."

Dirt mounds, and especially the ground are actually amazingly solid. I used to have a site bookmarked where a guy did nothing but shoot stuff commonly seen in movies with moderatly big weaponry (like your example of a door; and I recall his car that did little to stop riffle bullets). Dirt mounds (well, I think it was piles of sandbags) however, had incredible stopping power and survived impressive explosions.

Re:On physics

[nugneant]

The inability to blow up scenery has more to do with level design than anything else. It's damn hard to keep things interesting if you allow the player to just blow up anything in their way.

It's a challenge - but you know, it's a videogame, not a sight-seeing tour. Maybe some people like getting a guided tour of a museum, but there are those of us who like charting our own paths, and have only ourselves to blame if it's not Mathematically Interesting.



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.

I disagree. Heck, a simple AI strategy would be to increase Rivalry factor +1 - okay, once was an accident, but when that third-string LB committed four unnecessary roughness fouls en route to Peyton Manning's career ending elbow-tear, then you'll have an entire team fired up and aiming for the weak spots. Refs could throw flags, kick players out, maybe a bench clearing brawl, and the post-game "newspaper" would mention a real battle on the ballfield. Too much and "you" (the GM/coach/whatever) could get fired.

Honestly, give us the option. If Sammy Straightline wants to remove the temptation to "game the system", then let him turn "Constraint" ("Pro"/"Sim"/whatever) mode "on". If Nasty Nugneant wants to see what kind of realistic gridion chaos he can wreck, let him play his mode. This "leading the player by the nose" is symptomatic of an industry that is concerned only with the mythical mass appeal, and tunnel vision has never made a game fun.



For your car crash scenario, that could be done now. You'd just have to sacrifice graphical detail in other areas to do it. Based on what sells, people would rather have better looking scenery or more detailed cars than more detailed damage.

I call bull. What sells is what's advertised and what's hyped in everyone's favorite monthly magazine, Game___. What Game___ hypes is what it "thinks" people are interested in. Really, to determine what sells, you'd need two games, identical save for one having purdyful trees, the other having yummylicious car damage - oh, and a control game that is the same engine but features neither of these improvements - and then see what a majority of subjects indicated a preference for.



Your comment on computer teams switching cities and changing logos probably won't ever happen. I doubt the licenses with the sports league would allow that.

No. The option already exists in Madden (as of 2005) - however, in the two campaigns I've played, my team's been the only one to move to Mexico City (/Portland / random Canadian cities). It was around in the _____ Mogul series as well, and once again, computer teams just chose not to move on their own - even though I could go in and change all the names to "(TeamName) SUCKS NUTS", should I so decide to. I can't remember if the ____ Moguls were MLB / NFL licensed or just MLBPA / NFLPA, though.



For your platformer comments, branching level paths have been done plenty of times. Super Mario World 15 years ago was a rather prominent one. About a third of the levels had multiple exits, which opened up different branches on the world map. They also had a level broken into 4 parts. Each part had about 3 possiblies. Which one you were given depended on what you did in the previous one. It was a nice change, but would've gotten annoying fast if they did it often.

Yeeeeesssss..... ....no. Sorta. Kinda. Agree to disagree? Plead the 5th? Motion to adjourn?

SMW had branching EXITS. I was still confined to moving right (usually) until the world ended. Sometimes if I went down, or up, I would find a second exit. What I'm talking about... for starters, picture DOOM's E1M1. Say there was the e

Re:On physics

[KDR_11k]

Shouldn't the crate get blown to pieces instead if you use a rocket launcher?

Re:On physics

[Anonymous Coward]

good old AC coward to the rescue..

you do know humans ARE WALKING BAGS OF BLOOD right?

have you seen someones arm get shot off? it makes like 25 gallons of blood...

and as someone else pointed out hollywood has very rigid dead scenes and acting, as comapared to real life

and now my keyboard isnt working right fggdsg help

Re:On physics

[nugneant]

Dirt mounds (well, I think it was piles of sandbags) however, had incredible stopping power and survived impressive explosions

Apples and oranges. To put it another way, a litre of water (a mound of dirt) is incredibly subject to the forces of nature and man. It's not going to hurt much if I clock someone upside the head with it. That same litre of water, encased in a plastic bottle (a sandbag) takes on added elements that enhance its durability, and make for a sound thrashing.

In the case of sandbags - and I Am Not a Physics Major - I believe the compacting and confinement of the dirt would enhance its durability (dirtability? ouch ouch i'm sorry i'm sorry). We oftentimes see sandbags used to prevent floods or protect auto racers from tight turns, but an equivalent amount of dirt wouldn't do as much to help or buffer.

Explosives are used to knock through SOLID ROCK. I am relatively confident in stating that an RPG hitting the top of a reasonably narrow foothill will turn said foothill into something more resembling Mt. St. Helens, post-eruption. Ie, jaggy and carved out.

Re:On physics

[KDR_11k]

Allowing the player to remove certain obstacles (in this case walls) necessitates new obstacles the player cannot remove easily in order to prevent the player from blowing a straight line from start to finish. Currently they're using walls and the like to stop you from going somewhere, if you could blow up the wall then they'd have to think of something else, probably a huge sea of fire or something.

As for the telephone pole of doom, well, the Gizmondo CEO found out the hard way that telephone poles are indeed instant doom.

At some point the FIFA games allowed unnecessary brutality, it was removed for later games. Probably because people were abusing it.

What I'm talking about... for starters, picture DOOM's E1M1. Say there was the exit we know, an exit behind the Imp Tower, a long meandering path towards the left of where you start, and maybe a "secret" exit as well. Granted, this might seem confusing, but a simple NSEW grid system could make this manageable for starters, and from there it could be iterated and re-iterated, each iteration becoming more and more transparent, until we are left with a single map, similar to ES: Daggerfall in size.

Metroid anyone?

Re:On physics

[KDR_11k]

Hardly a new concept.

Re:On physics

[RylandDotNet]

It's a challenge - but you know, it's a videogame, not a sight-seeing tour. Maybe some people like getting a guided tour of a museum, but there are those of us who like charting our own paths, and have only ourselves to blame if it's not Mathematically Interesting.

Actually, it is a sight-seeing tour. Even in open-ended games like Grand Theft Auto, the missions are still scripted. Everything you see in a game, some artist or programmer had to spend hours creating. So if they spend hundreds of hours and many thousands of dollars creating this world with mazes and keycards and interactive bits, you're damn well going to see it. Why even have keycards if it's possible to shoot your way out of the maze? If you do that, all the stuff they put into the level (along with all the time and money that went into producing it) is wasted.

Re:On physics

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes and no?

Explosives work best when placed IN the things that are to be asploded. But since RPGs are designed to asplode things from the outside, they should leave dirt mounds in tiny dirt chunks.

Re:On physics

[DrXym]

That, and being able to move enormous metal crates simply by shooting them, breaks any immersion the game has created. :/

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 go yet.

I'd like to see destructable landscapes & buildings where you can demolish and blow shit up and the leave a smoking ruin behind you. And scenery that interacts with you and other plays in decent ways. Then we'd be getting somewhere. The upcoming game Crysis (by the makers of Far Cry) seems to be doing some of these things and it will be interesting to see if they're the first to make a good reason for getting a physics engine. The physics engine is something that all future graphics cards should have.

Re:On physics

[It'sYerMam]

Perhaps the point is that keycard/maze puzzles are old-hat, and that blowing your way through the building is far better. A lack of intuitivity plagues games in this way. Like on 007 Nightfire, I think, where you had the laser watch that could cut through STEEL, but an enemy wouldn't even blink if you laz0red his eyes.

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

[nugneant]

Allowing the player to remove certain obstacles (in this case walls) necessitates new obstacles the player cannot remove easily in order to prevent the player from blowing a straight line from start to finish. Currently they're using walls and the like to stop you from going somewhere, if you could blow up the wall then they'd have to think of something else, probably a huge sea of fire or something.

And yet again, allow me to restate my central point: the genres aren't stale. The minds behind them are. Rather than brute-forcing everything into compliance, how about something creative? Like along the lines of:

* If I choose to blast a straight line from start to finish -
* And if I do not get caught in the falling debris-
* Then this will no doubt trigger an minor institution-wide event-
* And therefore I might find a platoon of soldiers swamping the start-point of the next level-
* Which, having already made the decision that a "fun experience" for me is the Rambo Tank of Doom approach, will probably be a fun challenge when I whip out my chaingun and mow down as many as I can while frantically fleeing for some cover of some sort.

This can be as simple as I made it, or made even more complex / interesting by incorporating RPG (Role Playing, not Rocket Propelled) elements. Fuck that System Shock stuff - that's for toddlers. How about a system where each gun weighs X units. Where the more units I have for carrying capacity, the less able I am to sneak about (given that a 300 pound muscleman can't prance about like a sleek Ninja of the Night). Where a rocket launcher, a pistol, and a chaingun would pretty much max me out - but you could have your pistol, your dual-pistol, your glock pistol, your AWP, your throwing knives, and your ballerina tutu or whatever helps you prance from choke point to choke point. :-D



As for the telephone pole of doom, well, the Gizmondo CEO found out the hard way that telephone poles are indeed instant doom.

Hahaha... +1, Funny. This is why I love discussing videogames, because I find that I go from neck-and-neck "yo mama so fat" low blows (see the last line of my above paragraph) to fucking laughing out loud.

Anyway. Point well taken.



At some point the FIFA games allowed unnecessary brutality, it was removed for later games. Probably because people were abusing it.

Or possibly because FIFA wanted to make a family-friendly image, similar to the NHL's misguided efforts in the mid-90s. Solution, of course, being - who needs licenses? I remember the days of the NES, where Bases Loaded was king and champion, Baseball Simulator 1.000 was the fun alternative, Baseball Stars was the Otaku-favorite, and the MLBPA licensed RBI baseball was usually "top of the second tier" at best. And the only (that springs to mind) baseball game licensed by the MLB? Everybody agreed that it blew goats (MLB, by LJN, possibly the worst baseball game of all time - even Jeff Rovin hated it. It's so bad I can't even find a Google result for it that isn't COMPARE PRICES BUY SELL TRADE. Some things are truly best forgotten, it seems).

I fault game companies not willing to take risks, burnt out programmers unwilling to fight for what they know is right, and stockholders who are paranoid about profits. In that order.

Re:On physics

[jacksonj04]

But if the player can't be arsed finding a keycard or 20, and has a rocket or demo pack spare, they can go 'stuff it' and take out the door with a satisfyingly big boom.

Re:On physics

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure you do, Sport. Look, does your Mom know you're using the family 'puter to post here?

Re:On physics

[nugneant]

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.

