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[Blade_Train3r]

This is just awesome. Makes PhysX look bad and Havok even worse.

Lagoa multiphysics demo

Bout time. When you have up to 6 physical cores running at 3.2GHz each (ignoring performance overhead that's over 19GHz of processing power) I'd say you have a pretty decent basis for realistic physics.

[timtek]

That is insane!

[ToonyMan]

Man, these always look neat to watch.

[Quarr]

PhysX can do a lot, actually -- it's just rendering on the fly that's hard. Even with a hexacore running ridiculously fast, rendering this kind of stuff live (PhysX, by the way) is out of reach. It's a pity we won't see more of this in games for a while yet -- modern consoles have such horrendous hardware.

[Blade_Train3r]

Considering the price ranges they were designed for consoles had amazingly good specs for the time, but I  digress. I've never disliked PhysX - I've wanted a lot more games to implement it. Mirror's Edge was even more awesome with PhysX.

I'm hoping that CUDA and ATI's equivalent (forget what it's called) help with this more than they have so far. It's not so much the calculations themselves that chew through processing time but the fact that they need to be processed serially, which considering the number of objects needed for any realistic physics simulation will bog down the average CPU as every object needs to "wait it's turn".

Hell, I actually think ATI would perform better on the physics simulation side than nVidia (and I'm an nVidiot ) simply due to the fact that their cards can handle a greater number of parallel calculations, and for physics the processing power isn't as important as simultaneously calculated objects. There would still be overhead since things would still need to go through the CPU, but far less.

I'm betting you ATI's gonna grab up Lagoa, once both major companies have their own physics software I think (PC) game companies might actually start taking greater notice of physics in games (aside from ye olde Havok ragdoll).

And for anyone who wants to dispute the advantages of parallel processing of many relatively similar calculations... try the CUDA version of F@H or hell, grab Apophysis and Flam4Cuda and compare rendering times on CPU and on GPU. You lose out a bit in precision but that's being worked on slowly but surely.

And then I could just be talking out of my gat but I needed to get all that out

[Pillow_Killer]

Uh, woah what? PhysX can do this.

[ILikePie]

This is really cool, but do games really need cloth simulation, or bricks that turn into fine powder? All games really need are some nice object interactions and ragdolls. When was the last time you wanted you cover up your enemies in blankets or spray some dust in their faces?
Crumbly structures are nice, but they can be done in both Havok (?) and PhysX. Valve did some very nice collapsing structures in episode 2.

[JoshuaFH]

This is really cool, but do games really need cloth simulation, or bricks that turn into fine powder? All games really need are some nice object interactions and ragdolls. When was the last time you wanted you cover up your enemies in blankets or spray some dust in their faces?
Crumbly structures are nice, but they can be done in both Havok (?) and PhysX. Valve did some very nice collapsing structures in episode 2.

Hey, when I smother my enemy to death with a pillow, I want that pillow to look REAL damnit.

And then I can throw his ashes into the ocean, just for the purposes of completing this analogy.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

I was having a hard time buying that that wasn't just video of a convincing hoax untill it switched to showing the controls. The water rendering looks like...water. I don't think I've ever seen that before.

[Blade_Train3r]

This is really cool, but do games really need cloth simulation, or bricks that turn into fine powder? All games really need are some nice object interactions and ragdolls. When was the last time you wanted you cover up your enemies in blankets or spray some dust in their faces?
Crumbly structures are nice, but they can be done in both Havok (?) and PhysX. Valve did some very nice collapsing structures in episode 2.

Hey, when I smother my enemy to death with a pillow, I want that pillow to look REAL damnit.

And then I can throw his ashes into the ocean, just for the purposes of completing this analogy.

Although I can enjoy a game that doesn't have extreme visual fidelity (I play DF don't I? ) I do enjoy a pretty game, so anything that makes it look or play better is good. Advanced physics simulation isn't necessarily NEEDED in games, but then neither are the shiny particle effects and texture maps.

If they ever make another game like Dark Messiah, imagine how awesome it would be after benefiting from a really powerful physics engine? Short it was, but oh so sweet...

*kicks an orc down a flight of stairs into some conveniently located spikes*

[Sergius]

3D Studio Max and Maya with Vegas or Mental Ray plugin makes DirectX and OpenGL look bad!

And it only takes several hours more per frame! I mean, c'mon!

[Agdune]

I want less creation of physics engines and better implementation of the existing ones! I mean, we still have invincible buildings and scenery for 95% of PC games! Granted, Red faction Guerrilla was laggy as hell but that was mostly down to the terrible, terrible port. If it was well ported and buildings didn't collapse when you squinted at them, that would be a reasonable example of using a physics engine to make stuff go boom.

Also more junk lying around in FPS/3rd person shooter games. I wanna wade through the debris dammit!

[Jopax]

One thing that i want to see this used for is liquids, i really want a game where water is water, not just a bottom layer of a map that you dig down to, i want to be able to dam a valley and sink my foes in glorius H2O

[JoshuaFH]

Isn't stuff like this already ridiculously expensive? Videogaming as a hobby is already very pricey, and the constant leaps in technology aren't helping things.

[ILikePie]

That's what abandoneware is for, oh and GOG.com.