Nvidia PhysX 5.0(github.com) |
Nvidia PhysX 5.0(github.com) |
Previous discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18589494
(Submitted title was "Nvidia PhysX 5.0 is now open source")
Zelda Breath of the Wild is a recent example where the designers went all-in on physics-based gameplay and did an amazingly impressive job with it. But the hard part wasn't the technology, it was everything else.
It uses voxels and the game premise is destroying the environment to create an escape route once you trigger the alarm (by stealing required objects).
Someone else pointed to another game, The Finals, which feels waaay more realistic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGRoborkkw4
I just hope it isn't another Battle Royale because that I find that genre incredibly underwhelming vs. team-and-round-based gameplay like CS:GO or offline campaigns
It is the only game I am aware of that I would say has a true “chemistry engine” along side its physics engine. (Though props to designers of Zelda BotW for giving objects internal properties besides just velocity & mass that facilitate reactions and interactions. Falling sand games that Noita takes a lot of inspiration also often have “chemistry” interactions but generally don’t incorporate physics bodies and are more of a simulation toy box than a game).
Also iirc they are big on Rust and are supporting a lot of grassroots projects in the Rust gamedev space
A good integration with a decent physics engine feels better in-game than a superb physics engine with a bad integration.
When programming physics there's many ways of getting the desired behavior from the physics system, and as with all problem solving some solutions are better/more stable than others.
I hope/pray for a Battlefield 7 game that actually takes this seriously, but EA has run Battlefield into the ground.
I feel the primary reason are the consoles, game devs can't push the boundaries as most consoles are around 5-6 years behind gaming PCs.
There’s been so many advancements in the last ten years outside of raytracing. Better character motion, better character AI, spatial audio, audio materials, speech matching just off the top of my head.
Every single thing about games has gotten noticeably better for realism.
One only needs to watch a Digital Foundry video or a GDC talk to see the big uplifts.
10 years is a long time too and spans all the way back to the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 era. So your comment is nonsensical at best
This will likely change in the near future as the industry invents ways to replace human modelers, texture artists, etc, with automated "AI" tools.
But that engine also shows that you are not wrong with your remark about consoles holding progress back: The game barely ran on the ps4, and even on the ps5 you won't get stellar framerates... You need a really nice PC to run the thing smoothely...
[0] https://www.nintendo.com/store/products/trine-enchanted-edit...
Tetris?
Nvidia's own marketing page about the 5.0 release.
https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/open-source-simulation-exp...
Also, if you are building a game, wouldn't you want it to work on AMD GPU's too?
Since gfx benchmarking is stable and MemTest86 never found anything, the only other culprit would be power transients. I'm using a relatively modest 200 watt RTX 3060 ti so I hope it wouldn't be that.
Just wanted to bring this up because I'm not the only one that has experienced this, it was a recommendation from a Steam discussion. And by hard system crash I mean full system reboot.
After that, PhysX API was accelerated via CUDA and the dedicated PhysX ASICs were discontinued.
See positioning of NVidia Omniverse for example.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzIHI7y4ZG4
Which needed that separate physx card at the time. Wonder what ever happened to it.
> As we said before, installing the hardware automatically enables higher quality physics. We can't get a good idea of how much better the PhysX hardware would perform than the CPU, but we can see a couple facts very clearly.
So what you call a scam is down to implementation details. In a true like for like scenario the PPU would usually outperform the CPU implementation as long as your sync boundaries were clean to get stuff back from it, and pipe the transforms back to the GPU.
I wish people like yourself wouldn’t reach for incendiary language by default. It ruins any and all nuance in discussion.
This is great news. Bullet and others could benefit from this as well.
It turns out wand building and extensive end-game/meta progression is far more engaging than most other things. IIRC there was more chemistry early on (I think there was/still is cooking?) and more rogue-like elements like satiation, but wand-building combined with the world physics turned out to be such immense fun, that it eclipsed everything else.
They have a Rust game: https://medium.com/embarkstudios/embarks-creative-playground...
Which maybe be using their PhysX bindings but it's not The Finals
Also, relevant to this story, Embark does a lot of open source development in Rust, including physx-rs. The Finals is using Unreal Engine though.
Nowadays I see developers doing amazing things with shaders, like you said. And stylized models are easier to make, but also less in the uncanny valley.
Realism can be cheaper when you don't care about optimizing, or AI can optimize for you. When you can scan in objects and it is workable in a game engine that's cheaper than designing them. We're there with mo-cap vs character animation.
But yes the future for UE is chaos.
