I want Physics

#1 Okay.

Why?

Just a question, but physics in games is one of my pet peeves since they are rarely actually used in the game.

My favorite examples are driving games. Grass texture = -100 MPH. And the proud proclaimation of having licensed Havok.

Physics can be extremely necessary to a game, but usually they're more necessary to distanced wow factors. Kind of like particles in the mid 90's. Oooh! Something's happening over there! Oh wait. It has no impact on the gameplay except to spawn enemies or distract me from something.

Another problem with physics in a low-entry-bar game engine is that many people want single-player physics in a multiplayer game. Why can't I accurately ghost a million particles boucing off each other? I need to know exactly which particle hits which character so I can make them bounce prettily!

Sorry; my pet peeve. I was happy to see that HL2 actually made use of physics in something related to gameplay. But I've pretty much been disappointed before and since (RE4 and games like RocketBowl or TubeTwist excluded).

Physics have such potential for gaming. I just wish they were actually used rather than simply advertised.

#2 David: to be fair though, vehicle games do need physics, and the vehicle collision aspects of TGE are a disgrace (the basic driving physics are OK).

#3 I just want to have realistic ragdoll
and basic physics like box , cylinder and sphere
with mass , gravity , collision and friction

these arent hard to make and wont have an inpact on the preformance (except from ragdoll)

in Half Life 2 the physics slowdown the game in Swat 4 they dont they just make it more realistic and more fun with just the basic things.
(the physics in hl2 are just a hype as mentiont above)

I saw that there are rigid body included in tge can i test them out or use them in a multiplayer game ?

#4 Dave has a point,
i think physics is just trimming and sort of silly
unless it's really a core part of gameplay.

Gish uses a lot of physics in gameplay,
as do most (all?) Chronic Logic games.

actually, i think the first game i played
which really had rigid-body physics influencing gameplay
was Yoshi's Island on the SNES !

that game was fantastic.

#5

Quote:I saw that there are rigid body included in tge can i test them out or use them in a multiplayer game ?

Have a look at this resource - Rigid Shape Resource

#6 Hi all,

Does anyone successfully integrate dynamic physics
(eg. ODE , Tokamak , Newton , Ageia Physx, etc.)
into TGE??? Any sample codes?

irrlicht already do so. They have codes and videos showing.
http://irrlicht.sourceforge.net/tutorials.html

It seems strange that Torque could not and
no one have considered this before.

edit:
(If physics could be added to TGE, it wiil become its main weakness.)

Thanks in advance
Sammy
:)

#7 The problem lies in networked physics, not physics themselves. 21-6 integrated ODE (as have others). Newton's been worked on as well. Unfortunately, people often expect the most advanced physics with amazing numbers of collisions over a network.

#8 You can get good physics over a network, just not over the internet unless you have at least 128k upload. We got some pretty good physics going with 100 boxes and several vehicles in our non torque game.

Since we had network LOD tied into the camera frustrum and objects were updated depending on how fast they were moving, it all worked out really well. Wouldn't know where to begin in torque though.

I think that bowling game could have easily had network physics in.

#9 Hi all,

I just know that Truevision 6.5 has integrated Newton physics.
And the users there say they could integrate other physics lib easily.
Oh, my god!

Sammy
:(

#10

Quote:i want ... in TSE
Ragdoll and phisics aaahhh

Great. Start here.

#11 @Adrian
Strangely enough, I'm an Aurora licensee. Fun stuff! It can definitely be done, but I'm not sure where or how the impact would occur either. I have yet to see a game that has networked physics as extensive as many people clamor for on development forums, though. I rarely see single-player games with such physics! I believe the problem with bowling and ODE (RocketBowl) was the size of the hulls which had to be checked for adequate collisions on a low-end network. I'm thinking (and could probably look up several topics which mentioned it) that it was a bandwidth metric issue for their target market which killed networked physics. But I'm not sure. My memory's kinda foggy.

@Sammy
So do a number of engines. It depends on how the engine, API, etc is set up. TV/Irrlicht/Nebula/C4/Unity/BeyondVirtual/etc/etc/etc have done some ground-up approaches to people's desire for physics in games. Blitz3D and DarkBasic have physics plug-ins (DarkBasic soon having an Aegia add-on). People have implemented ODE and Newton into TGE, though since it is not a game API but a structured engine, there are a lot of hooks that API engines don't necessarily have. There are several areas where TGE beats out TV3D/etc/etc just like there are areas where those engines clearly shine. It depends on your focus. If your focus is only physics because you want to make Incredible Machine 3, then Unity would be a fun choice (and an easy one to get up and running with minimal overhead). But who knows. I don't know what your dream game or dream engine is.

#12 I'd be happy if I could just get consistent collision detection from high-speed vehicles using the rigid body method already present in the engine. =\

#13 Hi David, cool that you have Aurora. for the MP stuff we actually used a heavily modified version of the old BPpro_lite for networking, along with tokomak which has some useful networking functionality built in. So not Aurora yet, we were actually thinking of using either TNL or Rakknet with our personal projects. One of the biggest problems we get with networking are router problems, which Torque seems to handle really well.

Aurora uses Ogre, which has several physics solutions ODE, Tokomak, Newton, Novodex and TruAxis avaliable for it, but you still have to build your own engine framework and find a networking solution for yourself. I think networking is a pretty important part of making a non casual Indie game stand a better chance of success. So definately something not to be overlooked in a hurry when picking an engine.

#14 Physics would be nice to add a bit more realism........but other than that........i mean, u can definately use it for gameplay, but unless u do it's not really necessary for anything other than bells and whistles.

#15 I was under the impression torque already had a physics engine?

#16

Quote:
If Torque would have this all other game engine can be thrown in the trashcan

What a silly thing to say.

Quote:
I was under the impression torque already had a physics engine?

It does, basic physics, collision detection, rigid body, vehicle physics. What's being discussed here is intergration of a more advanced physics engine allowing for more realistc physics and with integration into more game play objects.

#17 Torque has very basic physics built-in. out of the box, torque does simple things like basic kinematics, gravity, force, and friction. these guys are talking about more complex physics concepts like inverse kinematics, moment of inertia, and angular momentum. basically these kinds of things also take the shape of the object into consideration.

for instance in torque, if you have one box on top of another, if you push the top box off it wouldnt rotate. it would just fall flat to the ground and stop.

in a proclaimed physics engine, the box would tip over a bit before it falls like in real life. it would rotate a bit while falling, hit the ground and rotate a bit to align to the ground plane. the main feature of a physics engine is that it acts differently depending on the shape. if it were a sphere instead of a box, the simulation would be different to compensate for the shape.

#18 We just added the Ageis Physics SDK to our engine, and whilst talking to the guy there about indie stuff he said that GG already had a networked physics solution for TSE that was done before IGC last year. It's probably only a matter of time before they release it to the community.

#19 I also remember the Novocode demo from a while ago. I'm not sure what happened to it, though--well, I know what happened to the company...they became Aegia. But I'm not sure about the demo.

#20 We just added the Ageis Physics SDK to our engine, and whilst talking to the guy there about indie stuff he said that GG already had a networked physics solution for TSE that was done before IGC last year. It's probably only a matter of time before they release it to the community.