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. It truly was "isometric action from a different perspective". Now tell me why 3D game designers can't possibly bear to part with their pacifiers and security blankets - er, I mean, their keycard hunts and mazes?

(sidenote: the one LOL moment I had during Serious Sam came when he said "sure beats finding keycards" upon blowing up a cavewall with a suspiciously-keycard-like-in-execution detonater. The irony, plus the 4th wall crashing down combined for an uproarious giggle)

Re:On physics

[Darren Foong]

A gun weighs x units: this system makes a LOT of sense.

In MOHAA, my brother and I realised that the player was Superman: he could carry a Thompson, a bunch of grenades, and a Panzershreck with five rockets to take out a damn tiger tank.

Or JKII multiplayer. I could have all nine weapons with me and I can still do a force jump, and slash a Jedi.

Though removing this features would make stuff less fun, but severely more challenging.

Re:On physics

[HorsePunchKid]

* - Telephone poles OF DOOM (found in most racing games, Grand Theft Auto)

Err... ever hit a telephone pole in real life? 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

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you would be shocked at how limp a dead creature is before rigor mortis sets in. The realism problem with the situation is not with how the joints are behaving, but with the amount of kinetic energy the bullets are imparting to the corpse in the first place. Roughly, for say a shoulder mounted weapon, it should be the same as the kick the recoil gave to the firer. You get knocked down when you're shot not not because you're bowled over by force, but because you lose your balance. You should crumple or topple, not cartwheel.

Re:On physics

[@madeus]

People play games primarily for fun rather than for strict realism - particularly when it comes to maiming and killing other human characters - as in Hollywood movies, people tend to prefer some things to be represented in a more abstract fashion.

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 realistic depiction's of maiming and personal injury) disturbing.

Personally, I found the gameplay in Kingpin a little disturbing (and ended up not playing it because of that) - I mean who though you might want the ability to walk up to a woman minding her own business and smack her in the face, giving her a very painful looking black eye (but without knocking her out or killing her). I wasn't expecting that and found it very creepy.

In games like GTA you can beat up people with hammers, attack prostitutes and steal there money (and then kick them repeatedly as they lie on the ground, watching the blood spurt out). It's a little sick, but the relatively poor quality of the graphics and the abstract way it's handled prevent it from being disturbing and allow it to remain over the top and appear humorous, rather than just twisted.

Re:On physics

[GTMoogle]

Heh, someone else did the same search as me. Found a really good example:

http://www.angelfire.com/mn/jvolstad/CarAccident.h tml

Fear the telephone poles. They will end you.

Re:On physics

[Anonymous Coward]

More challenging can be more fun. Enable god mode in pretty much any FPS, they lose much of the fun. On the other extreme, check out nethack, it's a lot of fun, and it's a TOUGH challenge (I ascended! only took me like 5 years). Of course, if it's impossible to win, it's not fun, particularly if there is nothing you can do to improve your odds. Nethack is probably a good example of how far one can push the challenge, it's very much at the limit, there are plenty of immediate deaths, for example early on a falling rock trap can kill you, but as long as you wear a hard helmet (which most orcs carry), you're safe, in fact most 'unavoidable deaths' require planning a long time before the threat is even around (getting fire resistance before Gehennom, for example). What I hate are those games that have that 'auto-adjusting' difficulty. Let me select a difficulty on my own! If every threat is more or less the same, then it's as scary as Doom 3 (that is, not at all). Auto-adjusting is just a way to hide crappy level and game design, in my opinion.

Re:On physics

[Shelled]

"Slow Motion Corpses" might have been enabled. It's intended to get exactly that reaction. UT is more the Cartoon end of the FPS genre.

Re:On physics

[xtieburn]

First off I dont think hes talking about stopping the characters flying back more talking about when there arms seem to fold in to there bodies and all sorts as they flop around.

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 was the fact that they could simulate the real world that then allowed them to seamlessly produce things that were far more fantastical. E.g. Many of the huge pieces of scenery in the lord of the rings were entirely CG. Most people didnt even notice. It is infact incredibly difficult to pick out whats New Zealand and whats fabricated.

The same can be said of physics. The reason why ragdoll physics makes a person flop around unrealistically is because its flawed not because they made a conscious choice to make it less realistic. When you have the ability to perfectly simulate a human falling down then you can alter the physics to either have them all floppy, have them fall down like a plank, or anything in between. (Including, if you want, a fully realistic simulation.)

Re:On physics

[Fred_A]

The only realistic FPS to date has been the Operation Flashpoint series which suffered from an imperfect engine but where you carried your own weapon and that was pretty much it. No powerups, no ammo on the ground (you could pick some off fallen soldiers if they had the same weapon though), etc. Of course you could be killed or kill by a single shot. You could take simple precautions to stay alive but you could always get unlucky.

The problem with that game was that although it quickly got a dedicated following, it never worked out with most players because you simply couldn't run around firing at everything that moved (well not for more than ten or fifteen seconds). I think most people don't have the patience for this kind of thing. Very few games still implement realistic damage like Flashpoint did (the SWAT 3/4 and Rainbow Six series come to mind).

Re:On physics

[phadez0r]

http://www.theboxotruth.com/ Is probably the site you're thinking of. Great site.

Re:On physics

[zippthorne]

why would that be bad?

Re:On physics

[Runefox]

I've always had a love-hate relationship with ragdoll physics; It's realistic in case of an explosion or a high-calibre shot to the head (though the end result may not be), but really, if you shot someone in the foot a bunch of times, they wouldn't die on the spot and hit the floor like they do in ragdoll-enabled games. I imagine they'd probably drop to the ground pretty quickly, though, but for an entirely different reason ("You blew my foot off! What the hell!?"). If you shot someone in the shoulder with a shotgun powerful enough to tear it off, they would not immediately fall to the floor, arm still intact as happens in ragdoll. They'd probably be blown back, yes, with a bit of a spin, too, but the arm would probably either be torn off, or almost so, and they'd still be more or less 'alive' (and probably in shock).

Thing is, ragdoll is only really necessary in some situations (the aforementioned explosion or head-shot; Something that kills instantly, perhaps post-mortem kicking around, but today's implementation causes quite a strange reaction when you hit someone with a crowbar; I wasn't aware the human arm was made of rubber. In real life, I expect very little arm movement from a stiff on contact with a large bludgeoning force or even a bullet). I find it amusing, however, that game companies have decided that they can save money by using only ragdoll physics, and thus not having to make death animations.

Death animations are still very much necessary for a believeable gaming experience. Of course, not everyone dies the same way, but if you shot someone in the chest, and it's enough to 'kill' them (read: Deplete their health), they probably won't die straight away. It could easily be combined with ragdoll-like physics to enhance the believeability of it, though; Have the force of impact cause them to fall/stagger back, clutching their chest and either falling to the ground or slumping against a wall, nursing the fatal wound until death. If you blow someone's leg out from under them, possibly off, the character shouldn't die right away; That's silliness. Ask the Vietnam vets.

It's one of the reasons why I like Call of Duty 2; I see no ragdoll in sight with standard shots, and when someone dies, it looks a lot more realistic, to me, anyway, than watching someone get shot in the arm and just slump over. In CoD2, you can shoot an enemy soldier to within an inch of his life, he'll crawl on the ground, shakily reach into his coat and pull out his Luger, and take pot shots at you until he's either shot again, or runs out of juice. If they've been taken out by a grenade, they're thrown about realistically, and nowhere have I ever seen the broken-arm syndrome. I think they're on the right track.

The point is, most games today don't make a distinction between incapacitation and death. Today, when someone's health is depleted in-game, they die instantly, slumping to the floor in ragdoll glory (which I consider buggy as all hell, all things considered; Ever have someone bend over backwards and start twitching until ragdoll's turned off for the model?). Even if the ragdoll physics more accurately represented (or even considered) the mass of the body in question, the maximum movement for the extremities, etc, it would be far more realistic. Having someone fall over dead with their arms 'broken' behind their back and legs twisted up for shooting them with a 9mm a couple times is far from what I'd call realistic, not to mention the ease at which the arms and legs move afterwards.

But hey, games are more or less mass-produced copies of each other these days. Those games that innovate are copied by a slew of others that together make up the mainstream. When someone finally realizes that the laziness involved in copying a physics engine from X company and just turning on ragdoll physics is detrimental to the overall experience, maybe we'll see some better physics. Maybe later we might see some better gameplay, too. God I miss Rainbow Six.

Re:On physics

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed. The total amount of energy delivered by a bullet is _small_. You can deliver a lot more energy with a bat.

It just delivers it to a small area. Lots more energy per square inch. And the expansion, fragmentation, and/or tumbling really fucks you up.

Re:On physics

[X0563511]

I love that game! But i really hate the CTF style maps floating around on multiplayer servers.

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

Re:On physics

[NeoSkandranon]

I love that aspect of Crusader (and hell I still play that game whenever I have a junker Compaq Presario lying around to load it on)

"Hm...Can't find the card..Fuckit *Detpac* BOOM!"

Then the fun of going full-tilt rock-and-roll through the next roomfulls of guards.

Those two games were awesome...

Re:On physics

[SilentChris]

My first grenade throw in the original FarCry: http://s133761904.onlinehome.us/FarCry0000.jpg If you're wondering, the guy's foot is stuck between the pipe and the wall.

Realistic? Not at all. Amusing? Undoubtedly. :)

Re:On physics

[delus10n0]

Hah, oh man. Didn't you see the Mythbusters episode about this?

Anyways, it boils down to the simple "every action has an equal and opposite reaction" law.

Re:On physics

[Fred_A]

Indeed the lack of an in-game mechanism for finding multiplayer games (and the mess of patches) was a bit of a problem, apparently a kind of shareware game finderr was required. OTOH the game was quite good solo with fairly decent IA and a good (if simple) storyline. I never really managed to play online :(

I wasn't too convinced by the aircraft either at the time, I hope they fixed that or just removed them this time...

Thanks for the pointer to the new version. I wasn't aware of it but had heard of a Flashpoint 2 (which kept being pushed back so I figured it was going to be based on the next Duke Nukem). It looks like it's almost complete too. Good news :)

Re:On physics

[Khyber]

Only in Hollywood, bullshit. a .50 caliber bullet packs approximately 4 times more power and a .45 - more inertia, mass, more speed. greater speed multiplied by larger mass with the added power of more explosive behind the projectile for propulaion = MUCH greater amounts of energy. I own all the mythbusters tapes, I went and looked up that episode - they hardly used anything nearly as powerful as what I've fired in my life and in my short military career. It's liberal mindwashing - that show. Even Penn & Teller's BULLSHIT at least bothers to do a better job of revealing hoaxes. Again, I re-iterate. There's so much energy in a .50 DE that you MUST use both hands to fire it. If you don't, the recoil alone snaps your elbow or the recoil brings the gun backwards - usually straight into your face (I actually broke my nose by not beleiving the gun's power and attempting a one-hand shot) a .50 DE round is smaller than a 16 gauge slug and even that from a reaonably short distance can blow a hperson in half and make each half spin/flip contort in ways you wouldn't believe. If there's anything "only in Hollywood" you shouldn't belive, it's all these people running around with Glock .40s and the bulletholes they leave in people look like fucking pinpricks and hardly any blood splatter.

