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Yoshi (2319)    Jun 30, 2006 - 01:44 pm

The ATI technology way makes sense. Allow people to use the old video cards for physics instead of just tossing it into the parents, grandparents or friends PC. Though really hardware physics is pretty much a joke that isn't needed. Regardless of what AGEIA tells people we will never see it matter. The reason why is physics is to much work to program for so the industry uses static numbers for physics. Basicly you get this is a light, medium and heavy object. No real physics are done since it would take so long to go this is a box that can be broken. In the real world you break a box the density, size of the peice and thickness would matter to what happend to it. Even the shape that the wood broke into would effect how far it flies. Now really do you think a developer is going to go through that much work? In the real world we have little need for more than 200 objects on the screen at once using physics since if you really think about it even the physics of driving a race car is to much to fully program into a game. » Login to reply to this  xephyris (155)   Jul 01, 2006 - 09:59 pm You're confusing realistic physics with useful in-game physics. We don't need algorithms that predict exactly how a piece of wood flies from a box after it has been broken. As long as it looks to the gamer like it flies correctly, for all intents and purposes it does fly correctly. What the chip allows us to do is take off cpu cycles that would be previously used to do something deemed more important than many-little-particles such as AI and use them on many-little-particles instead. Razumen has it right - it's not the physics that's hard (it's easy, we have the formulas and algorithms in textbooks), it's getting the effects to work and actually enhance the experience noticeably that's the important and difficult thing. » Login to reply to this  Razumen (10)   Jun 30, 2006 - 03:13 pm Wow, you have no idea what you're talking about do you? There are already programs out that can easily calculate the mass, density, and material of a object and have it break/act realistically. Stuff like this is already being used in games (the new Indiana Jones game for example). Implementing physics into games isn't the hard part, the hard part is getting these new fangled physics features to actually enhance the gameplay experience. » Login to reply to this

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