Quote: "If I recall correctly, the Unreal engine (or at least, No. 3) has a special system geared towards allowing quick integration/swapping of different middleware packages. "
Unreal 3 might be, I have no experience with using it.
Hope to when the SDK and tools are released with Unreal Tournament 3.. my original comments were made given I never saw it install anything for PhysX (in-fact like most installers I just have it in the background on one-click install), and either there isn't anything on boot.. or more likely I skipped all the logos flashing up.
So I was going on the fact that previous games released using the engine had used Havok (atleast on the 360, not played any on the PC except this and Fury, which also used Havok)
Quote: "Also, if you actually check out a physics engine sometime, you'd realise the utter stupidity of what you're suggesting: They're using Havok, but they're also using PhysX to take advantage of PPUs, even though PhysX can do software as well? What a totally brain dead suggestion that is"
I never said they're using both. I said quite clearly, that even swapping (as in replacing) is enough of a nightmare. I have used Renderware : Physics, Karma, PhysX, Havok and ODE in the past; currently I'm very happily utilising Havok.
To me it's the best solution for both Software and Hardware physics; as it is quite easy to integrate, many of the features are geared towards blending physics seemlessly with traditional animation as well as next-generation animation.
The Software version will utilise extra processor cores as required, and computing wise free. You can also manually set this affinity to enhance performance on specific systems.
That said it will also take advantage of additional gpus available, as well as the HavokFX enhancements available within the DirectX10-Generation graphics cards.
It scales perfectly between platforms will similar results without having to seriously limit what is going on (a very very big problem back when developing for PC and PS2 was having to strip huge amounts of physics back simply because the PS2 while having the performance didn't have the memory, for PhysX (Novicane or whatever it was) yet Havok worked just as sweetly.) not to mention the performance doing similar tasks between the two engines is a world of difference.
A good example is for the Xbox 360, we could have close to 3000 rag-dolls at any given time. This has allowed for games like Kameo and Dead Rising to have huge amounts of enemies on-screen at once while still reacting to the physics system with Havok.
PhysX however in tests, was only able to handle around 500 before seriously impacting performance in software mode.
Only reason PhysX is currently so popular, and probably mainly for the PC is because of their recent licensing system freedom. As in being free. It's still the same price as Havok is for the 360.
Quote: "But the graphics are astounding, and the physics usage is excellent IMHO. "
Oh yeah definately, the physics system is awesome. Especially the integration for developers, you can really have some awesome fun with it.
That said, the graphics to me have felt a bit dated.
As a whole product, it fits together nicely; and from what I see of the Episode 2 changes they're dragging it into this century.. still they're not exactly amazing. Particularly the texture quality.
I have the texture quality on high, and it's still far from nice.
Perhaps a nice procedural texture system might help
Also not to sure about the lightmapping in this day and age, still it does mean it can scale and look nice even on an ancient graphics card.. not that it'll run very quickly (trust me on a Radeon 9700 mobility or GeForce 2, it's more fun watching paint dry than 5-10fps
)
That said Half-Life has never been the most amazing looking game, even the first one sacrified graphics for better AI and interaction. Personally I did like that.
I think one of the most amazing things about Valve is somehow they've added normal mapping to the entire engine yet it's barely noticeable throughout the entire game. Not sure if that's intentional or not, I'm all for subtle to add depth.. but you never notice it unless you stop to smell the roses so to speak.
Well unless you're looking at the water heh
