Insane Physics Engine Will Blow Your Mind With Dirt

[Xiorell]

My PC is sat here like "BRING IT ON F***KERS" !!! lol

So finally some day soon we might get realistic water? Water in games really annoys me for some reason

 

[Darth_Dude]

Think of what we had say... fifteen years ago.

I think we all know that we're going to be getting this kinda technology relatively soon.
And it will be Sweet.

Computer technology isn't improving nearly as fast as it was 15 years ago (I also wouldn't call 15 years "relatively soon" for the video game industry). Something like this may require a major technological leap, such as moving beyond silicon.

theyre actually thinking about using diamonds for chips rather than silicon

Diamond? That's a horrible idea, no matter how well it actually works, it's like using Oil. It's finite, and expensive as hell.

 

[TheDoctor455]

Impressive. Most impressive.
Hmm... I hope someone will find creative ways to use this tech beyond the standard "see-saw puzzle" or "random garbage tossed around" approach.

 

[Mako SOLDIER]

Change of pants required. Holy crap was that impressive.

 

[MetalMantheRevenge]

Tech has come this far. *Head explodes* Now that, that's out of the way. I can't wait for a game that can use this engine to it's full potential.

 

[frago roc]

The way consoles' hardware hold the industry back we won't see stuff like this become mainstream for many years.

 

[sosolidshoe]

Think of what we had say... fifteen years ago.

I think we all know that we're going to be getting this kinda technology relatively soon.
And it will be Sweet.

Computer technology isn't improving nearly as fast as it was 15 years ago (I also wouldn't call 15 years "relatively soon" for the video game industry). Something like this may require a major technological leap, such as moving beyond silicon.

Like this you mean? [http://www.geek.com/articles/chips/mit-unveils-graphene-chip-could-lead-to-1000-gigahertz-processors-20090326/]

Trust me, scientists will keep the hardware advances coming, if only because none of them want Moore's Law to be wrong.

 

[SNIPERFOX ft. Harry P.Ness]

the next transformers/ gundam game with this think about it

*blarg*

 

[dochmbi]

I like dirt

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yxybXTTbX_8&fmt=18

 

[Iron Mal]

1. I find it hard to be excited by physics engines because, quite simply, as a player they do little or nothing to actually improve the game for me.

2. I can hardly even call a change like this that 'groundbreaking'. By now we've gotten about as far as we can with graphics and realistic visuals in games (now almost every game that comes out these days boasts to have 'hyper realistic HD visuals') to the point where any futher progress in this feild feels somewhat trivial and pointless.

3. This is kinda like when we tried moving from DVD to BluRay, sure, it looks kinda nice...but the changes are asthetic at best.

Gonna just dispute a few of your points here.
1. I mostly agree with you in that most games don't use physics for the benefit of the gameplay. Half-Life 2 is one of the rare gems to use physics in a responsible manner, rather than just looking pretty. The idea has potential, but needs proper implementation.

2) We are still incredibly far from true photorealism in videogames (though Uncharted 2 and Crysis are starting to get right up there.) We still need to get past the uncanny valley in the vast majority of titles, textures need to be much higher resolution, we need much more varied and complex material shaders (blurred reflections, to name one), and we need higher res models. Games today look great, but they're far from their potential.

3) Personally, I'm always stunned when people say they can't see a major difference between DVD and Blu-ray. Avatar is the most definitive title to compare (night and day difference, seriously), but if you have a good set-up, you're looking at image quality that is about 2-3x higher detail/fidelity than what is possible on DVD.

Fair points, although I still stand by what I say (although you do make very good arguements).

1. Half Life 2 tried to impliment them but to me it only ever actually seemed to come into play in the few physics puzzles that were scattered around (presumeably with the intention of letting us know that they made an advanced physics engine), I'm not quite sure how it could be implimented in a way that feels natural and doesn't seem like it's shamelessly tacked on to display the technology (which a lot of games are guilty of).

2. Granted, technology can always improve and there is always going to be more potential. However, the actual rate of significant progress and advancement has seemingly gone down (as someone said before, 15 years ago games were getting dramatically more advanced at an incredible pace, now all our advancement seems to be solely fixated on the visual aspects of games and many 'highly advanced' titles require access to high end computers that many people simply don't have, remember the issue Crysis had?).

3. Don't get me wrong, I acknowledge that BluRay has a higher resolution and screen quality and other things such as that but is by no means anywhere near as revolutionary a change as it was from VHS to DVD. Our first change to DVD was actually benifical in more ways than simply having more impressive visuals (you could store discs easier, you didn't have to rewind, they could be played on PC's and game consoles and other such bonuses), the change to BluRay meant only that the image quality was higher and that the discs held more content. It just doesn't seem like enough of a change to me to be a worthwhile advancement.

