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NVIDIA To Showcase PhysX Content
Early next week, NVIDIA will release the GeForce Experience Pack to demonstrate the 'PhysX' engine it bought from AGEIA earlier this year. The pack is free, and it will contain a stand-alone action game, maps for Unreal Tournament 3, and various demos. Gamasutra notes that the UT3 maps are "designed to 'fundamentally change' the game's mechanics."
Let me go out on a limb and take a guess that the demo will consist of a bunch of boxes falling or other things we've already seen in games that seem to work just fine without PhysX chips for some reason. Except they'll note that since it's handled by the PhysX processor to the CPU doesn't take a hit. Then everybody will applaud and cheer, and PC gaming will continue to stagnate.
I have nothing compelling to say
Any 8000, 9000, or 200 series is supported, so you can get something a bit cheaper.
I remember, many moons ago, when the PhysX cards were gaining some king of industry momentum. I wouldn't call it acceptance, but it definitely wasn't a complete disregard either.
I think one of the big problems here is that between AMD and NVIDIA there are only two major market forces -- both of whom are no where near on a lovey-dovey level, and definitely no where near sharing ideas (read licensing) stuff between them. So if NVIDIA gets this PhysX stuff working from AEGIA, marvelous, but it will be completely ignored by the ATI/AMD crowd. And if the better share of 50% of the marketplace is ignoring this, it is simply not in game designers' best interests to waste development time and money on something.
Really, I could see this type of technology being similar to the PS*2* HDD -- barely ever used.
(Consider the -X ending, implying DirectX, rather than something like PhysicsGL, or PhysL, implying OpenGL -- you know, the actually portable industry standard for graphics.)
...Or maybe PhysX just sounds a hell of a lot better than PhysL?
PhysX is actually not connected to DirectX at all; the PhysX SDK is even available for the Playstation 3 and Linux.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
Both player super powers and quite a bit of Paragon City and the Rogue Isles have been designed or retrofitted for PhysX capabilities in mind.
For example, when a fire blaster sends a bad guy to the burn ward, bits of flame and whatnot fly around, catching on nearby terrain or even other players or enemies. The same things happen with electric and other blasters that have a big visual 'splash'.
My earth controller leaves lots of stones and pebbles lying around. Enemies, players, and my stone golem have to wade through these and kick them out of the way to get to where they're going. When her wind powers kick up, the rocks frequently roll around in the gusts.
Anyone who uses firearms in Paragon, Rhode Island or in the Rogue Isles generates LOTS of brass. If you're not careful, they'll pile up around your feet and go scattering when you walk around. If a flier-type happens to go around them, they'll be blown around by his wake.
Perhaps the most dramatic use of PhysX in player powers is the 'Propel' power. This allows some telekinetics and gravity control types to throw bits of the terrain around (summoned out of pocket-space, of course). It's frequently possible to litter a zone with 'Propel Junk', that you have to shove out of the way to get anywhere. It's quite a fantastic thing to knock out a gangster with a ballistic fork lift. Gravity control just does bad things to physics particles in general, such as spraying piles of the forementioned casing brass all over the place.
A flier who tears through a tree will see lots of leaves and maybe a branch or two swirl behind in his wake.
The real bonus to PhysX is ragdoll model physics. When you punt someone hard enough to send them flying, they often land... awkwardly. It takes a few seconds for a mook who's just been skipping along the pavement by his teeth to pull himself back together. A favorite bonus is to knock an enemy into a railing. You can often leave them helpless, hanging by their feet or even their head in some rare cases.
PhysX in City of Heroes uses the CPU-only dll by default, but will also work with an add on Aegia card or with the newer CUDA drivers from nVidia.
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Feeding advanced physics back into gameplay creates a compatibility barrier.
True. But there's also a parallelism problem and a lag problem. Particle systems where the particles don't interact with each other parallelize easily. In other words, blowing stuff into little bits is easy to make run fast. Big-object collisions don't parallelize well; you need intercommunication between adjacent objects. This is transitive, which turns a parallel problem into a sequential one. Worst case: "Now let us all join hands around the world", or, "Everybody take hold of the rope and pull". Very few games do physics well enough that two players could pick up an object, one lifting each end, and move it realistically. I'd like to see a game where a raid team has to cooperate to pick up a boat, carry it to the water, and get it launched in the surf zone, timing the launch so they don't get pushed back onto the beach by a wave. That would be a good feature in any "special ops" game; SEALs train for weeks to get that particular skill nailed.
The lag problem is that the graphics pipeline normally runs behind the game engine, and the game engine doesn't wait for it. If some physics out in the graphics pipeline has to feed back into the game engine, either the game engine has to wait, which slows it down, or the effect has to be introduced into the game engine a few cycles late. In some cases that works; you could have a game where snow was falling and snowdrifts affected skiing or driving. That would work fine if the snowdrift updates reached the game engine a few cycles late. But large-object collision detection and response can't be processed late, or the results not only look awful, you get fly-throughs and instability.
(I used to do physics engines. I'm responsible for the "ragdoll falling downstairs" cliche (1997)).
For those that already have a Geforce 8 or 9 card and don't want to wait for Nvidia's demo.
Head on over to http://www.warmongergame.com/ and grab the game. I'd also recommend heading over to Guru3d and finding some BETA drivers that enable PhysX support for the 8 series cards and newer PhysX drivers.
the cake is a lie
Yes, they're used as a substitution.
Poorly, yes, but they do also affect gameplay directly, when used properly.
For a really trivial example, try adjusting the crosshairs on your favorite FPS. Most gamers I know like to use a little dot, dead-center in the screen, to show exactly where the bullet is going to go (assuming the gun is accurate). But just try turning it off for a moment -- are you even playing the same game? The difficulty just went up a hell of a lot.
Try that all around -- toggle HUD displays and see what happens.
For a more relevant example, take lighting. People like to say that HDR adds nothing to gameplay -- and to some extent, they're right. But say someone has a sunset to their back -- how are you going to aim at all into that lense flare? Whereas they can see you just fine -- in fact, you're all lit up by the setting sun -- better duck down quick and find some shadow. And maybe sneak up behind them, and reverse that situation.
For an extreme example, the visuals and controls can be designed as a gameplay gimmick -- take the final level of Beyond Good & Evil. (SPOILER: Having your character be as messed up in the head as if she'd been drugged has a profound impact on gameplay, and this was, in fact, the single hardest moment in the game for me.)
And finally, let's take the best game I've played in a long time -- Portal. It's about gameplay, right? Everyone will tell you, it's a whole new paradigm of gameplay about portals.
Well, what if those portals were just blue and orange circles. What if you couldn't see through them. Would the gameplay be at all the same? (Play through with the developer commentary if you need it spelled out for you.) What if it wasn't for the visual cue of white-ish walls to show you where you can legally place a portal?
And would it be the same game without GlaDOS? Or the theme song?
Yes, I realize GlaDOS wasn't that impressive visually -- I'm talking about her voice. My point is that everything about the game has the potential to change the way it's played. And you will never know how little or how much until you actually get people to play it. Honestly, did anyone at Id imagine rocket jumping, before someone else discovered it?
And yes, it does suck when visuals are used as a substitution for gameplay. With few exceptions, the visuals do not make up for the gameplay.
(I'll make an exception for Final Fantasy, which are worth watching, even if they're more like a season of anime with a crappy RPG minigame squeezed in.)
But that is not a reason to immediately dismiss any eye candy as completely useless, without giving it a moment's thought.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!