ScotteusMaximus
Limp Gawd
- Joined
- Oct 2, 2005
- Messages
- 415
i just read this in an interview with gabe newell. not sure if you guys have seen it before or not.
full article here.
GI: I think you guys have one of the best physics setups in gaming, and with things like Aegia and what Havok is doing with NVidia, how will you implement that in Half-Life?
Newell: There are a couple of different issues going on there. With our physics, the player can collide with objects. This is a good thing. The stuff that is being shown by NVidia right now, the latencies are too high. Their physics is essentially to make prettier pictures. Its like you can have a bunch of different things bouncing around so long as they dont actually touch anything that matters. If you dont actually have to read the data out if your AI system ever needed to know about whether or not one of those objects had collided with something else it would run slower by running on the GPU than having it run on the main CPU. So physics that matter is different than physics that makes pretty pictures.
The presentation quality is fine. I think we went through a round of that with graphics acceleration. It wasnt until it enabled different types of games, games that involve the game logic being able to ascertain the state of the physics system I think that thats the really important long term direction from everybody. So having pretty explosions is cool, but you stop seeing it pretty quickly. You only see the stuff that actually matters. Theres still a lot of work to be able to figure out how to get an order of magnitude or two orders of magnitude improvement in that kind of physics. Thatll be a big challenge for everybody.
full article here.