Re:On physics

[X0563511]

There was a server browser, and it wasn't ALL that bad, but it could have been better.

The big problem with the aircraft was that (unless you had an UBER system) the viewdistance was too short to really make them usefull (except for helicopters, which were very hard to fly without a stick).

game physics advances

[invader_allan]

I remember going back to play Duke Nukem 3D many years ago (I stopped playing the game many, many years ago) and found it nearly impossible to play. Half Life is not unplayable, but boggy by todays standards. It is really remarkable how the physics rendering advances along with the graphics, and how important it is to game play.

Re:game physics advances

[WhatAmIDoingHere]

Counterstrike doesn't have advanced graphics or physics. It's still played by hundreds of thousands of people.

Gameplay is more important than Graphics and Physics combined.

Re:game physics advances

[Firehed]

But CS:S does, and I think it ranks number two or three in overall usage (at least of non-MMOs). As far as I'm concerned the gameplay between the two is equal given the same level of physics and graphics, but as you can have better of both with the newer version (and it's not that taxing of a game, so a crap computer is no excuse) I don't see why not. Of course, I'm just asking for people to flame me there.

Re:game physics advances

[WhatAmIDoingHere]

Actually, you can play CS on a PII 233 with 64 megs of ram, and until some jackass throws a smoke grenade, you can play pretty well. CS:S requires higher computer specs. I know my Computer Repair class in high school didn't upgrade from CS to CS:S because all we had was a bunch of crappy PIIs.

When I LAN, we usually play CS over CS:S, too.

Re:game physics advances

[Firehed]

Huh. Well, any computer purchased in the last five years should be suitable. Though considering you're not even meeting the requirements for XP with those, I think your version of CS is the least of your worries. Personal preference I guess with LANs, but I don't have a good computer just so I can have 8000FPS with crap graphics.

Re:game physics advances

[Anonymous Coward]

What have you got against Duke Nukem 3D, there are modern ports for the game and they are just as good as the original. Diss quake or something, not duke!

Missing the point?

[WhatAmIDoingHere]

"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."

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?

[chanrobi]

""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."

Graphics was never the number one factor. Great gameplay was. This type of "graphics makes the game" type thinking came along with stuff like Far Cry, FEAR etc. In fact it almost seems like the game content was an afterthought.

Re:Missing the point?

[AndyAndyAndyAndy]

Graphics was never the number one factor. Great gameplay was. This type of "graphics makes the game" type thinking came along with stuff like Far Cry, FEAR etc. In fact it almost seems like the game content was an afterthought.

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?

[Anonymous Coward]

It is also one more piece of hardware likely to have either no support in opensource operating systems, or poor, unmaintainable half-assed propriety support for Linux on i386 only (like we are getting for video cards). And thus one more thing to make sure MS Windows artificially remains the only viable PC gaming platform well into the future.

Re:Missing the point?

[dj245]

Fallout 1 was the only game ever that I actually cried at the end, it was so sad and powerful. That was the only time I ever was that emotional about a video game. So what made that game so special?

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 of knights dressed in power armor really just send me on a quest for a Holy Hand Grenade? I can't remember the last time I paid attention to what an npc was saying in WOW.

The open ended gameplay and multiple methods of completing quests. "Obtain item x from npc y". Sure, you could kill him (98% of what I see now in rpgs) or you could pickpocket him if your skill was high enough. Or maybe you were a slick talker and could talk him out of it. All these methods for one quest.

Re:Missing the point?

[servognome]

It's not graphics that are the number one factor, it's gameplay. There's no debate here

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 know what they want [good gameplay], what they are asking for is better graphics, interactivity, breast physics, new rosters, etc.

Lets get another Fallout or a Starcraft. The graphics can be a generation or two behind as long as it's fun to play!

And with great gameplay it still may not sell, so big companies are reluctant to fund such development.

Re:Missing the point?

[imsabbel]

Totally not true.

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:Missing the point?

[YrWrstNtmr]

I find myself buying fewer and fewer games as time goes by, and I believe it's thinking like that that really shows why.

Naaa...you're just getting older. Just like the rest of us. Life intrudes...

Re:Missing the point?

[James_Aguilar]

This "graphics is everything" paradigm is most certainly not new, whippersnapper. :P It's been around since the Famicom, and before. Man, I remember Zelda II: the Adventure of Link. That game had amazing graphics and effects when it came out. The most powerful spell in the game, Thunder, was just a flashing on the screen. Man, those were the days. I wonder what kind of hacking they must have done to fit all of that into . . .

True, though, the real reason it was great was because of the amazing gameplay.

Re:Missing the point?

[spectrumCoder]

If you liked Fallout, you should try Oblivion.

1. Joked around with quests and put in blatant references. Check
2. Dialogue worth listening to. Check
3. Open ended gameplay and multiple methods of completing quests. Check

The most important thing in a game is being able to feel involved. Here's a good test - if, in the game, you will take the time to carry out tasks (conversation topics, location visits, flower picking, whatever) that isn't going to improve your in game situation (stronger armies, stronger character etc.) or move you closer towards completing the level / quest / game, then it's a game that's really worth playing, regardless of the graphics.

That's why games like the Elder Scrolls quadrilogy, Simcity and The Sims have been so popular. If you'll forgive me the cliche, it's not about winning, it's about taking part.

Re:Missing the point?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't mind if the graphics are a generation behind (like duke3d was vs quake) but they were polished off nicely - and the gameplay was great. Hey, I guess quake's still king too :P.

And polish includes stuff like the controls, not just whether the game looks clean - and that goes towards gameplay partly.

All games now seem really plasticy, though I havn't played many for a few years because quite frankly I got the perception they were all shit.

Re:Missing the point?

[Murasaki Skies]

What is this Revolution wii speak of?

Re:Missing the point?

[AaronBrethorst]

You know that Bethesda bought the rights to the Fallout series, right? I was wary of what this meant until I picked up Oblivion this week. Truly a fantastic game.

How about we just go back to pong.

[Avillia]

Ball hits wall, ball reflects away from wall at the exact angle it hit. No need for all this garbage.

Re:How about we just go back to pong.

[GigsVT]

Good luck. Simulating that in Havok is damn difficult.

Re:How about we just go back to pong.

[Ziviyr]

Yeah, well, I'm gutta hit that with my paddle and cause spin which will alter its post-collision trajectory. nyah!

Another note: STOP the POV summaries.

[Avillia]

A 'comparison of PC Game Physics' should not have a summary obsessed with one technology and one company (Havok).

Load Testing

[Anonymous Coward]

"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.""

Next generation game engines will be demanding on GPU's. How much additional load will Havok FX place on them?

Re:Load Testing

[Anonymous Coward]

New gfx cards will have a co-processor just for handling the physics.

growing older

[Deep Fried Geekboy]

I find myself buying fewer and fewer games as time goes by, and I believe it's thinking like that that really shows why.

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

[DrunkenTerror]

those games you think were so great? they aren't.

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

[Sparr0]

What? If you think Fallout and Starcraft were not in the top 5 games of their years, and among the top 25ish games of all time, then you really don't belong in a discussion about the quality of games. This is not a game preference thing; it can be said objectively that these games embody everything that can be good about games in general, and specific to their genres. They were revolutionary, evolutionary, spawned good sequels (WC3 is a functional sequel to SC, not WC2, regardless of the story), sold insanely well, and pretty much cleaned up by any other metric you care to apply.

Re:growing older

[WhatAmIDoingHere]

I just installed the Yuri's Revenge expansion for Red Alert II and have gotten more play out of that game than Act of War and C&C Generals combined. I've spent more hours in Starcraft than World of Warcraft.

I'm not that old.

Re:growing older

[plover]

I think it's the novelty. "You never forget your first."

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.R, HL2, and Doom III? They're still just "Doom with better graphics." Animated light sources, live shading, refraction under water, and all of that don't change the fact that the game is still a first person shooter. Trotting around an ever more detailed environment and firing ever more detailed weapons still gets stale.

Splinter Cell is a pretty good series, as far as originality goes. The objective stopped being "shoot everything" and became "hide and go seek" with a 9mm. The near future settings, the news broadcasts, they do a pretty good job with the game. It's more like playing Doom to find 100% of the secrets.

Re:growing older

[donscarletti]

I think UT2004 corrected a lot of UT2003's mistakes and didn't deviate all that much from the original UT's gameplay.

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 that UT had, but more of it (even if you ignore onslaught completely).

Re:growing older

[Slaxer]

No its not a nostalgia thing. This is a common argument I see whenever someone brings up the fact that older games were alot better than newer ones. I admit that when I play old games I get graphics-shocked because of how dated the graphics are compared to what I'm used to now (probably what happened when you tried to play UT1). For example I played the game Front Mission 3 on the PS1 for the first time ever this month. The graphics looked like crap and becuase of that I didnt enjoy it at first. After I playing it for a while I got over that and didnt notice it anymore and found the game to be extremely fun. That old game is several times better than most of the crap that comes out now. Graphics dont make a game good. Period. I cant speak for UT because I wasnt into it but I can say for a fact Doom 1 and 2 are better than Doom 3. Not because we played them "back in the good old days" but because no one played Doom 3 for months on end like they did the originals. At best they probably played it one or two times and got the Doom 1 conversion.

Re:growing older

[Anonymous Coward]

I got the same reaction when I went playing the original Doom game(s). At first, the sprite-filled VGA graphics looked horrible, but an hour later in a dark, emtpy room playing the game... Scary.

Re:growing older

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do so many people take doom as the first 3d game? Ultima Underworld had a better 3d engine than doom and it was 18 months before doom.

Re:growing older

[Tim C]

You do realise that Starcraft is still insanely popular, don't you? They have televised tournaments in Korea - people not only play the game for money, but other people (lots of other people!) watch them.

Not too shabby for a game that's what, 7, 9 years old?

Re:growing older

[Anonymous Coward]

...what? I still play the original UT once in a while. It doesn't look any better at all on my 7800GTX, but it still has the flavor that all the newer releases are lacking... They didn't upgrade the old fight mechanics at all, they just added new (and, in my opinion, lame) modes.

