How fast game physics develop.....Crysis.

[Taehoon]

http://ve3d.ign.com/videos/play/19490/PC/Crysis

check this one. I couldn't bring my jaw back for a while...

[cookepuss]

Meh. I am actually not impressed.

I've been programming since I was 7 years old actually. Even majored in CompSci in college. I can tell you, from practical experience, that crates are probably THE easiest test objects to use in a demo like this. With something like a crate, the bounding volume necessary for collision detection perfectly matches the dimensions of the test object. Perfect collision every time. Plus, since you're dealing with a cuboid, you can special case it and squeeze every last cycle of optimization out of it.

Had they done this demo with more arbitrary objects then I might have been impressed. Even a mix of other procedural primitives might have been more technically dazzling. Crates? Bah.

Let's see how this plays out in a real game. Once you factor in logic, sound, input, multiplayer networking, disk access, and any number of variables, the visual impact of this engine might be diminished over this demo. Right now, as a demo, its consuming every last CPU cycle for its own purposes - even when it is doing what it takes to maintain a constant frame rate.

All we're seeing here is a tech demo with special case objects, nice camera work, and artsy manipulation of the interactions. Again, let's see how well this plays out in real games. I'm still waiting for the real payoff from game genres that were supposed to be revolutionized by ragdoll physics.

Maybe I'm just skeptical after all of these years. It looks nice, but in much the same way that the Mario 128 demo did on the then code-named Nintendo Dolphin.

To me, the real revolution is going to come when more devs make use of multi-core CPUs. Imagine dumping all of your physics or graphics calculations onto a separate core.That'd leave your main core for much more complex AI and game routines. That's going to change the LOD in games much more than what you're seeing here now.

[vied]

http://img158.imageshack.us/img158/4185/jawhb9.gifhttp://img158.imageshack.us/img158/4185/jawhb9.gifhttp://img158.imageshack.us/img158/4185/jawhb9.gif

it surely makes me want to try nano suit on my computer :o

regardless of cpu speed? I don't understand it clearly because I know nothing about programing...
I wonder if P4 3.0 ghz processor can handle that kind of game graphics? :(

[cookepuss]

My guess is that it'll either drop frames, change LODs depending on circumstance, use impostors/placards, use lookup tables, cache solutions, or resort to some other CPU independent tricks. There are tons of ways to do stuff like this without burdening the CPU. (VFX teams do it all of the time on CG movies. In particular, Pixar had to do similar sort of trickery for "The Incredibles". In their case, their tricks were based on statistical analysis, cached solutions, and predictive behavior. Without such tricks, we'd still be waiting for the movie to render. :))

Also, don't necessarily buy all of the hype regarding CPU independence. Dave Perry and Shiny made the same exact claim regarding "Messiah" a number of years back. They claimed that their proprietary system of patched surfacing technology would make the game play equally well on all systems. The same claim was made of the "Jurassic Park: Trespasser"'s foliage tech. In both cases, this claim only turned out to be partially true. (Always pay close attention to minimum specs, btw. That'll always put that CPU independence hype to the test.)

If you look past the hype, you realize that you can't leave the CPU out of the equation. You can only minimize its negative impact on frame rate. CPU is just where its at, even if all you're using it for is to stream data. Let's just put it this way. If it were TRULY possible to free yourself from CPU dependence then we'd all still be using 386 processors in our PCs. :)

[Ramseus]

Uhhh.... I'm not trying to be dense, but uhh... how do I play this? It's a flash video, but yet I can't play it. Arrrgh, Vista.

[Ged]

regarless of cpu stuff its still pretty cool to look at also thanks to all the nice motionblur etc :)

[Deto]

Not fully on topic:

Regardless of CPU :D I got 4800+, some decent/good card and 2Gb and the game runs like quake 1, just that it looks much worse thanks to fully pixelated foliage everywhere. So far, the worst graphics engine I've seen in 'hit game'. As for game play, its nice shooter, that's all there really is.

And as finnish game magazine said.. So much for the physics when the game engine hardly even uses it. Only physics I really saw was the breaking trees, which itself was pretty unrealistic, or then the gunboat was pretty good at aiming to 3 meter high and shot CD size sharp metal discs instead of bullets. Not really physics, but I didn't see much else, except for people dying on their feet (and you wasting clipful of bullets on corpses, thinking they're still alive cause they move, ignore gravity and point their gun at you).

Then again, nano suit were nice. I really loved the angsty voice saying you're out of batteries ;)



On topic:

When one does physics engine, they should use it, else just stick to havoc which does pretty much the same :)

[Ramseus]

doh! I thought that was just an image, I didn't realise that was video player. Meh. That was pretty boring. Looks like all he was doing was spawning invisible tornadoes and invisibly blowing up crates.

[cookepuss]

When one does physics engine, they should use it, else just stick to havoc which does pretty much the same
Well said. A custom physics engine, while nice to have, is pretty pointless (imho) unless the physics itself affects gameplay in a tangible manner. Really, there is a reason why middleware exists. Companies that specialize in that stuff tend to do it much better and cover more ground because that's all they do.

I'm not down on Crysis, but I only hope that what we're being shown here is more than just a convenient distraction. If you're going to show us a physic engine then you better pony up with the physics-based puzzles. OR, like you said, go with Havoc or some other middleware solution.

[Ged]

Not fully on topic:

Regardless of CPU :D I got 4800+, some decent/good card and 2Gb and the game runs like quake 1, just that it looks much worse thanks to fully pixelated foliage everywhere. So far, the worst graphics engine I've seen in 'hit game'. As for game play, its nice shooter, that's all there really is.

I felt the same way when I played the demo. The engine technology is not scaleable, the quality settings just turn off more and more features until you are basically just left with a game with flat diffuse, no shaders, no lighting, with no painted or baked shadows. It goes from "next gen" to "2 gens ago" as you go from high settings to low. Surely if this was such an amazing engine/amazingly made game... it would be able to scale the special effects and shaders or at least fake them when you go down in quality. This way we could all play something that kind of looks like the game on the box, instead of having this chalk and cheese experience.