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Nvidia PhysX 5.0
81–90 of 113 posts
Re: Nvidia PhysX 5.0
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think your comment is wrong and perhaps speaks to your own visual senses than any factual effect. There’s been so many advancements in the last ten years outside of raytracing. Better character motion, better character AI, spatial audio, audio materials, speech matching just off the top of my head. Every single thing about games has gotten noticeably better for realism. One only needs to watch a Digital Foundry vid…
character motion being the same old animations, just done/interpolated better the only advancement I know of which got close to be implemented in games is https://github.com/sebastianstarke/AI4Animation (I think Sebastian worked with EA or some other big company at some point) - still haven't played anything using this though
What a surface level take.
Firstly, we’ve been doing the “same old animations” for a very long time, and in most areas of content.
Secondly, they aren’t they same old animations, technologies to produce them are becoming higher precision, more efficient, and better in many ways.
Continuing on, the amount of work being poured into dynamic animation, IK, and the like is significant.
Various locomotion systems, including AI4Animation that you linked are becoming significant contributions. Though crazy you single that out as an exception, because it is also using the “same old animations” just a large unstructured set of them. But this work is a direct continuation of motion matching, which also works on large datasets of unstructured animations, and *has* shipped in quite a few titles, and is a very significant jump in how animation is done today.
And that’s just animation.
https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1023280/Motion-Matching-and-Th...
Re: Nvidia PhysX 5.0
#83[dead]
Re: Nvidia PhysX 5.0
#84What 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.
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
They use PhysX with rust bindings for this. https://github.com/EmbarkStudios/physx-rs
Re: Nvidia PhysX 5.0
#85What 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.
Designers figured out that it's hard to make physics-based gameplay that's fun and interesting and doesn't break the game in various ways. Physics-driven games in the HL2 style are then almost their own genre - it has to be a conscious design choice - so most games don't try to make complex physics core to gameplay, they just use it as window-dressing. There's a lot of impressive window-dressing these days! But I don…
Also realistic physics is very hard on multiplayer. The more detailed the simulation the more data you have to keep in sync.
Re: Nvidia PhysX 5.0
#86Not to be THAT guy, but Physx is basically reaching EOL. I'm sure a few mid sized studios who want to roll their own engine can still take advantage of the core, but with UE5 completely replacing Physx with Chaos and the "ballast" around the core (Blast/Flex...) being as useless as ever, I don't see the Physx adoption increasing.
Re: Nvidia PhysX 5.0
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Noita game features huge 2D levels where gasses and liquids interact with magic spells. Teardown has completely destructible voxel levels. BeamNG driving simulation implements soft bodies, various experiments with its physics are popular on youtube. I don't think any of these use PhysX.
My only problem with Noita is that the back half of the game basically disregards most of the physics and chemistry systems. It’s more based around exploiting the build-a-wand system so you can e.g. generate infinite black hole chainsaw spells that let you blast through rock at a million miles an hour. It is the only game I am aware of that I would say has a true “chemistry engine” along side its physics engine. (Tho…
It's the great unanswered question: what works in game design?
It turns out wand building and extensive end-game/meta progression is far more engaging than most other things. IIRC there was more chemistry early on (I think there was/still is cooking?) and more rogue-like elements like satiation, but wand-building combined with the world physics turned out to be such immense fun, that it eclipsed everything else.
Re: Nvidia PhysX 5.0
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not quite as easy as slapping on a good physics engine and call it a day. A good integration with a decent physics engine feels better in-game than a superb physics engine with a bad integration. When programming physics there's many ways of getting the desired behavior from the physics system, and as with all problem solving some solutions are better/more stable than others.
I don't doubt there are compromises being made. I guess I'm just a bit surprised that immersion via realistic physics isn't in higher (and competing) demand. It also seems to me there could be a lot of interesting gameplay mechanics to explore there.
There just isn't enough talent to make those games. People who are both good at programming and physics are very rare, and without them you are unlikely to produce programs that can use the physics system in reliable enough ways.
Re: Nvidia PhysX 5.0
#89For what it's worth, PhysX 4.0 (2018) was also Open Source (3-clause BSD license). Previous discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18589494
Ok, we've edited that bit out now. Thanks!
(Submitted title was "Nvidia PhysX 5.0 is now open source")
Re: Nvidia PhysX 5.0
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 fu…
You are right, but I think it goes back and forth. I can recall seeing a game I was working on (Homefront 2?) where it looked surprisingly photo real - at least as a prototype. But the physics took you out of the illusion as soon as anything moved.
Nowadays I see developers doing amazing things with shaders, like you said. And stylized models are easier to make, but also less in the uncanny valley.
Realism can be cheaper when you don't care about optimizing, or AI can optimize for you. When you can scan in objects and it is workable in a game engine that's cheaper than designing them. We're there with mo-cap vs character animation.