physics on PS3

[haggisns]

I just read an article on www.theinquirer.net

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=30434

Here is a snippet of it:

The problem is that physics can be two things, eye candy-like particle effects, ripples and visual stunts, or hardcore collision detection, proximity effects like gravity, and other play affecting effects. One is frosting, the other is a V8 engine. The Nvidia slides seem to indicate that the physics data and results in its methodology stay on the cards, and only go out as pretty pictures. This interpretation seems to be backed up by The Tech Report.

So, the SLI physics engine can make water fall, ripples move, and rocks from the exploding cliff wall bounce off each other in a way that would be damn near impossible to do on a CPU. It can't however make those things interact with your player, the ripples may look like they are washing over your legs, and the rocks bounce off your shins, but it won't cause in game collisions.

The Ageia way of doing things is the 'real deal', it can make things bounce, cars crash, and have the game work with it. The gravity of the asteroid can pull your ship off course at a critical time just before the warp jump in ways that SLI physics, in V1.0 at least, can't.






Although they mention NVIDIA I am aware the physics capabilities will derive from the CELL SPUs (and of course this annoucement is way to late to fit into the PS3).

I am wondering of the physics for PS3 is "eye candy" or real "meat and potatos"

Haggisns

[cliffbo]

Although they mention NVIDIA I am aware the physics capabilities will derive from the CELL SPUs (and of course this annoucement is way to late to fit into the PS3).

I am wondering of the physics for PS3 is "eye candy" or real "meat and potatos"

aren't ageia working closely with PS3. best of both world. three if you include cell :)

[Sevin]

im probably wrong but i thought sometimes developers made thier own physics engines for games so why would this effect them? someone fill me in with some info.

[cliffbo]

im probably wrong but i thought sometimes developers made thier own physics engines for games so why would this effect them? someone fill me in with some info.

yes you are right but with rising costs a lot of devs will buy engines and not waste time building them. fine by me if they work well.

[cpiasminc]

yes you are right but with rising costs a lot of devs will buy engines and not waste time building them. fine by me if they work well.
In terms of money, it typically costs more to buy a physics engine than to build one. Either way, you have to pay physics coders to tear away at it (in the case of buying, you have to pay for the coders and the engine). All physics engines fail catastrophically in all parts of their code under *some* circumstances. So as the game progresses, you're going to hit more and more of these cases, and you have to either work the game around the engine or work the engine around the game (or both).

The main advantage you get is that content creation tools are already built, which is generally the hard part of any engine of any type. And they'll be tools used throughout various studios.