Honestly, I think this argument that old games "weren't as good as you thought" is just plain stupid.

Re:growing older

[DrSkwid]

Quake was the first 3d game

Re:growing older

[Lord Crc]

Quake was the first 3d game

Both System Shock and Descent 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

[spectrumCoder]

Should we take it then that you've played all the great games ever written? That's the only way you can know for a fact that there are a maximum of twenty three (ish) games that are better than Fallout and Starcraft.

So, unless you have spent your life playing all the great games ever written, I don't think you should tell people who can think of more than twenty three games that are better than Fallout and Starcraft that they don't belong in a discussion about the quality of games. If they're familiar with that many top class games, they probably do.

Re:growing older

[Haeleth]

Actually, System Shock's environment is basically 2.5D - the levels are flat and tile-based (no rooms above rooms, and IIRC all the walls are either 45 or 90 degree angles). Bridges are simulated by using 3D floating objects and allowing multiple height positions for each tile -- exactly the same technique as was used in games like Dark Forces, Duke3D, and even ROTT.

Which isn't to say that the level design isn't pure genius. It fooled a lot of people. Easily one of the greatest games of all time.

Re:growing older

[DrSkwid]

I knew after I typed it, there would be a counter example =)

Descent wins

Re:growing older

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow. That's the kind of pedantic retort I used to use in high school. Good luck with that; you'll be a better person when you grow out of it!

Re:growing older

[Sparr0]

Actually, I have. Gaming is my passion. I own more legit copies of games, new and old, than most people have downloaded images of. You name an english-language non-sports game from the past 20 years, odds are better than 50/50 that I have played it.

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 use).

Re:growing older

[HAKdragon]

Yeah, well, I, Robot was released in 1983 and was the first game to feature flat shaded polygon graphics.

Re:growing older

[Kjella]

What? If you think Fallout and Starcraft were not in the top 5 games of their years, and among the top 25ish games of all time, then you really don't belong in a discussion about the quality of games.

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 original Dune 2. Eyecandy, freeform 3D, queuing, formations, AI, combat, experience, unqiue units and so on and so forth.

It's not major changes, for example I've liked many games which trace right back to Transport Tycoon. It's fundamentally the same game, but refined, polished and with current generation graphics and sound. It's another game I would put on a "Top 5 of the year" list, but that no longer belong in a "25 best games of all time". X-COM: UFO Defense is another example in the same category, so is Doom.

My point is that when you take off the rosy glasses, most of the old games were exceptional, but most of them just don't live up to today's expectations. Civilization 4 is in fact a lot better than Civilization, but it was the original that was the revolutionary. The sequel is just a greatly refined product. That doesn't change that even knock-offs behind the "state of the art" would place themselves between it and the original. And that unless you introduce some historic compensation factor, Civilization doesn't belong in the "25 best games of all time".

Re:growing older

[plover]

Why do so many people take doom as the first 3d game? Ultima Underworld had a better 3d engine than doom and it was 18 months before doom.

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 experiment. If you were to magically appear today as a 15 year old never having grown up with computer graphics, television or movie CGI effects, and you knew computers only via pocket calculators, and suddenly you were presented with Unreal Tournament 2k4, it would be "the best." You'd play it daily for months. It would be so damn cool.

Now, imagine fast forwarding the clock to 2036, and look around at the video games they'll have -- virtual reality holographic displays, maybe head-mounted, maybe brain implants, who knows. But they're still first-person shooters, and none of them will be as good as you'll remember UT2K4 being.

That's why Doom was "the best" for me. Every game since has just been a prettier version of that original "cool factor."

Re:growing older

[Lord Crc]

Actually, System Shock's environment is basically 2.5D

Ah true true, my memories must have been tainted :) I thought I recalled travelling underneath sections of the map, but that must just have been clever map design as you say. this page shows that it was more advanced than Doom though, allowing you to stand on objects etc. Made it very close to 3D without actually beeing 3D.

Forget PC Gaming...

[JimXugle]

Where's my Holodeck?!

Gimme interaction.

[nugneant]

When Duke3D came out (seems like it was ages ago... forever, one might-- ouch, okay, sorry, sorry), it was right around the same time as Quake.

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.

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately both the parent and those who modded it "interesting" have a fundamental misconception about what "game physics" actually entails. As an example, Mega Man III did not have any real physics (except I suppose a simple simulation of gravity). The elements you're referring to here collision detection and the controls of the game.

The article is actually comparing the Havok and PhysX (formerly Novodex) physics libraries. These are modules of code developed by one company that are then used by several other companies to help them make games cheaper/more quickly/better. It's a common practice and not just for physics engines. Rendering, collision detection, sound support, networking, etc. are other common applications for such libraries. These are collectively known as "middleware".

By the way, I am a game programmer.

Re:Gimme interaction.

[feepness]

or the second Ken Griffey game to the first.

Just out of curiousity, which one did you like better and why?

Re:Gimme interaction.

[TheRaven64]

I played Quake and Duke3D when they came out too. I played both in single player, and got bored with Quake quicker. Oh, and Duke3D could run at 800x600 on my P166, while Quake could only manage about 320x240.

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 runs quite happily. Since it was released, the game has improved in several ways:

• It now runs at higher resolutions and takes advantage of 3D acceleration.
• Dynamic coloured lighting was introduced with QuakeWorld.
• Most importantly, there are a huge number of mods available which dramatically change the gameplay.

I consider a game that I still play a decade after its release to be more deserving of Game of the Year than one I haven't played for more than five years.

Re:Gimme interaction.

[Anonymous Coward]

Just out of curiousity, which one did you like better and why?

Well... the pattern should give you a hint - but yeah, in case it's not clear -

The first game I liked. I was pissed at first that what Nintendo Power hyped as a player editor was nothing more than a rename function, but after the angst ran its course I was left with a fun, quick-moving video baseball game, complete with tons of little "eyebrows" - players chewing gum, breaking bats, plowing into the wall, scaling the wall, and (if a screenshot in Nintendo Power is to be trusted) starting fights. Throw in all 28 (at the time) stadiums, and I was sold. Granted, not the best or most in-depth baseball game of its time, but there's a certain joy to be had in playing a full game in 20 minutes or so. I probably logged more games in the first Ken Griffey than in any other SNES baseball game, baseball Simulator 1.000 excluded.

The second was when "Play It Loud" officially became "Play It Jesus God This is Awful I Want a Sega". I actually like most of the first wave of Play It Loud games - Ken Griffey the first, UniRacers (still one of my favorite party games), even Donkey Kong Country and Killer Instinct (to a lesser degree). But man oh man, this was probably the first time I was actually disappointed - as opposed to "confused" or "pissed off" - with a rental. The bright, cartoony, hand-drawn graphics were replaced with faceless, bland, OMG RENDERED drones. Instead of (what felt like) unique player models for each and every batter, Winning Run had your standard "White Guy / Black Guy" models. And forget about different stances. The bird's-eye fielding cam? Sucked. Gone were the eyebrows, and unless I'm gravely mistaking, the 28 stadiums were replaced with the standard 1-3 set (open, dome, and big). Player edit? Sorry son, no can do. The entire game was bland, soulless, and turgid. I think the one full game I played took about an hour to complete - or at least it sure damn felt that way. After the one game, the rental gathered dust as I played older games for the weekend - which was rare for me back in those days.

Since then, I've played Pugsley's Scavenger Hunt for the NES, so I can no longer declare Winning Run to be the most hollow, empty void of a game. But it's definitely in Pugsley's LJ Friends list.

Anyway. Your opinion?

Re:Gimme interaction.

[nugneant]

I consider a game that I still play a decade after its release to be more deserving of Game of the Year than one I haven't played for more than five years.

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 were limits as to what you could do with the GAME.CON file. I suspect (though have absolutely no evidence to support this theory) that the 1.5 patch (which removed these limitations) was delayed so it could ship with the Plutonium Pak. In the end, by the time that piece of shit had shipped and modders were free to truly explore the depths of the BUILD engine, QuakeC had already started to take off, and had all the momentum. Not to mention that, as a budding modder myself, I was put off by the prospect of having to pay an additional $19.99 for some levels I'd never appreciate and a patch which, in my eyes, fixed the game.

Moral of the story: Don't be sleazy.

Re:Gimme interaction.

[Stormwatch]

I liked Kyle Petty's No Fear Racing much better than Mario Kart. Of course, neither came even close to F-Zero.

Re:Gimme interaction.

[Shelled]

"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."

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'.

Re:Gimme interaction.

[spyrochaete]

You may be interested to know that Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, one of two games PC Gamer has awarded a score of 98% (with Half Life 2), no longer appears on their top 50 games of all time list they do every year or two. They qualify their decision in terms of longevity - the game doesn't thrill them as much as the original Doom does. A lot of people had a problem with this, but I think it's a valid argument.

I think PC Gamer is one of very few reputable gaming publications, and always has been. I disagree with their decisions and statements from time to time, but for something as subjective as creative product review you have to allow a little room for personal tastes. Then again, there are those who would argue that games journalism is a completely worthless endeavour altogether. Those people are just as entitled to their opinion.

Re:Gimme interaction.

[nugneant]

Don't kid yourself about 'target audience'.

I was speaking in terms of taste, not in terms of demographics.

Remember Bungie's "Myth"?

[mblase]

I confess I've never played the game much myself, but I do remember with a smile comments on the impressive physics engine Bungie developed for their "Myth" series of games.

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"?

[Pfhor]

A Dwarf blasts... quite a game technique in multiplayer

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 (the "lets make a real world / physics model, and see what it can do approach").

Re:Remember Bungie's "Myth"?

[Animats]

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.

Been there, done that. At the 1997 Softimage user conference, we showed our physics engine, Falling Bodies. This was the first ragdoll physics system that actually worked right. We had a 3D model of a big mecha about 20m high, which you could keyframe and then let the physics engine take over. Someone playing with it keyframed it on the ground on one frame, and about 20 meters higher in the next frame. Then they started the physics engine. This launched the huge character straight up at about mach 2, and it rapidly shrank into a dot. But the frame counter kept running, and after about twenty seconds, the dot started to get bigger again. The huge character hit the ground, bounced, rolled, slid, and eventually came to rest.

It really does look better if you handle the hard cases correctly.

Re:Remember Bungie's "Myth"?

[Malor]

For those not familiar with Myth: The Fallen Lords, they were a series of tactical "wargames"... sort of like the RTS games, but with a fixed budget to buy units when you started the game. The idea was generally to be the last person alive. The engine was remarkably sophisticated for the time, including things like animals grazing, and birds flying about.