[1] to be fair fortnite used it, but clearly they optimized and fixed only the subset of features that fortnite uses.
The software is the clear winner of that. The team was fantastic, and one of them (John Ratcliff) helped kickstart my career. So it isn’t entirely off base to say that the PPU was… exaggerated.
>down to implementation details
Game is running 2 times slower. Nvidia favorite kind of technology. Tessellation, Gameworks, Hairworks, RTX, all run at lest 2x slower when enabled unless you buy Nvidia flagship hardware.
Did you know Nvidia physx library shipped compiled for FPU? At the time SSE2 was available for 10 years and SSE3 for 5 https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2010/07/did-nvidia-cripple-it... https://www.realworldtech.com/physx87/3/ Nvidia PR person tried claiming Physx actual computation is not a bottleneck, so they didnt bother optimizing :D If its not a bottleneck then why run it on GPU?
They’ve been busy moving the vast amount of the bits into the GPU firmware (not uncommon, this is how Apple and some others do it too).
I think the FOSS crowd made a bigger deal of it than it was because it appealed to their sensibilities.
The best new OSS-ish stuff from NVidia is their research, and things backing that research. They’ve released a lot of their nerf tech in the wild and Warp (a differential Python to CUDA transpiler) which are very cool.
the only advancement I know of which got close to be implemented in games is https://github.com/sebastianstarke/AI4Animation (I think Sebastian worked with EA or some other big company at some point) - still haven't played anything using this though
There’s been tons of advancements on higher fidelity motion, better interaction , pose blending, constraint targeting, secondary motion, pose based deformation etc..
Firstly, we’ve been doing the “same old animations” for a very long time, and in most areas of content.
Secondly, they aren’t they same old animations, technologies to produce them are becoming higher precision, more efficient, and better in many ways.
Continuing on, the amount of work being poured into dynamic animation, IK, and the like is significant.
Various locomotion systems, including AI4Animation that you linked are becoming significant contributions. Though crazy you single that out as an exception, because it is also using the “same old animations” just a large unstructured set of them. But this work is a direct continuation of motion matching, which also works on large datasets of unstructured animations, and *has* shipped in quite a few titles, and is a very significant jump in how animation is done today.
And that’s just animation.
https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1023280/Motion-Matching-and-Th...
That said, a lot of open source projects have console ports, they just can’t be shared publicly.
When the other people are talking about consoles, any sensible person knows they mean things like the PlayStation, Xbox or Switch.
I'm inclined to somewhat agree, because you can still have situations where buildings can be hanging on due to a single voxel and will refuse to fall down, and when they do there's no sense of weight, instead they just kind of plop down. Very much the same how the cars and such also feel awkward.
It doesn't detract from the gameplay much, and it's not like that makes the game bad, but personally I think that the Red Faction Guerilla game felt a bit better. Of course, it was geared more towards presentation and had a large studio behind it, rather than being very technically accurate, so the goals are a bit different than those of Teardown (interesting setpieces vs procedural destruction).
Here's a few random YouTube videos:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n16pZxHBo4o
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXmKlVZmvRg
It is pretty awesome to see projects like either game, though! Even engines like VOXLAP were interesting: http://advsys.net/ken/voxlap.htm That's actually more or less what powered the old Ace of Spades game, which is now Open Spades: https://openspades.yvt.jp/ (not as focused on destruction, but rather having large maps with lots of voxels, a fun game)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ttwBelIlLv8
I'm not aware of any other real-scale voxel game out there. This one has water physics (things float), cars are destructible (you saw a construction vehicle that can take a lot more damage before noticeable deterioration), and more. Cheers!
And not the fact that it's, you know, a "console" that can be used to play "games"?
Practically? Yes, IMO. You can say it uses specialized hardware manufactured on a massive scale, with each gen being a distinct set of hardware with slight variations, but then you're describing an Apple M1 Macbook Air or Microsoft Surface.
People have and will always gain root access, but the OEM doesn't typically like this, and goes out of their way to prevent it. There may be APIs the OEM leaves open to allow the creation of, for example, XMBC, but an XBox is hardly an open, general-purpose, computing platform.
If you want to call it a console that can play games, then my custom-build Linux computer console fits that definition. Hell, I wouldn't have to even leave the computer console TUI to play Dwarf Fortress.
So the differentiator these days seems to be running custom software.
Which Steam Deck is also running.
The remaining difference is "console = extra lockdown". That might be a good definition in general, but doesn't make sense in the context of the original post
> And only on PC and Mobile. Not on console.