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

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

[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.

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).

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.

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: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.