 

[BloodSquirrel]

Like this you mean? [http://www.geek.com/articles/chips/mit-unveils-graphene-chip-could-lead-to-1000-gigahertz-processors-20090326/]

Trust me, scientists will keep the hardware advances coming, if only because none of them want Moore's Law to be wrong.

There are tons of technologies like that out there right now, but none are anywhere close to being even prototype ready, much less market ready.

For now, we're still advancing via die shrinks, and we've almost exhausted that route.

 

[chaos order]

Think of what we had say... fifteen years ago.

I think we all know that we're going to be getting this kinda technology relatively soon.
And it will be Sweet.

Computer technology isn't improving nearly as fast as it was 15 years ago (I also wouldn't call 15 years "relatively soon" for the video game industry). Something like this may require a major technological leap, such as moving beyond silicon.

theyre actually thinking about using diamonds for chips rather than silicon

Diamond? That's a horrible idea, no matter how well it actually works, it's like using Oil. It's finite, and expensive as hell.

well ya but they're planning to use synthetic diamonds and add impurities like phosphorus (which will probably make them colored) and use those instead of "real" natural diamonds

 

[JeanLuc761]

Fair points, although I still stand by what I say (although you do make very good arguements).

1. Half Life 2 tried to impliment them but to me it only ever actually seemed to come into play in the few physics puzzles that were scattered around (presumeably with the intention of letting us know that they made an advanced physics engine), I'm not quite sure how it could be implimented in a way that feels natural and doesn't seem like it's shamelessly tacked on to display the technology (which a lot of games are guilty of).

2. Granted, technology can always improve and there is always going to be more potential. However, the actual rate of significant progress and advancement has seemingly gone down (as someone said before, 15 years ago games were getting dramatically more advanced at an incredible pace, now all our advancement seems to be solely fixated on the visual aspects of games and many 'highly advanced' titles require access to high end computers that many people simply don't have, remember the issue Crysis had?).

3. Don't get me wrong, I acknowledge that BluRay has a higher resolution and screen quality and other things such as that but is by no means anywhere near as revolutionary a change as it was from VHS to DVD. Our first change to DVD was actually benifical in more ways than simply having more impressive visuals (you could store discs easier, you didn't have to rewind, they could be played on PC's and game consoles and other such bonuses), the change to BluRay meant only that the image quality was higher and that the discs held more content. It just doesn't seem like enough of a change to me to be a worthwhile advancement.

You make some good points as well.

 

[Bloodstain]

OMG OMG THAT IS SO AWESOME!!!!!

*ahem* Sorry.

I agree, Mr. Funk, I'd spend $15 for that, too.

 

[MachoFern]

I don't even want to know how much hell a developer will have to go through to get this on a console, particularly the ps3 with its difficult scripting architecture,although it would be awesome, I can't wait to see what this guy can do with water

I found the guys website, turns out Sprite used his engine for a commercial, also one of the articles on there shows his engine with smoke and fog effects
http://thiagocosta.net/

 

[Wolfram23]

It's called dedicated Physics Processing Unit (PPU). Nvidia's PhysX already does this, it has extremely realistic particle effects and smoke effects, but if you don't have an Nvidia card to run it, it will cause your game to run at 5fps or worse, and if you do have Nvidia but not a dedicated PhysX card, it'll cause large framerate drops during the extreme PhysX processing parts.

This physics engine looks great tho. I hope it's open source and allows GPU/PPU acceleration. I know AMD/ATI were supposed to be developing an open source physics engine called Bullet but it's been a bit of a flop IMO, certainly not up to par with PhysX.

Also, while that demo was awesome, that was not realistic dirt. It flowed way, way, way too much. Even if it was sand it flowed too much. Still, looked super sexy, and the other stuff was amazing - the cloth and water and jelly things.

PhsyX:
Cryostasis PhysX:
Batman: Arkham Asylum PhysX:
Dark Void:

And several others.

 

[Asehujiko]

3) Personally, I'm always stunned when people say they can't see a major difference between DVD and Blu-ray. Avatar is the most definitive title to compare (night and day difference, seriously), but if you have a good set-up, you're looking at image quality that is about 2-3x higher detail/fidelity than what is possible on DVD.

Storage mediums do NOT directly influence image quality. A video will look exactly the same whether it's played all at once from a blu-ray disk, in 2 hour chunks from a dvd, or frame by frame via NES cartridges.

 

[JeanLuc761]

3) Personally, I'm always stunned when people say they can't see a major difference between DVD and Blu-ray. Avatar is the most definitive title to compare (night and day difference, seriously), but if you have a good set-up, you're looking at image quality that is about 2-3x higher detail/fidelity than what is possible on DVD.

Storage mediums do NOT directly influence image quality. A video will look exactly the same whether it's played all at once from a blu-ray disk, in 2 hour chunks from a dvd, or frame by frame via NES cartridges.

Fair enough, but playing high definition video across multiple DVD isn't exactly appealing to consumers.