The scripted vs non-scripted argument is irrelevant. Everything in a 3D game is scripted and simulated to represent a fantasy world. Whether that is animations, textures or physics. It's the end net effect and how that impacts your game play that matters.
I'd hardly say it's irrelevant, because computed physics is just that.....computed, and demands a lot of processing power for it to work effectively, which is the trade off. The authenticity of the simulation is proportional to the amount of computational power. The advantages though of using computed physics are well worth it, as you can achieve more realistic and better looking simulation (especially for complex physics effects like smoke, cloth etcetera), with far less development time and cost..
If the scripted vs non scripted argument is irrelevant as you claim, would you support using scripted animations for all game physics?
While animations have gotten much more complex and realistic over the years, they still cannot match computed physics, and what's more, they take up space on disk and in memory..
Battlefield has a huge extensive physics engine that allows you to deform and manipulate the game world to change game play. In the BF4 alpha you could destroy near everything in sight to change the battlefield. It looks realistic and impacts your game play. The fact that I can blast my gun into the ground in Borderlands 2 and see 1000s of rock chunks that all look generally the same, but different sizes of that chunk and the direction they're going generated on the fly really does nothing to improve the game beyond hammer my frame rate.
That's a gameplay design decision, and has nothing to do with any sort of limitations PhysX has. I showed a link earlier from a beta Hawken destruction map where practically
everything was not only fully destructible, but it was all calculated using tens of thousands of GPU rigid bodies, far more than in games like Red Faction Guerilla.
So it's not that PhysX can't do it. I'm sure game developers would like to add more destructibility to PhysX games, but can't because it would deprive non NVidia users of the gameplay experience.
That's why hardware accelerated PhysX has for the most part, been confined to eye candy physics.
Like I said, the only thing I've seen GPU physx do so far in the 23 games out there that use it to excel beyond something in a game running physics via CPU is the interactive smoke/fog.
You can add interactive cloth, and fluid to that.. Before PhysX, cloth in games were animated, and basic animations at that. You had clothing that stuck to characters like glue, and moved as though it were made of cardboard.
A thug in Arkham City:
I don't think gpu physx is going to go away because it's still essentially alpha technology. It's nowhere near efficient or robust enough to take over from CPU run physics engines as a full-fledged physics implementation in games that need it
.
PhysX is already far ahead of software physics solutions, but is being artificially limited by it's proprietary nature.
Right now it's just a marketing point for nvidia that they pay and do the work of implementing to get developers to even use it.
Talk about resuscitating an old and discounted argument. Do you honestly believe NVidia
PAYS developers to use PhysX? :awe:
It's also visually generally less realistic than what you get in other games, see water that looks like gelatin
Click here and
here to see water that looks like gelatin :whiste:
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