ET:QW Physics technology?

(Kaider) #1

Does anyone have any information regarding QW and support for PPUs (physics processing units) or any kind of advanced physics? And will the game have realistic physics to some extent, possibly like Source but maybe not to the same extent, seeing as how this game will be much larger in scale. It’s running on the Doom 3/Quake 4 engine as far as I can tell by looking at it, so my guess is that it’d have similar physics to those two.

(carnage) #2

i take it you have not been reading the reviews and listend to to paul wedgwood rant on about all the vehicles make differnt and extensive use of the physics system… etc

(Mordenkainen) #3

Re the OP’s question of whether ET:QW will make use of hardware to accelerate the physics system; the devs are more than welcome to prove me wrong but:

  1. id doesn’t like to license middleware solutions because it wants to be able to release the source of their games ~5 years later and to use this ETQW would have to use the PhysX or Havok FX APIs.
  2. John Carmack has said in his QCon '05 keynote that he doesn’t believe PPUs will take off any time soon. He even went on to say he thinks physics can lead to very fragile and slow game logic.
  3. If the game was using it then either PhysX or Havok would have released a PR shouting their lungs out that the almighty id was using their technology.
  4. The first PPU parts will be expensive and will only allow for raising the number of rigid bodies. PhysX has admitted only the second generation of PPUs will be able to do cloth physics, liquid simulations, etc. See how much time it took games to support dual-core.