Dwarves were sort of the artillery unit for the 'good guys'. They tossed Molotov cockails, which could be annoyingly imprecise and prone to misfiring... but they'd literally blow enemy units into pieces. (and the system tracked the pieces!)

The best movie of Myth that I ever saw started out pretty typical... a pitched battle between good guys and bad guys, going back and forth. It was getting into the toe-to-toe phase, and the light-side player told his dwarf to attack. He lit the fuse, cocked his arm, hurled the bomb.... and it bounced off a bird overhead, fell down onto his own army, and obliterated the player's entire side.

Funniest thing I ever saw. And people wonder why games don't do that well anymore... if they had a tenth of the creativity and atmosphere of Myth, but took advantage of modern hardware, they'd probably move ten million copies.

AnandTech actually reviewed a card

[Anonymous Coward]

http://anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2751

Not much more needs to be said -- they tested and analysed it.

Remember Bungie's "Myth"?-AI, Sound.

[Anonymous Coward]

"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."

Try playing some genres without either an AI or 3D sound engine, and I bet you'll feel different.

Multi-Proc

[ZachPruckowski]

Come the end of 2007, every bleeding-edge gamer is going to be on a dual-core or quad-core system (if not an Apple or Alienware 2x4 machine), so I think that making games multi-thread aware has to be a major concern here. I mean, physics engines should aim to use as many threads as possible, because soon CPUs will out number GPUs, so that's where some physics processing should be targetted.

Re:Multi-Proc

[ardor]

The problem is, multithreading is no shiny new hammer. Many problems in game logic just aren't suitable for multithreading.

Re:Multi-Proc

[jdonnis]

Looking at the market, you see that the publishers and, in turn, developers in general make their money on consoles.

That said, Xbox360 and PS3 being multi-cpu you will see gamecode optimized for multiple threads and I suspect that this will spill over to secondary platforms like the PC (and maybe even Macs).

Re:Multi-Proc

[Charcharodon]

I already have a dual core system, sorry it's already being used up, nothing left over for multi-thread gaming.

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 cpus (cpu, ppu, gpu, spu) than a 4 core general cpu. The specialized rig is going to spank the pants off the general one every time.

Re:Multi-Proc

[Watson Ladd]

More important then multithreading is using efficent code. Don't duplicate LINPACK, use it and get a massive preformance benifit. The guys working on LINPACK are smarter then you are.

Re:Multi-Proc

[ZachPruckowski]

Yes, but that's less of an option, because it's a lot cheaper to make 2-4 of the exact same thing. We'll have dual-core 2.something Conroes for $300 in two months, with a 3.0GHz one around like $700. By end of Q1 2007, 80% of desktops sold by Intel will be multi-proc. So it's coming.

The Physics of Brick Out

[cdtoad]

So why does the DOT go sideways when it hits it straight on? Mr. Bushnel would you like to answer?

Re:The Physics of Brick Out

[nugneant]

This, actually, is a perfect counterpoint to the "realistic physics are ALWAYS better" line of thinking.

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 6-12 inches off the ground? If you ran at a rate of around 20MPH? My stipulation is that it would not be. Game designers must fudge the physics to keep a game playable. And frankly, I find the physics of Mighty Final Fight for the NES to be light-years ahead of the supposedly "revolutionary" physics of, say, Trespasser. More complex != more funriffic.

Re:The Physics of Brick Out

[RhettLivingston]

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 want it to snap, but only if a heavy body part moves over it. My footprints should be findable by the enemy in soft ground. I should be able to make use of things like trees to block roads or crush a building with everyone in it. Being able to cause and watch the effects of rockslides would be really cool. Even with HW acceleration though, lots of this is still years away.

And as far as the graphics coprocessor being usable for this function, forget it. When you put Ageia into the picture, so many more objects become movable usable items that the graphics coprocessor becomes swamped trying to deal with a more complex reality. The inclusion of physics on larger numbers of objects is going to make the graphics vendors very happy because their products are going to actually be behind the curb again.

Re:The Physics of Brick Out

[Watson Ladd]

Tresspasser had a very bad physics engine. It didn't use a very good method for handling collisions. That was where a lot of the problems stemed from.

Wake me up when...

[ecorona]

Wake me up when a game world isn't a static 3D environment. Wake me up when I can walk up to any tree, pick off a branch, chop the tree down, squish some ants living on the tree, and can rip a moist leaf on the tree like a sheet of paper. Wake me up when I can knock down a building, wall, and can permanently remove bricks from a house. I want to be able to drive a car through a wall, have grass that actually grows, and can cause wildfires (just like in real life). I want to be able to take some sand from the beach with a bucket and pour it all over the nearest NPC and see all the little grains of sand stick to his shirt. Wake me up when it's time because I can't wait to play. Imagine MMORPGs where you can actually DIG A SECRET TUNNEL underground to invade your enemie's territory. Imagine being able to dig holes to hide in and cover them up with leaves. Well, you get the idea. Possibilities are endless. Seriously, how long do you guys think it'll take for some crude implementation of what I listed above comes to fruition?

Re:Wake me up when...

[WhatAmIDoingHere]

Why not.. go outside?

Re:Wake me up when...

[Musc]

So you want a completely detailed model of the world, down to bricks and individual grains of sand?
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/

You want the water on the beach to swirl and splash?
How about a piece of paper that you can burn?
Again, a challenging set of problems that we are just beginning to solve in a way that looks good.
http://graphics.stanford.edu/~fedkiw/

How about the snot you pull out of your nose?
You want to pick your nose and have the snot squish in a gooey fashion?
We can do it, but just barely, if you want to wait all week for a few seconds of animation.

http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/b-cam/Papers/Goktekin-2 004-AMF/index.html

Now, what you want is to combine all these simulations, plus many more.
Also you want it to run in real time on a desktop PC.

I predict we will have this in 50 years, and that is being extremely optimistic.
If Moore's law is really ending, then maybe much longer.

Hardware physics cards may be just the thing we need to make it possible one day.

Re:Wake me up when...

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't hold your breath.
Things like that have been doable in muds for a long time. They're not implemented often, though, for a good reason. "Combinatorial explosion" is what it's usually called. The possible actions the player can take begin to overwhelm both the game's system and its programmers, dragging everything down and breaking things. Tying a rope to a tree is fine, but what if the player wants to tie the rope to an ox, hold the other end, point the ox at a cliff, and kick him while wearing a set of wings he carved out of wood from a tree? At this point your game's programmer is breaking down in tears, realizing what ELSE that would mean is possible, and must be taken into account.
  In a single player game you can have this sort of freedom (well, a programmatically reasonable amount thereof), but multiplayer is a serious problem as this makes game balance nearly impossible. (See: Nethack. A sufficiently skilled player can quickly become a seeingly unstoppable engine of death due to the vast array of tricks at his fingertips)

Re:Wake me up when...

[monoqlith]

Wake me up when a game world isn't a static 3D environment. Wake me up when I can walk up to any tree, pick off a branch, chop the tree down, squish some ants living on the tree, and can rip a moist leaf on the tree like a sheet of paper.

I mean, we already have that. It's called reality. It's great!

Re:Wake me up when...

[ardor]

Never, really.

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...

[nugneant]

Because acting weird in public is a crime punishable by secret prisons, 72 hour observations, and in general a whole bunch of idiots who lost the ability to feel taking things far, far too seriously.



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...

[zokrath]

It depends on the amount of abstraction that you are willing to accept. Game physics are currently focused on accuracy rather than results, which is why ragdolls go haywire and objects get stuck into corners and bounce out of the world at relativistic speeds.

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 dump the bucket on an NPC, and the NPC gets covered in random sand particles.

A wall can easily be abstracted to a single entity, rather than the individual components. Drive a car through it, and the associate component's properties are used to determine how the wall breaks up into smaller pieces, but again, it really does not matter exactly how the wall breaks, or exactly how the bricks scatter. What matters is that there is now a hole in the wall, and the wall is now divided into smaller discrete objects and a mess of random bricks. Because the discrete entities do not form a solid body from the top of the previous wall to the bottom, they no longer offer support to whatever is above, potentially causing a chain reaction.

Digging a tunnel in an MMO is problemtic not because of technology, but because of other players. An engine could certainly be developed that allowed for the construction of tunnels, with location-based criteria for starting a tunnel, and valid tunneling areas defined underground. It could even have advanced engineering aspects such as shoring, cave-ins, and flooding. But the more robust you make a multiplayer system, the easier it is for one individual to ruin it for numerous others.

The idea of sneaking into the enemy's tunnel system and causing a cave-in is certainly enticing, and would be filled with peril and what not, but what about someone on your own team going down and causing that same cave-in, due to malice or incompetence? And where does all of the excavated dirt go? Player made mountains are perhaps of even greater concern...

Taking leaves from trees is reaching into assinine territory, but tree limbs are perfectly reasonable, and chopping down trees has been done many times. Perhaps not with molecular simulations of axe versus wood, but why bother? You hit the tree at a given location, it gets a notch. You hit the notch, and it gets bigger. Once ht notch is big enough, the tree falls over. If you spread your swings around, you get a bunch of little notches. Accuracy, strength, and technique could all be factored into the one end result, the goal of chopping down a tree.

Re: Wake me up when...

[donscarletti]

Wake me up when a game world isn't a static 3D environment. Wake me up when I can walk up to any tree, pick off a branch, chop the tree down, squish some ants living on the tree, and can rip a moist leaf on the tree like a sheet of paper. Wake me up when I can knock down a building, wall, and can permanently remove bricks from a house. I want to be able to drive a car through a wall, have grass that actually grows, and can cause wildfires (just like in real life). I want to be able to take some sand from the beach with a bucket and pour it all over the nearest NPC and see all the little grains of sand stick to his shirt. Wake me up when it's time because I can't wait to play. Imagine MMORPGs where you can actually DIG A SECRET TUNNEL underground to invade your enemie's territory. Imagine being able to dig holes to hide in and cover them up with leaves. Well, you get the idea. Possibilities are endless. Seriously, how long do you guys think it'll take for some crude implementation of what I listed above comes to fruition?

Wake me up when the world has no hunger or desase, there is no war or anger, we all live in wealth and comfort with all the nicest posessions. Wake me up when you can drink, smoke and do drugs without ruining your body, where you eat your favourite foods all day without getting obease and you can sleep around without picking up a nasty itch. Wake me up when everyone can have their own harem, but the numbers still work out right. Wake me up when we can hunt humans for fun and sport, but nobody really gets hurt from it, where we can take what we like from this world, but no one looses anything through it. Wake me up when the doctrines of everyone suddenly become compatible, and we can tollerate one another's lifestyle without it invalidating everything we believe in. Wake me up when everybody sees the world in the same way I do and what I say is agreed with and acted apon with no decent or skeptisism.

