Have physics been forgotten?

I

infin|ty

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Jun 20, 2003
Messages
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Is it just me, or is there a lack of emphasis put on game physics? When HL2 came out the physics were amazing, I was so amped when they showed off the physics demo.

I feel like since then, that side of gaming has totally stagnated, if not reverted. I can't remember the last time I played a game, especially multiplayer that had good physics.

Any games out there with on par or better physics than HL2?
 
I think modern games are expected to have solid / realistic physics and it's no longer a gimmick or a surprise to see them. It's an organic part of the modern gaming experience.

The only time I notice physics at this point is if they are glitching, poorly implemented or non existent.
 
Physics are there, they're just hidden behind fancy graphics. Back in the HL2 days physics were a big deal so there was more emphasis.
 
This, unless it's a physics-based gameplay type title, it's something taken mostly for granted nowadays. Play any battlefield 3 lately?
 
For me, it's the little things like running animations (too basic with little variation) and clothing (doesn't move). I hope this next generation can push these two aspect further along.
 
Phew! I thought I was going to wear myself out, constantly pushing downward, to stay planted on my butt.
 
Games are pumped out too fast to worry too much about physics i think. They're always trying to get away with the bare minimum especially these days.
 
My biggest gripe is hair physics. I feel like hair doesn't move...EVER!. For example, in Skyrim, my dude's beard never moves. Its completely stiff and I'm pretty sure hair spray didn't exists in Tamriel. Thankfully, AMD noticed this problem as well and brought TRESSFX to the party. Now if they can optimize it a little more, maybe I won't be so pissed off at hair.

Bottom line, I think physics development have stagnated since Source Engine. I'm sure Valve, HavoK, etc. are working on something better for the future.
 
With the new generation of consoles coming up, maybe we'll see more physics in video games. I saw a demo of a console game the other day, forgot what the title was. The guy was jumping around shooting fireball out of his hand destroying the environment.

The problem I see with TressFX though is that I'm not sure if the console's GPU have anything extra to spare for it. Simulating realistic hair in a room full of people will probably require significant amount of GPU power.
 
I found myself rather impressed with the physics in Crysis 3 -- particularly the water effects when you are running/jumping/shooting in it.
 
Yoshiyuki Blade said:
Starcraft 2: HotS had some neat physics effects implemented in. Take a look at the Ultralisk corpse on the ground skid across the screen after getting nuked: http://i.minus.com/i496Ht5KLWt55.gif
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Most RTS games have very good physics. It may be easier to implement since the amount of details required is scaled back. For example, destroying a building in a game like Command & Conquer takes a lot less computing power and particles to accurately portray than destroying a building in a game like Crysis.

IMO, each genre is at a different level when it come to physics. Some of the best physics I've every seen / dealt with are in the sports genre. The Japanese baseball game Pro Yakyuu Spirits has the absolute best ball and bat physics. Nothing about them is unrealistic. The console game Backbreaker (American football game) used their own Natural Motion engine to simulate tackling perfectly.
 
AMD always seemed to like physics (going as far back as the work AMD did for Turbine's DDO; DX11 work & water physics, then following with Lotro), they even kept the dedicated module in their 79xx cards at the expense of increased power usage. With the upcoming consoles, we might have a good chance to see more physics being used... All the tools are there, it's up to the studios really...
 
Cod said:
My biggest gripe is hair physics. I feel like hair doesn't move...EVER!. For example, in Skyrim, my dude's beard never moves. Its completely stiff and I'm pretty sure hair spray didn't exists in Tamriel. Thankfully, AMD noticed this problem as well and brought TRESSFX to the party. Now if they can optimize it a little more, maybe I won't be so pissed off at hair.

Bottom line, I think physics development have stagnated since Source Engine. I'm sure Valve, HavoK, etc. are working on something better for the future.
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You Skyrim character never bathes. That beard is a crusty stalactite.
 
why do people have such a hardon for tressfx? because lara "brit tits mcgee" croft had it? it's shit. completely worthless to the industry, and will be forgotten beyond the one game they used it on to push a few cards off the shelves. amd will do nothing with this, just like all their other halfassed promo shenanigans, because they never do any practical r&d.

physx on the other hand, I think you're going to see alot more of this especially on consoles. ever since nvidia wised up and started campaigning hard with gpu independent opencl/cuda sdk, devs can still target cpus for simple effects on the console, while enabling the gpu features for their pc versions. even with amd hardware in them, they will still end up using nv opencl, just because their tools are so much more advanced, essentially skirting around this little branding problem.

what's amd going to do, forbid devs from using an sdk of their choice on oem hardware? thumbs up their asses.

