Physics?

[Adam Brennecke]

We will be using PhysX provided through Unity.

[Juneau]

Awesome, throw a fireball watch it immolate the unlucky foe and scatter debris in all directions. *imagines*

 

edit - this is why I love developers who talk with their customers. You learn stuff :D Thank you.

Edited January 23, 2013 by Juneau

[samm]

They're looking for readily available cloth sims, which leaves Havok, PhysX, and Bullet.  

 

 

PhysX's cloth sim actually performs better on a CPU than Bullet's cloth sim.  Download them both and see for yourself.  This is easy for you to verify for yourself.

 

Bullet requires too much work to make it worth using.  It is currently at the state that Havok was in back in 2004, which is to say it very often looks like ass due to it's poor collision detection (see VtMB dresses riding up female characters), let alone the extremely poor performance when compared to the other two.

 

The choice is really between Havok and PhysX. 

Seems you have more insight on the current situation Thanks for sharing! Regarding VtMB: Not only Havok was used in a sub-optimal way, their version of the Source Engine wasn't really up to speed either

 

Wouldn't it be easier to go to the Unity forums and ask what version of PhysX they are running?  Considering the article samm talks about in the first post is over 2 years old and just from a quick google I can see people talking about physX 2.0 during that period and expecting better optimization from 3.0 I'd think bashing PhysX based on outdated information is probably a waste of everyones time.

Very sensible suggestion However, this is the internet, I'm lazy, already have an account here as opposed to the Unity boards, and google didn't spit out very helpful topics regarding the current state of PhysX in Unity. Only just now found the remark "Physics: Physics simulation is now using SSE2 on windows for better performance and to make simulation consistent with Mac OS X" in Unity 4's change list which tells me that at least nVidia found the compiler flags to get their engine up to the state of the art from year 2003 regarding cpu instruction sets

 

 

@Adam Brennecke: Thank you for your answer Do you by chance know which version? And will you / the dev(s) responsible for this plan to invest the extra effort to space independent physics related calculations across multiple threads?

[Drauka]

Since I'm not too much into PhysX, does this mean now that only people with NV GPUs will be able to see the good stuff, or will it be rendered on the CPU instead with no loss of quality?

 

At that point I'd like to mention one other thing that popped up with the last Tomb Raider: TressFX. What about good looking hair? I think it makes a huge difference with 3D characters.

[Frenetic Pony]

Hah, please don't get PE involved with crappy PhysX. If anything, you can use Bullet, which is actually open source.

 

They do two different things, or at least PhysX is often used for shiny FX while bullet doesn't have any of that built in (so far as I know). Regardless there are some things that could be done with how the game is set up technically.

 

I could see collision being done, fairly cheaply even. There are issues with missing info, right now unless you can "See it" on the screen, the game doesn't know that anything's there. Things might fall through an invisible hole in the ground a lot. But there are ways around that, another texture. Could flip a single 1 bit texture off some already stored one, use it only for collision, store an extra layer under that bridge or something.

 

In fact, using "screenspace collision" is a thing in some games. You could definitely get ragdolls, use physics for cool spell effects, even have things like bouncing sparks from a fireball, or explosive stuff. It would take a bit of work, but I'd say would be worth it to get a bunch of goblins ragdolling all over the place after getting exploded by a fireball.

 

BTW, Tress FX, c'mon you're so zoomed out from your characters anyway that it's not going to make much of a difference really.

Edited April 17, 2013 by Frenetic Pony

[Drauka]

BTW, Tress FX, c'mon you're so zoomed out from your characters anyway that it's not going to make much of a difference really.

 

Well in that case I could question the option to zoom in. I don't want characters that look good from afar, but more or less crappy when I zoom in. But we'll see how it turns out