I really want all of that stuff, it will never happen because it is completely impossible, but I still pointed out what would be best. Do I get modded insightful too?

Re:Wake me up when...

[NeMon'ess]

Yeah the grandparent is asking for unreasonable possibilities. I am though looking forward to games where many objects can break apart. One game a year or two ago already had destructible walls. The next step is for objects to break into smaller pieces when required to. Meaning castle walls should have their physics calculated most of the time as a solid mass. No point doing the physics for 1000 pieces of stone all the time if a wall section isn't under attack. But when a cannonball is about to hit it, replace the bump-mapped object with 1000 polygonal stones, each with its own physics.

Re:Wake me up when...

[Lord Crc]

But parallax mapping and the like? Their advantages are not as obvious, sometimes you actually have to look for it

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...

[hyfe]

If these examples are supposed to highlight how you want games to be more like real-life, I think you haven't been too much outside :)

rip a moist leaf on the tree like a sheet of paper.

Leafs don't tear like sheets of paper. They tear like leaves.

Wake me up when I can knock down a building,

People don't knock down buildings too often. They're mostly made of concrete and fairly big. Being able to knock one down is *not* a sign of a good physics engine.

have grass that actually grows, and can cause wildfires (just like in real life)

I have never ever seen grass cause wildfires. Grass, atleast over here in Europe, seem to be mildly content with staying put right where it is and trying to grow.

some sand from the beach with a bucket and pour it all over the nearest NPC and see all the little grains of sand stick to his shirt.

Firstly, are you fantasizing about pouring sand over strangers? Got a shrink yet?
Secondly, you want to pour sand over someone, and have all of it stick to his shirt? Have you *ever* been at a beach?

Imagine MMORPGs where you can actually DIG A SECRET TUNNEL underground to invade your enemie's territory

Bloody hell, any idea how much time that would take? I'll stick to teleporting thank you.

Possibilities are endless. Seriously, how long do you guys think it'll take for some crude implementation of what I listed above comes to fruition?

Adhesive sand, pyromanic grass, leaves made of paper and buildings which anybody can knock down? Hopefully; really soon. Sounds fun as hell =)

Re:Wake me up when...

[this great guy]

<<
Seriously, how long do you guys think it'll take for some crude implementation of what I listed above comes to fruition?
>>

I heard those features are planned to be incorporated into Duke Nukem Forever. Does that answer your question ?

Re: Wake me up when...

[Anonymous Coward]

Nicely put. I was about to respond with a similar rant myself, but it's nice to be spared the effort.

And yes, if I had mod points, you'd be Insightful and GP would be Overrated.

Re:Wake me up when...

[Anonymous Coward]

It sounds to me like you're taking *his* comment too seriously. In any case, I do not believe that what he's saying is as nonsequiter as you say it is. Indeed, why make a 100%-accurate and immersive real life simulation if... there's real life?

The answer, of course, is that we *don't* want games to be 100% accurate to real life. We want them to be consistant. Objects that look squishy should act in a squishy manner, and if they don't there better be a good reason for it. A tree should have leaves to pick off. A garbunkle should phlobup properly. Improved physics will allow us to do this better and in greater detail, but my point remains that reality is actually not the be all end all.

I'm not sure if your secret prisons comment was entirely serious, but it's not as bad as you think (at least if you don't look Arabic). My sister once dropped down and did pushups in the middle of a museum until she was told to stop. So far, she hasn't myteriously disappeared. Braking a branch off a tree would depend more on who owns the tree more than anything else...

Re:Wake me up when...

[Kopretinka]

Some time ago, I expressed a similar wish, but I'd really settle for something much simpler: digging holes and climbing trees (and stuff). I find this real neat thing that I can't carry with me right now - I'll hide it under a rock or in a tree so that nobody finds it before I get back for it. How about that?

Re:Wake me up when...

[Anonymous Coward]

If you were playing Second Life, you could help bring that game into existance. Game development will need an open source model before that game can be real. As it stands now, game developers keep reinventing the wheel. Instead, when one developer understands how to make leaves that can be picked from tree, he should share it with the world.

Re:Wake me up when...

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow. You sound like a lot of fun. Who wants to spend 3 weeks of 5 hour nights digging a tunnel? I'll give a pass to PoWs, but anyone else gets labelled "boring as a piece of stuff that is boring which is particularly boring".

Or is it that you want realistic physics without realistic time?

Because that's just fucked.

Re:Wake me up when...

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like you both need to go outside for a while. Or nappies.

Re:Wake me up when...

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem with this scenario is not so much technical as it would need a huge expenditure of labor.

Programmers would need to write some kind of AI for ants. Modellers would have to make squishable models for any insect you might expect to find. Level designers would have to start building houses not by the wall, but by the brick/board/shingle. They'd have to come up with simulations for the destruction of any material they use. Making sand is no longer just a matter of laying a texture; now you have to tell the game to be on the lookout for anything that might be able to pick some sand up.

This type of feature is possible and is often added to games, but they are always limited to small touches. You seem to want a game world that reacts just as the real world at all times.

Why? Why should the designers allow you to dick around playing with trees and ants and sand when they've laid out a whole adventure for you? Simulation is not about re-creating every aspect of the world, it's about modelling the parts that are meaningful to the work--that add up to a particular experience.

Re:Wake me up when...

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed, why make a 100%-accurate and immersive real life simulation if... there's real life?

When someone is killed in real life, they're dead and gone and the killer can go to jail. When it happens in a game, they simply respawn and the game continues. The same can be said for the other items on the list. Real life has real consequences. Games do not. That's why we want a real life experience without going out and doing those things in the real world.

Re:Wake me up when...

[Anonymous Coward]

Because they want to kill without consequence? Disconcerting.

Re:Wake me up when...

[octopus72]

Like... Red Faction?
This game was great innovation, I was actually was spending more time digging the holes than playing through levels. Game developers somehow don't realize that such game can be a hit, with a new gameplay layer. But condition is that it excells in other important areas (which is very hard task), so people will hype and embrace it. HL2 had physics gun, Far Cry had beautiful landscapes, while Riddick had great character models and full shadow/lightning system.

I don't therefore expect parent's ideas to appear until there's middleware + engine which can significantly speed up the task of creating complex environments.

Re:Wake me up when...

[Deth Rot]

Its going to take alot longer than I want to wait. But when it does I hope I am still alive and able to play it. The controls would be... just a few more than now because of all the different things you could do or maybe it will be voice activated or something...

PIN*BOT!?!!?!?!??!?!?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

MARRY ME.

Sincerely yours
(sincerely speaking)

Your SINCERE best new friend

(whose name begins with an "N" and is now a "fan" of yours, and is posting AC due to -1 offtopic)

Re:PIN*BOT!?!!?!?!??!?!?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

As an old pinballer, I find it amusing that all the gamefaqs reviews for Pin*Bot fail to mention that Pin*Bot was an actual pinball game before it was the NES game. They also get all the vocoded quotes wrong.

Ultimate Physics Engine

[Umbral Blot]

In my opinion the ultimate physics engine was, and is, that of Carmageddon.

How much?

[TopSpin]

As much as you can give. Physics provides depth and quality. Show the way and demonstrate this; be a legend.

Or not.

Your call.

You Missing the point?

[imsabbel]

Have you every thought if it might just be you growing up that shifts your interest?
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)

Dear god, wrong direction!

[Vo0k]

Graphics, interaction, physics, this all doesn't make a good game! This makes a game that may feel realistic at places, but not good! Good game is a fun game. One that has a captivating story with unexpected twists. (Aeris dies. That made a good game.) One that doesn't bore you with hourly load times because more data needs to be loaded. One that creates no artificial limits (you can't climb up there, invisible wall, from that place you'd see too much at once overflowing the gfx memory).

So arguing whether we need better physics engine for better games is like arguing if we need 5.1 audio equipment in the room to make the lunch taste better.

Re:Dear god, wrong direction!

[Anonymous Coward]

As you said a good game is a fun game. Just because it has graphics, interaction and physics doesnt automatically make it bad either. The problem as always is with game developers and not the hardware.

Re:Dear god, wrong direction!

[ardor]

Properly used, the new tech can actually enhance gameplay. Realtime shadows are *very* useful in a stealth game - imagine Thief with realtime shadows, indicating when someone is coming around the corner. (Also, your shadow needs to stay out of sight.) Physics can tremendously enhance gameplay, as long as it is used evenly across the game world. For example, if a map contains little interaction, but at some places, there are weird puzzles that work with the physics engine, you know something went wrong. This is really an indicator that the designers wanted to show off with the physics. But, if you can knock down enemies by dislodging rocks for example (Indiana Jones-style), or play with buyoyancy (and thus create bridges over water with some wood), then you can even enhance multiplayer sessions with it.

Re:Dear god, wrong direction!

[Vo0k]

...and with time and resources redirected from the actual -game- development towards physics, graphics etc.

Re:Dear god, wrong direction!

[ratpack91]

this is why they have physics middleware like Havoc and PhysX

Re:Dear god, wrong direction!

[Vo0k]

Read some developer comments about using these. The guy spent 20 minutes to make the arrow fly with Havoc. Then next 2 weeks to make it behave realistically after hitting the target. They spent about a year debugging scripts of Radiant AI because its results made the NPCs to do things that were just breaking the game. (two NPCs fighting each other to death over which one can take a bed to sleep. Or a guard leaving his post while on duty to hunt some food, the rest of the city guard going after the slacker to arrest him for desertion, citizens going rampage stealing and fighting because law enforcement is gone)
In the end the AI scripts got so dumbed down to prevent this kind of "creativeness" from the side of the NPCs that in most cases it consists of going to fixed-choice bed, using predefined respawning food container to find food, then walking randomly in fixed radius around a marker, offering services.

Getting the purchased Radiant AI debugged and correctly (for certain values of "correctly") implemented took them several times as much resources as it took them to build the scripted behaviour of characters in Morrowind from scratch. Similarly Havoc, Facegen, Speedtree all costed more work to be implemented and tweaked to work properly than it took writing their (simple) counterparts in earlier games from scratch.

In defense of graphics

[cgenman]

The point is not the gameplay. The point is the experience. If your experience is reduced if you can't get over the fact that the graphics look bad. Or don't evoke the images they are supposed to evoke. Sure, Starcraft has a limited visual experience now, but A: it was amazing for the time and B: there have been a lot of amazing games released since which players just couldn't get into the experience because it was a cheap, unbelieveable 2D sprite engine. Certain games it works for, but to get into the experience of others, you have to kick it up a notch visually.

