Ageia Phys X + Tse = Greatness?

#1 But what I dont get is this at the bottom, is it free or not?

The AGEIA PhysX SDK is free for non-commercial use. Standard pricing for commercial use is $50,000/title/platform. Licensed developers who implement PhysX accelerator support in their PC title are not required to pay this fee.

makes it seem as if its free for pc but not for xbox 360/ps3/wii?

#2

Quote:
The AGEIA PhysX SDK is free for non-commercial use. Standard pricing for commercial use is $50,000/title/platform.

Umm, nope it ain't free. It's free for non-commercial use only. Only Licensed developers have access to the good stuff. You will only get a license upon approval, forget about this if you're an indie. The best you can hope for is to become a registered developer. Even then you have to be serious to an extent, not a backyarder.

#3 There's been some talk about Aegia and TSE on their forums, if you're at all interested in that you should take a look =)

#4 I think i found something
http://support.ageia.com/ics/support/default.asp?deptID=1949

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Free:

* Non-commercial use
* PS3 platform (through Sony pre-purchase)
* Through some of our middleware partnerships, such as UE3, Gamebryo 2.2, and others--often limited to non-commercial use
* PC platform (if the game makes significant use of PhysX HW)

$50k per platform:

* All other uses
* Fee may be waived at our disgression for multi-platform developers providing PC HW support
* Fee may be waived at our disgression for some Tools & Middleware providers

What is "significant use"?

This will be specified in the contract, and may depend on the title, but general rules of thumb:

Grandmother test: If you show the game running on PhysX HW side-by-side with the non-HW version, your grandmother would be able to easily point out the differences.

Gamer test: The gamer is going to want to run your game with PhysX HW. In other words, we're helping you make your game (inexpensively, but with a world-class SDK), so you are helping us sell HW (by having a great game supporting PhysX HW).

Contract process

#5 PhysX in TSE is super easy to integrate. The resource works just the same.

#6 My only question with the side-by-side test is this. Is improved frame-rate enough? If it isn't, why would you *want* to use a library that will cause your game to *behave* differently with special hardware than it does without.

In the classic falling box example every physics library uses, what is the point of a physics library that causes the boxes to behave differently when the library has hardware acceleration than the software-implemented version?

Never been able to figure that out. Anybody here have any clue?

#7 .

#8

Quote:
PhysX chip manages prediction and keeps a simulation syncronized on the net as well. Proof of this, there is a MMORPG included in the chip's box.

Not pointing fingers at you Berserk, but you can't make the assumption that the card performs network synchronization ( it doesn't, in any way) simply because a MMOG is listed as using the SDK. There are quite a few techniques for using a physics SDK within a multi-player game that require zero synchronization (things such as non-game impacting eye candy is where it's used quite a bit, such as fluid dynamics for a waterfall/fountain).

Where the problem with the "mass market" (and this includes many indie developers that haven't done extensive research into the breakdowns between physics and networking) lies is that people tend to forget that just having a physics library/hardware means nothing--you still need to design your gameplay properly to use that capability, and more importantly to work seamlessly with your networked play. And that is something that I've said many times--no one has a fully physics controlled synchronized networked simulation of even hundreds of objects, much less thousands.