The State of Video Game Physics

The Guardian's games blog convened a panel of engineers and other experts to talk about the current state of video game physics. A great deal of research is currently going on to make better use of multiple cores so that advanced physics tools and engines can take advantage of all the processing power available in modern computers. Many of those tools are being put to work these days to find more realistic ways of breaking things, and game developers are trying to wrap their heads around destructible environments. Mike Enoch, lead coder at Ruffian Games, said, "This idea of simulating interactions and constructing the game world similar to how you would construct the real world generates more emergent gameplay, where the game plays out in a unique way for each player, and the player can come up with solutions to problems that the designer might not have thought of." Another area that still sees a lot of attention is making game characters more human, in terms of moving and looking as realistic as possible, as well as how a game's AI perceives what's happening. "The problem is not necessarily in having the most advanced path-finding technique with large-scale awareness; we need to have more micro behaviors, with a proper physics awareness of the environment," said software engineer George Torres.

Comments

Re:No more

[Dr. Impossible]

Compare modern first-person/third-person shooters and compare them to the classics like Perfect Dark, The Legend of Zelda or Goldeneye. They were so much fun because handling was so easy, you could move, you could strafe, etc. It was so much better! And yet, as games become more realistic, all that happens is that your character becomes more sluggish and less powerful, harder to manipulate.

What does this even mean?

Seriously? It's gameplay that makes you come back, not reality. I wish we'd drop the reality of things and just make games fun.

"I wish they would stop making games that I don't like to play, even though I could simply choose not to play them." I'm also pretty sure that realism and fun are not mutually exclusive, and that realistic games are not a recent invention.