The same can be said for movies. Anyone can do Clerks. But nobody can do Titanic without a large budget going to visuals. Anyone can create the next Tetris. But nobody can create the next Final Fantasy without reasonably engrossing visuals and expansive, expensive vistas.

Which is not to say that gameplay isn't important. It's just that people know (or think they know) how to do amazing visuals, but nobody knows how to make amazing original games. Even Blizzard, a consistent hitmaker in the industry, basically takes existing genres with major flaws, fixes all of the flaws, and throws in a ton of aesthetic polish.

Now as a side note, you can get a hell of a lot of bang for your buck out of good sound, especially considering how few people do. Sound is subliminal, so it frequently gets forgotten when budgets are getting allocated. But you can spend months prototyping and sketching and modeling and mapping your main enemy to make them seem as massive and powerful as possible, or you can get a sound engineer who will mix a bowling ball dropping onto a piece of steak with someone punching through aluminum foil, and getting the most amazingly visceral reaction from the audience after one afternoon of experimentation.

Look at Oblivion.

[Vo0k]

Most of people asked say Morrowind was better than Oblivion.

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?
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?

Re:Look at Oblivion.

[Anonymous Coward]

2 word explain all of the above

X BOX

Re:Look at Oblivion.

[DrSkwid]

Surely BOTH would be better ?

The people that implement list 1 are generally not the people that implement list 2.

Re:Look at Oblivion.

[Vo0k]

Generally people that implement both lists are paid by the same people, from the same pool, so often tradeoffs must be made, fire a writer and two designers, purchase physics engine and redirect two coders to implement it instead of making the extra spells, then tell the NPC designer to implement NPC schedules in AI instead of thinking of some smart things for the NPC to say. And some things from the list 1 make some things from the list 2 impossible or problematic, all the extra polygons, landscape effects, grass etc forced them to make towns inside separate cells, voice acting vastly limited number of dialogue options, weeks or months were spent on betatesting and debugging misbehaving AI instead of implementing quests.

Re:Look at Oblivion.

[Kjella]

Or maybe these:
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 it. I had a maxed character and barely started the main quest because I didn't find my way. I had to complete the damn game with a walk-through, which was boring as hell (not to mention the enemies were all wussy at that point). More linearity is good, maybe It's too linear at times but more hints than last time is an improvement.

Load times: In town, I accept it because Oblivion actually has towns that feel like a town. Morrowind felt like you've entered some sort of staged set. However, I agree that load times otherwise could have been improved. Particularly I find the dungeon area load times excessive, and should have been cached up in advance.

The classic spells, I didn't miss them. Spells like Levitation change the combat mechanics quite a lot. Likewise I found the number of factions to be fairly ok. I thikn you're repeating yourself about the quests.

Dialog is fairly constrained yes, presumably due to the number of voice acting hours. I never found chatting with NPCs that didn't lead anywhere in particular such as to quests to be very interesting anyway. And books... you READ those? I've never read a single one, except to get the skills bonus.

Yes, Oblivion is perhaps a bit more hack&slash than Morrowind was. If your friends are RPG-lovers, perhaps they think Morrowind was better. I think Oblivion is overall a better game. Particularly the quick map movement means you're jumping from task to task, the game doesn't really give pause to fit roleplaying. If you want to ask me what I would improve, I think it's simpler things. Look at the most popular oblivion mods. Stuff like animals that all have rabies and want to kill you, picking ingredients should make them disappear/appear plucked and so on. And I think the enivironment grows in completely the wrong way... If you're running around in daedric armor, every bandit shouldn't have one too, instead you could get ambushed by a group of bandits or the like.

Re:Look at Oblivion.

[buffer-overflowed]

Morrowind? What about daggerfall, ya young whippersnapper?

Re:Look at Oblivion.

[Vo0k]

Daggerfall was too buggy and contained (the same as Oblivion, only worse) too much of random-generated stuff comparing to actual content. At least they didn't try to dumb it down for console lusers.

Re:Look at Oblivion.

[buffer-overflowed]

Well, all TES games are buggy. It goes hand in hand with Bethesda.

And Daggerfall was a lot more ambitious than Oblivion or Morrowind. I wish Oblivion had kept what was good about Morrowind, added in a bit of direction for the main quest, and gone more towards the daggerfall skill/etc. systems.

But hey, always mods, right?

Re:Look at Oblivion.

[Vo0k]

Daggerfall was more revolutionary than Morrowind, but still Morrowind was a serious improvement over Daggerfall. It WAS better though not all that much. It retained most of what Daggerfall had good, corrected some it had bad and added some of its own good content. Oblivion is a step back. Lots and lots of good or at least medicore stuff was replaced with really poor stuff, and the few "revolutionary" concepts it had appeared to be a total failure. (why level up, when finishing the game is easiest if you are level 1 and grows harder with each level gained, level 30 becoming near-impossible?)

PhysX - mediocre technology, good business plan

[Animats]

Ageia has made a breakthrough. Not in the technology, but in the business model.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, but saying the technology is mediocre is just plan wrong, it is a very impressive chip.

Re:PhysX - mediocre technology, good business plan

[DrXym]

End users are not going to be interested in a card with a fan consuming a slot in their machines. This thing must appear on graphics cards or motherboards because it sure as hell won't sell otherwise. A few hardcore gamers might be interested in it but it will never capture the imagination or the critical mass as a card. And few games are going to demand a hardware accelerated physics engine when few people actually have one.

Re:PhysX - mediocre technology, good business plan

[GTMoogle]

Which is why they made a deal with Dell to sell them along with their high end machines.

Re:PhysX - mediocre technology, good business plan

[DrXym]

Let's see what prices we're talking about and whether these cards are built into the machines by default or an option the user must choose.

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 unaccelerated was compelling. Even then, where is Voodoo these days? Once their Glide API was shunned for hardware abstracted OpenGL and DirectX the bottom fell of their market.

I have a feeling that the same will be true with these physics engine guys unless they get themselves partnered up or bought out.

Re:PhysX - mediocre technology, good business plan

[octopus72]

My guess is there will be hybrid GPU/PPU cards with NV/ATI + PhysX hardware on it. Of course, if it is possible to do without cooperation from GPU makers.

It will unfortunately make game playing more expensive (a big showstopper for crowds which don't buy the most expensive cards). Maybe they are planning make cheaper (=slower) version for, say, $100 6 months from now, it would be smart move.

Ageia SDK is free and provides software mode as well, so it's "price" is a great advantage over Havok, which will struggle to stay in business. this is a crucial moment for ageia as well, as it will decide if physx will stay or go. So I'm not surprised that Havok tries influence that process.

Revolution, huh?

[James_Aguilar]

You should wait to see what kind of success the Revolution has before you hold it up as evidence that gameplay matters most. :P

Hello, Dr. Semantics!

[nugneant]

Let's see. I press the "A" button. Megaman launches upward, hits a peak, falls downward. In some cases (Super Mario Brothers), I press the "A" button, Mario jumps, and he appears to "float" in the air - ie, when I move left or right, in the air, he moves slower than the equivelant ground-based movement. Not so much in Megaman, but I digress.

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", for me, make the difference between a game I could be playing right now instead of even bothering to get into this ridiculous argument (Megaman III) and one so bad that... jesus, it's bad (Captain Comic).

It's physics to me.

But go ahead, code some "impressive" "real-time physics"-utilizing game where every time I jump, a small army of Emotion Gnomes dives into my PS2's CPU and calculates just where on the parabola I shall lose 0.0003% momentum and whether swinging my sword will affect my doppler-wind-resistance enough to cause me to miss that platform I was so eagerly expecting to reach. And while you're scratching your head and wondering why all the game reviewers called that game a sloppy nightmare, I'll be playing a Capcom game. :-D

Half Life 2?

[ShakaUVM]

Wait, Half Life 2 is finally out?

All I've played so far is some demo for the Havok engine.

Re:Half Life 2?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know if you are being sarcastic. But, it came out a year and nearly a half ago. In fact, there is an expansion called Half Life 2: Episode one waiting to be released.

Re:Half Life 2?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh the OP was being sarcastic.

HL2 was too short and very much on rails for a FPS. Describing it as a HAVOK techdemo is not unreasonable. Hell Doom3 stomped all over HL2.

Re:Half Life 2?

[Korvar]

Meh. D3 had samey samey gameplay, with no variation. Perhaps it improved after I gave up on it (just after the Lost Souls turned up), but *God* it was boring. Pretty, but boring. HL2 may have been on rails (and D3 wasn't?), but it utelised the possibilities of a FPS to have radically different play styles. From the mad dash of Water Hazard to the creepy horror of Ravenloft, and all points between. Plus superior character animation and characterisation, and actually running on my machine...

Beyond gfx enhancements

[castrox]

Proof that gfx is not what it's about is the fact that Counter-Strike keeps on being a major, if not the number one game being played.

The failure of Counter-Strike:Source is because it's dead SLOW. Even on modern hardware you have problems getting into the game and stop feeling like you're controlling a character.

Blazing graphics and physics, like in Counter-Strike:Source sure would be welcome, but not on the expense of the gameplay and I don't think I'm the first to say this about this very game. Not to mention that you hardly have any time to admire the graphics in such an intense game. Also, there's a reason that CS players constantly nag about it's "lagging" ;-)

Re:Beyond gfx enhancements

[ardor]

Yeah. CS: Source should have been focused on gameplay enhancements. CS was never about graphics, its about gameplay. Thus, its a pity CS: Source failed, because the added physics could introduce nice new elements into the game (like, using objects as weapons, pushing crates over so they fall on enemies etc.)

Look nice - but

[Anonymous Coward]

The user interface to the machine still suck big CRAPS DOO DOO

Really guys, what about those VR gloves or some better user input than those "Nintendo" type of joystick? How about an external gun that feel and shoot like a gun ?

And?

[Anonymous Coward]

We now know there to be a driver slowdown issue, and tbh, who the hell uses a software physics engine in a game when you have a PPU sitting there? All the hardware is doing is playing with particles - havok does the rest. It is a shame we cannot get benchmarks of it using havok as a whole, and then Physx as a whole.

I think then we would be able to judge slightly better this solution.

Re:On physics (On A.I.)

[3.14159265]

Interaction is great and all, but please give humanoid NPCs more rigid joints!

NPCs are great, but please give them a brain. If you're interested in the gameplay, that is.

Put a limit

[bufalo_1973]

If the gamemaker lets you destroy anything with a REALLY BIG rocket launcher then there can be a shortage of ammo. And I mean having less than 10 rockets for the whole game. And needing half of them to fight bosses or demolish some specific building.

