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Nvidia PhysX 5.0

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Re: Nvidia PhysX 5.0

#71
post #25

What are some games that have impressive physics nowadays? I remember being very impressed with Half-Life 2 back in the day, seemed like a leap. All spectacular looking games with crude physics nowadays remind me of those hi-res ports of old console titles, in an ajar way.

I'm very impressed with Trine [0] and I noticed it has the Nvidia PhysX logo on startup. The entire game is based on physics puzzles and the graphics are gorgeous.

[0] https://www.nintendo.com/store/products/trine-enchanted-edit...

Re: Nvidia PhysX 5.0

#74
Note this isn't really fully open source as the CUDA kernels for PhysX aren't distributed and the HLSL code for Flow isn't included either (only Vulkan and DX12 bytecode is included, no sources). Happy to be wrong if someone finds the code for these :)

Re: Nvidia PhysX 5.0

#75
post #51
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The CPU on xbox one/ps4 is very weak. Developers have to sacrifice physics.

The whole point of PhysX is to run it on the GPU.

That's not true at all. PhysX comes with a CPU solver by default, and using the GPU version comes with significant restrictions in customising the behaviour. Unreal Engine games (when they used to use PhysX) were all CPU based, for example.

Re: Nvidia PhysX 5.0

#76
post #25

What are some games that have impressive physics nowadays? I remember being very impressed with Half-Life 2 back in the day, seemed like a leap. All spectacular looking games with crude physics nowadays remind me of those hi-res ports of old console titles, in an ajar way.

Instruments of Destruction, still in Early Access: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1428100/Instruments_of_De...

Re: Nvidia PhysX 5.0

#77
post #60
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Embark Studios are making a game called "The Finals" which leans very heavily on destructionn. The trailer has some really impressive building collapses and other loud looking events: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X84w4DWEEes

Embark was founded by a lot of the old school DICE guys. Really excited for what they bring to the table. Also iirc they are big on Rust and are supporting a lot of grassroots projects in the Rust gamedev space

The destruction in the trailers reminds me a lot of Bad Company 2 when it was possible to level the battlefield. Later games dumbed down the destruction or had scripted destruction sequences.

Re: Nvidia PhysX 5.0

#78
post #25

What are some games that have impressive physics nowadays? I remember being very impressed with Half-Life 2 back in the day, seemed like a leap. All spectacular looking games with crude physics nowadays remind me of those hi-res ports of old console titles, in an ajar way.

The reason is money - it costs money (artists) to make destructible objects and art down for every conceivable way it can be broken/destroyed/manipulated. I hope/pray for a Battlefield 7 game that actually takes this seriously, but EA has run Battlefield into the ground.

Bad Company 2 came close to this and for me was probably the most fun and thrilling Battlefield game ever.

Re: Nvidia PhysX 5.0

#79
post #26
post #25

What are some games that have impressive physics nowadays? I remember being very impressed with Half-Life 2 back in the day, seemed like a leap. All spectacular looking games with crude physics nowadays remind me of those hi-res ports of old console titles, in an ajar way.

apart from games going from 2k to 4k to 8k, there hasn't been any noticeable improvement in realism in the past 10 years. ray tracing if enabled looks nice but that's pretty much the height of it, characters look just as janky as they did 10 years ago. I feel the primary reason are the consoles, game devs can't push the boundaries as most consoles are around 5-6 years behind gaming PCs.

The pursuit of realism hit diminishing returns years ago; the manpower needed to make a game hyper-realistic isn't justified by the number of additional sales it will produce. Instead of becoming more realistic, most games have instead focused on having more bright neon particles swirling around on screen. That's much cheaper and much more effective than chasing further realism.

This will likely change in the near future as the industry invents ways to replace human modelers, texture artists, etc, with automated "AI" tools.

Re: Nvidia PhysX 5.0

#80
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looking at a gameplay video on YT ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P--c8rjcSDs ), I didn't come away with the same impression as you described, or at least it doesn't really answer the parent's question. Sure, it is "fully destructible" but everything kinda breaks the same way because it's all voxels, and things like driving a seemingly indestructible truck through multiple walls doesn't feel particularly realistic.…

Uhhh, Physics are indeed a major part of Teardown. the breaking of the Voxels themselves may not be individually impressive, but it's the nearly entirely destructible Environment with per Voxel calculated Materials that IS impressive. Voxels can be of a wide range of Materials, giving them, well, unique properties. that allows things to be strong, weak, and all sorts of other properties. Driving a Truck through a Bui…

They are impressive on a technical level, especially given how well everything runs. However, I think that the other was pointing out that the game feel/presentation itself was a bit lacking - not having much momentum to it, or just the destruction itself not feeling particularly eye catching (even if the gameplay is fun, due to you needing to act within a time limit).

I'm inclined to somewhat agree, because you can still have situations where buildings can be hanging on due to a single voxel and will refuse to fall down, and when they do there's no sense of weight, instead they just kind of plop down. Very much the same how the cars and such also feel awkward.

It doesn't detract from the gameplay much, and it's not like that makes the game bad, but personally I think that the Red Faction Guerilla game felt a bit better. Of course, it was geared more towards presentation and had a large studio behind it, rather than being very technically accurate, so the goals are a bit different than those of Teardown (interesting setpieces vs procedural destruction).

Here's a few random YouTube videos:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n16pZxHBo4o

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXmKlVZmvRg

It is pretty awesome to see projects like either game, though! Even engines like VOXLAP were interesting: http://advsys.net/ken/voxlap.htm That's actually more or less what powered the old Ace of Spades game, which is now Open Spades: https://openspades.yvt.jp/ (not as focused on destruction, but rather having large maps with lots of voxels, a fun game)

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