Yakk said:
All the tools are there, it's up to the studios really...
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exactly, and if there's anything studios hate more, it's doing actual work. so the best api always wins.
 
mas said:
why do people have such a hardon for tressfx? because lara "brit tits mcgee" croft had it? it's shit. completely worthless to the industry, and will be forgotten beyond the one game they used it on to push a few cards off the shelves. amd will do nothing with this, just like all their other halfassed promo shenanigans, because they never do any practical r&d.
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None of us are saying TressFX is the best innovation of 2012/13. I merely brought it up since I have a gripe with hair physics in most games and its refreshing to see that a company is actively seeking ways to fix this.

PhysX is constantly getting better, but in my opinion, PhysX is being refined more than innovative. Don't get me wrong, I appreciate their effors to perfect what they've created, but it nice to see something new brought to the table sometimes.
 
infin|ty said:
Is it just me, or is there a lack of emphasis put on game physics? When HL2 came out the physics were amazing, I was so amped when they showed off the physics demo.

I feel like since then, that side of gaming has totally stagnated, if not reverted. I can't remember the last time I played a game, especially multiplayer that had good physics.

Any games out there with on par or better physics than HL2?
Click to expand...

Actually a lot of games employ physics into their engine. It's just that in most cases, it is seamlessly integrated into the core gameplay. So you aren't blatantly doing physics things. It's just part of the inner workings.

But, there are plenty of games where the gameplay is blatantly based around physicas. To name a couple:

Portal
Little Big Planet
Trials HD/Trials Evolution (recently released on PC)
 
infin|ty said:
Is it just me, or is there a lack of emphasis put on game physics? When HL2 came out the physics were amazing, I was so amped when they showed off the physics demo.

I feel like since then, that side of gaming has totally stagnated, if not reverted. I can't remember the last time I played a game, especially multiplayer that had good physics.

Any games out there with on par or better physics than HL2?
Click to expand...

Half-Life 2 actually uses the Havok physics engine. So does Halo 2 and all of the newer Halos, Killzone 2 and 3, and about a million other games. You can see the massive list here. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Havok_physics

There are some pretty cool Crysis 3 physics youtube videos out there, as well as some Unreal Engine 3 ones using Physx processing with a huge tornado tearing everything up. PlanetSide 2 has some nice PhysX effects.

The gameplay isn't based around physics for most games like HL2, but the realism is there and it is mostly just used for eye candy.
I think the only big physics gameplay games I've played since HL2 were Prey and Portal 1 and 2.
 
People think HL2 was big on physics? Wow lol..

I recall an old game called Trespasser :)
 
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I think physics have been "forgotten" because the level of physics people want that would drastically effect gameplay (i.e. fully destructible environments) are not feasible at this point in time or have a poor effort : profit ratio.

It seems that the level of physics that can currently be thrown into games usually just results in a meaningless addition in terms of gameplay to what usually comes standard or glorified particle effects and other fluff a la PhysX.
 
I miss the Red faction GeoMOD engine where you could put a hole in any wall you wanted. In fact, I used to make tunnles in the glass house stage. hours of fun with a rocket launcher....
 
Warrior said:
I miss the Red faction GeoMOD engine where you could put a hole in any wall you wanted. In fact, I used to make tunnles in the glass house stage. hours of fun with a rocket launcher....
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haha indeed...I really loved the original, and Guerrilla was a great reminder of what GeoMod could do.

Nowadays physics seems to be very limited in most games, generally relegated to ragdoll and explosion/spark simulations. Nothing very exciting.

To be honest I'm not sure physics (physx, Aegia fans?) is really the next step for gaming...
 
thank good ole ati for not a accepting the phsyx offer so i can never have nice physx based water that effects gameplay all so ATI wouldn't loose the few frames they need to keep up with nvidia.
 
