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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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)

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.

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?

[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?

[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.

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.

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).

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

[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

[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?

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.

[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.

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"?

[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.

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...

[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...

[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: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:Multi-Proc

[ardor]

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

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.

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?

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

[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.

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