Re:Put a limit

[KDR_11k]

At that point I'd wonder why they'd give you such a weapon if you can't use it for most of the game unless you're using an infinite ammo cheat.

Re:Put a limit

[nugneant]

At that point I'd wonder why they'd give you such a weapon if you can't use it for most of the game unless you're using an infinite ammo cheat.

And I'd have to wonder why they waste man-hours making a giant pillar encased in colored reflective flames (that shine and also explode) if you'll never be able to see it unless you're either using a SPISPOPD cheat or spend hours learning to groupthink and collect the key cards.

Re:Put a limit

[bufalo_1973]

I'm not saying "you have 5 bullets that have to be used in 5 places". It's more "you have 10 bullets and they'll have 5 places you can use them for better results".

I don't think using the RPG method of "item A in place B" is the best way to enhance gameplay. It's better when you can deal with a problem in different ways and the way you choose does matter for the rest of the game, so if you have a door and you choose to destroy it maybe something won't (or will) happen, but if you pick the correct key and open the door something else happens (or not). But maybe you want to put a trap on it. Or you want...

Starcraft sucked.

[eddy]

Personally I found Starcraft utterly DISAPPOINTING and very boring. It came out after Total Annihilation and had less of all, not the least 'fun'.

And no, I still don't understand how come millions of Asians drool all over it.

Re:Starcraft sucked.

[Anonymous Coward]

Same AC replies:

Oh, hell yeah, TA is considerably better. The interface in particular is lightyears ahead, and the huge scale makes it all more fun. Though it's a shame there are only two sides, and they're very similar. However, I still play both today, so they both get my recognition as truly excellent games. Starcraft's single-player campaigns aren't that much fun (though some of the weird little missions are cool, and the story/cutscenes are good if you like that kind of thing). Did you play multi-player?

I'm looking forward to Supreme Commander (sort of TA 2) more than any other game right now. And have you tried TA Spring? And the TAUCP unit pack? TA utterly rules when you consider the mods.

Re:Crowded House lol yea, wait for mp processors

[Anonymous Coward]

we are going dual core, soon quad core. let the cpu take the load of physics. it might be slower but it will improve and its more than enough for most people. i think most of us gamesr would rather spend more on our cpu's than some 300 dollar physics card that is useless for anything else but gaming. the need just isn't there. we are already tapped out paying for huge lcds and expensive video cards.

and yea the cell is a joke. at first they claimed it would do the graphics. then they came back to earth and tacked on a nvidia gpu for the ps3:P

Martial Arts Game Physics

[alohatiger]

I hope martial arts games can use this technology. Right now they just chain together motion captured sequences. The most glaring time you see this is when the players slide on the floor--they never seem connected to the ground: blocking a kick shouldn't make you slide back 12 inches.

And when a kick or strike is landed it should look different than when it's blocked.

Racing games use physics model the actions and reactions of the cars. If fighting games did the same thing, that would be awesome. You could model injuries (the fighter limps or holds one arm), just like NASCAR games model damage to the car. And they could interact with the environment and fight on uneven surfaces.

Re:Martial Arts Game Physics

[despik]

There already is an indie martial art game that does this. Check out Lugaru at http://www.wolfire.com/lugaru.html, and take a peek on the developer's blog (http://www.wolfire.com/lugaru.html) for some amazing screen captures from the upcoming Lugaru 2.

replace all video games with "the sims"

[dino213b]

Seriously, how accurate do you want a first shooter video game to be? While playing www.americasarmy.com should you be able to: desert while in a campaign, start a family, dig irrigation ditches for your farm, build your own mud brick house from materials found in the "map", convert to Islam, buy a lamb every year to be slaughtered for your neighbors?

I can understand some frustrations with gamers over "inaccurate physics" as they put it; namely, the indestructible door, the kevlar walking plank, but you should ignore those in favor of having:

• an inexhaustible amount of energy for movement
• an ability to carry multiple weapons unimpeded
• a lack of shoulder wear due to firing recoil
• a lack of sunburn damage and related skin cancer in outdoor "maps"
• a heads-up display (do you want to count bullet firing sounds?)
• a non-existant gastro-intestinal system
• a lack of dehydration and pathogens

Would you really want to play a game so "accurate" that you could die from diseases?

*** dino213b was killed by an e-coli infection he contracted while drinking contaminated water provided to him

Suspension of disbelief works for movies, why shouldn't it work for games too? I would personally like to be able to blow up every standing building in every game, but, from a programming perspective that would require way too much of hardware and development time.

AGEIA PhysX and Havok are apples and oranges

[robson]

It's my understanding that though they're both physics systems, their roles are completely different. Havok is integrated into an engine, and does all of its work on the CPU(s). That means the Havok-driven physics can actually drive game-play. You can toss a grenade over there, use proper physics to govern bounce, ricochet, and collision, and create an explosion that damages all nearby enemies, players, and interactive elements.

PhysX is on a card, which means there's not really a fast way to send accelerated results *back* to the game engine. So the elements accelerated by PhysX can be *generated* by game events, but they can't generate their own game events. Check out the examples provided by the AGEIA PR person:

With PhysX all destructible objects in the game now explode with greater realism.

All other particle behaviors in the game are physically simulated, including trash and grit blowing in the street, and bullets kicking up shards of any object shot in the environment.

AGEIA Smart Particle Fluids are utilized to enable enveloping smoke from explosions. There is no equivalent effect without PhysX.

So, yeah. They're very different animals, with different uses.

GRAW

[C.Jota]

"...it looks exactly same with the PPU as it does without it, the only difference is you get the extra blocks/debris, the strange thing is these extra blocks/debris seem to appear unrealistically out of no where when you shot things like the wall, floor etc, it really is like they've just been tacked on just to say *this game supports PhysX*." I definitely agree. I thought the PhysX acceleration in GRAW was not a full implementation at all.

Bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

Its actually the other way about (or will be)...

The engine can assert state from physical objects on the card, and therefore it definately can. Watch that cellfactor video, they throw an object at a helicopter style craft and it is put off balance. That is a GAME event. A player is hit by falling debris and hurt - thats an event caused by physical interaction.

The whole point of the PPU is that objects can be read back and properties asserted. The new HavokFX thing on the graphics card simply cannot do that due to how the gfx pipelines are laid out, you cannot read, then change, then write back on the gfx card.

Re:Bullshit

[robson]

Very civil subject line there.

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 can be read back and properties asserted.

Okay. I'm not a hardware engineer, but it's my understanding that the whole point of graphics accelerators is that you throw renderable data (triangles) at them. It's pretty much a one-way trip -- CPU->GPU->screen. GPUs are complex enough now that they can do a lot of logic operations on their own, but you still don't get to read that stuff back because the bus is slow from the card back to the CPU. So that obviously isn't an environment suitable to be sending lots of physics data back to the CPU.

Now, maybe busses have changed recently, and that reverse trip is much faster now. If that's the case, then sending game-critical data to a peripheral card and back may now be a viable strategy.

The new HavokFX thing on the graphics card simply cannot do that due to how the gfx pipelines are laid out, you cannot read, then change, then write back on the gfx card.

I don't know anything about HavokFX, and I certainly didn't mention it in my original post.

Let me clarify that I wasn't making a value judgement -- I think both systems have potential value.

Re:Bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

The whole point of the PPU is that objects can be read back and properties asserted.

Okay. I'm not a hardware engineer, but it's my understanding that the whole point of graphics accelerators is that you throw renderable data (triangles) at them. It's pretty much a one-way trip -- CPU->GPU->screen. GPUs are complex enough now that they can do a lot of logic operations on their own, but you still don't get to read that stuff back because the bus is slow from the card back to the CPU. So that obviously isn't an environment suitable to be sending lots of physics data back to the CPU.

Exactly, the PPU can send back, but the gfx card cannot. Your just backing the 'bullshit' post up?

Re:Bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

"Now, maybe busses have changed recently, and that reverse trip is much faster now."

Exactly. They did. It's called PCI express. Unlike AGP, it's symmetric - very fast both ways. PCI expresses is why putting Havok on a GPU makes sense.

And don't complain about someone saying "bullshit" on slashdot! What line there is with regards to language is drawn somewhere between "fuck" and "cunt".

Re:Bullshit

[robson]

It's called PCI express. Unlike AGP, it's symmetric - very fast both ways. PCI expresses is why putting Havok on a GPU makes sense.

Ahhh, interesting. See, that's all you had to say.

And don't complain about someone saying "bullshit" on slashdot! What line there is with regards to language is drawn somewhere between "fuck" and "cunt".

You know, it wasn't so much the expletive that bugged me, but the assertion that I was deliberately lying ("bullshitting"). "Misinformed" or "dumbass" would have been much better.

Re:Crowded House lol yea, wait for mp processors

[CastrTroy]

But people still spend hundreds of dollars on 3D cards. They aren't good for much other than games. Maybe if you're doing some 3D design work then they come in handy. But the majority people use them only for video games. You can easily buy a new $700 card every year. People buy these things because it gives them bragging rights.

Red Faction?

[BlueCollarCamel]

I'm surprised nobody mentioned Red Faction or Red Faction 2. I loved being able to blow up my environment, get around doors without needing to unlock them, and even blowing the bridge out of under my enemies and their vehicles. Both are old titles, but I would recommend checking them out, I thought they were fairly fun games.

Simulation?

[Frozen Void]

Better Physics and better graphics(rendering ,resolution,etc) don't
make your game better on their own.
Better content(original story/graphics/sounds,context and extensive info) and better gameplay mechanics(rules,stats,actions,game design points,game features,atmosphere) is more significant.
Engines aren't the game,just a tool.

Running a bit off topic

[heinousjay]

Mythbusters is full of shit approximately half the time. I'm not saying that about any particular case, just that they rely on empirical evidence obtained under conditions that frequently don't match what they proclaim to be testing. They are popular entertainment, not a physics authority.

Re:Running a bit off topic

[delus10n0]

Mythbusters aside, there is no way a handgun is going to throw someone back that far, or make them do a complete flip. Unless your arm gets shot off in the process..

Re:Running a bit off topic

[Khyber]

Fire an unbalanced .50 caliber (that's a half-inch round) Desert Eagle - ONE HANDED. The recoil alone should make you spin around, or at the very least, make your arm snap upwards from the recoil (not BREAK, just bend at the elbow) and the gun smack you hard in your face.

Disclaimer: I have had my tour of duty. I know my guns, it's a part of my training. A Deagle CAN and WILL make someone flip if the round hits them anywhere further than a foot above/below their main center of gravity, and just spin/lose a limb otherwise. Been there, done that, gimme something new, and it better not be any Mythbusters over-liberal one-sided bullshit.