Its nvida thats at fult not amd. If nvida wanted they could make it cpu based or work on a nvida gpu. If they made the dam thing multi thread it would run fine on cpus. I wish some one would make a good physics eng that was veary multi threaded. Nvida physics won't lead anywhere in the long run unless they open it upmore
 
tunatime said:
Its nvida thats at fult not amd. If nvida wanted they could make it cpu based or work on a nvida gpu. If they made the dam thing multi thread it would run fine on cpus. I wish some one would make a good physics eng that was veary multi threaded. Nvida physics won't lead anywhere in the long run unless they open it upmore
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PhysX does work on CPU, but that's not the aim. The aim is to bring physics simulation to GPU which due to it's parallelism (and the nature of physics simulation), is far superior than on multicore CPU. Physics simulation needs thousands of simple parallel cores rather than a handful of complex processor core (which is what the general purpose CPU is). Stuff like fluid dynamics cannot be efficiently simulated on the CPU.

This is the reason why we had Ageia. Ageia took advantage of the fact that physics simulation is inefficient on CPU. With the advancement in GPGPU, modern GPU are capable of doing what Ageia set out to do. Havok had their own GPU version too, Havok FX but I'm not sure what happened to it. AMD TressFX also utilizes GPU power.

Multi core CPU only allows more of the same, but I believe physics on GPU is necessary to introduce new game changing physics. I'm just not sure how we can take that step without requiring additional cost for additional GPU (since we still need GPU for graphics). Perhaps in 10 years time we'll have enough processing power for graphics that game dev will finally be willing to use any additional GPU power for physics. :p
 
Hornet said:
Perhaps in 10 years time we'll have enough processing power for graphics that game dev will finally be willing to use any additional GPU power for physics. :p
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Could this future for SLI / Crossfire setups? Instead of having dual graphics, one could be utilized for physics processing while the other is used for solely for graphics processing.

My knowledge of how GPUs work is limited, so my statement above may be moronic :)
 
It's possible we'll see a jump in physics evolution due to the new consoles, and due to Nvidia wanting to compete with the AMD-powered consoles, which may lead them into improving PhysX or coming up with a "PhysX 2" or something.

The area I always see skipped over is quality sound production and design (not including music, voice acting, etc.). Aside from the recent Battlefield games and the Dead Space games, sound in AAA releases is either ordinary or - in the case of COD - downright fucking terrible.
 
Plague_Injected said:
The area I always see skipped over is quality sound production and design (not including music, voice acting, etc.). Aside from the recent Battlefield games and the Dead Space games, sound in AAA releases is either ordinary or - in the case of COD - downright fucking terrible.
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Check out Company of Heroes 2, the sound design is amazing in that game.
 
Cod said:
Could this future for SLI / Crossfire setups? Instead of having dual graphics, one could be utilized for physics processing while the other is used for solely for graphics processing.

My knowledge of how GPUs work is limited, so my statement above may be moronic :)
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You can have a separate card for PhysX already. You don't put them in SLI because they act as separate cards.
 
tunatime said:
Its nvida thats at fult not amd. If nvida wanted they could make it cpu based or work on a nvida gpu. If they made the dam thing multi thread it would run fine on cpus. I wish some one would make a good physics eng that was veary multi threaded. Nvida physics won't lead anywhere in the long run unless they open it upmore
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CPU are just not ready for anything more than cloth blowing in the wind, run the nvidia liquid demo on CPU only and you will get a good idea of where physics sit in terms of performance.

Although it is rather interesting that in the fluid demo, turning hardware of with "H" will make my CPU performance drop to 10% when Hardware is on it jumps to 20%
 
Cod said:
Could this future for SLI / Crossfire setups? Instead of having dual graphics, one could be utilized for physics processing while the other is used for solely for graphics processing.

My knowledge of how GPUs work is limited, so my statement above may be moronic :)
Click to expand...

The future? This has been possible for how many years now? 4 of 5 I think.
 
sharknice said:
You can have a separate card for PhysX already. You don't put them in SLI because they act as separate cards.
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You can sli them, heavy physx games you set one to physx otherwise you can set it to sli for more performance.
 
kinda like the sunburst that makes games REAL FUN.
Every game had to add that one, N E S W it didn't matter where you were facing we can do a cool blinding effect.
Everyone expected physics to make some great new game play, it was hype and nothing more, not needed but like the blinding fun it looked good on the box.
 
like with AI, it's much easier and more lucrative for devs to settle on 'adequate' instead of jumping through the hoops of making something innovative and cool work on 7 year old console hardware, and instead spend their time implementing player progression to keep people playing and buying DLC.

Indie devs with less of a team and budget can afford to do innovative physics for just the PC, but I bet it's really tricky making a game around physics without it feeling like more of the same. The kickstarted game 'Sui Generis' looks pretty cool though - physics run the world and animations, there's no gimmick
 
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