Topic: Soft body physics in CryENGINE3

[-<WillyP>-]

Imagine physics like this in a Descent 4: Revolutionary soft-body physics in CryENGINE 3. [VIDEO]

[Scyphi]

Pretty cool.

Gaming technology has been making some other huge strides as of late, too.

Unreal Engine 4 NVIDIA GeForce680GTX

I personally would love to see a Descent game with a totally destructive environment. 

[Wraith-1]

"If we do a straight, pure, physics simulation his clothing might get wrapped around his neck..."

That'd be an interesting way to die in a game 

A fully destructible Descent game would be fun, but due to the maze-like gameplay there'd have to be something to keep people from just blasting straight through walls.

[-<WillyP>-]

Maybe, maybe not. Of course, the level designer would have to take that into consideration. For example there could be some material that is not destructible, or since it is a mine, perhaps material could fall from above filling in the hole.

Or blasting through the wall could be part of the game play.

[Scyphi]

I've already been considering the logistics of destructible environments in Descent for awhile now, and have already made a few deductions that would likely be necessary in order for the idea to succeed:

• Doors are indestructible save on special occasions to be used at the developer's discretion (suppose you have a rare, super powerful weapon to use, like, say, an Earthshaker that can blast doors too).
• The destructive power of most of your weapons are not sufficient to burrow that deep with present resources (for example, it would require the use of a LOT of energy to do this with lasers, even at their max) and what weapons you have that CAN do this will be rare and few so to discourage simply blasting through walls to your goals too frequently.
• One can only "tunnel" so far before reaching a point where the game will not allow you to go any further, save for special occasions to be used at the developer's discretion (had an idea for a boss fight that, instead of fighting the boss in a boss room like before, it chases you around the level, blasting through walls to get at you).
• The mine itself cannot withstand too much destruction, and will cave in and cut off paths if you are not careful, forcing you to either find an alternate route, or to bore through the rubble with special drilling equipment on your ship (but this equipment is limited to boring through cave-ins, not intact walls, and is naturally a resource hog and perhaps has a limited range, to again discourage too frequent use)

I'd imagine all bets are off in an anarchy game, though, especially when the destructive environment could play to your advantage. Of course, that said, it'd probably be ideal to allow the host to choose whether or not the game's environment can be that destructive or not and be able to switch it on or off.

[Matthew]

I think it's safe to say PhysX is definitely the way of the future, but at the same time it seems a bit of a waste to have 8-core processors more powerful than anything we could've dreamed of a few years ago, and load more and more on the GPU. Not the mention the cost of these GPUs is way above the cost of the processor itself even in a fairly budget-minded build.

Nevertheless, the stuff they can do with GPU-accelerated physics is pretty sick and it'll be interesting to see where this goes in the future as CUDA technology advances and we get more, and faster, cores in graphics cards. I've even seen some predictions that in the not-so-distant future we might even start to see some other things unloaded onto the GPU as the line starts to blur between GPU and CPU. When it comes to rapid calculation and data handling, you just can't beat 2GB+ of high-speed memory on the same chip as your processor cores. And with more and more CPU cores becoming common, developers will have to start looking more into ways to take advantage of many cores, which also leads down the path of the GPU. Imagine in the future a game that runs almost entirely of the GPU. It wouldn't even have to load into RAM, it could all just load into the GPU's memory. Heck, with the massive amount of RAM we're already starting to see on both the motherboard and the GPU, if you could run the game on the GPU, you could load the whole game folder into RAM, treating the RAM like the hard drive and the GPU RAM like the system RAM. Loading screens would be a thing of the past.

GPUs can process numerous AI threads quite efficiently as well, possibly leading to faster, more challenging AI opponents in video games. And having played the CPU-demolishin nightmare that is Supreme Commander, I can only imagine what a huge improvement it would mean for performance to offload all the physics, AI, and pathfinding onto the GPU in an RTS game.