Quote: "Check out the videos of the fracture meshes. Friction and gravity tends to be set by the programmer so blame them, not the physics engine.
Oblivion used havok and the gravity in that is appalling."
I can go ahead and vouch for Havok here
The gravity is set by the programmer in Havok as well. You have many levels of customization with Havok, but I seriously don't know what they did with Oblivion. My guess is that they did something like modifying the gravity factor of a rigid body character to increase the jump height as your acrobatics skill increased. That is just my guess on the subject, but either way, with all my use of Havok ever since it was released for free, it has been simply amazing. I mean, Halo 3 doesn't have poor gravity or physics in general in my opinion.
And I'm not sure if you were saying that they programmed the gravity in a weird way or what, but I'm just kinda saying. I'm going to assume you used this as a "the physics engine is only as good as the programmer who uses it" type of thing.
That is an interesting video. I'd be interested in how much memory that used up if it really did use Havok and Ageia together, as they'd have to do some pretty weird things to get them working. You could make the Havok rigid bodies kinematic (as Dark Physics calls them, unaware of their name in the Nvidia PhysX sdk) and simply simulate the particles in PhysX. That would be an interesting test, and now I am getting tempted. But I still have serious reservations about memory usage.
