[aldo_14]

Originally posted by MicroPsycho
i have noticed that havok causes bodies to go almost weightless and it bugs me, Doom 3 had great physics. did anyone notice that some of the creature's flesh kind of 'sunk' down because of weight?

I think that (body weight) is something being miss-set in programming rather than down to the engine, though.  I'm sure if you can do proper physics simulation for tin cans, etc, you can do the same for a body.

Same for the floppy body syndrome you get, where the skeleton turns to jelly when they die.

[Fineus]

I shouldn't think it's too long before all this stuff is genuinely realistically modelled though. It just depends how much detail you want to go into... whether a models arm goes floppy, or has the correct bone structure (including hand?).. or even if this stretches to include broken bones from falls and so forth.

Then one has to think about everything else in a world (from a tin can to a crate made of wood, or metal, or plastic...) and how it reacts. Does all wood catch fire? Does all wood splinter? If it does splinter, does it splinter in accordance with the world - or does it just fragment randomly?

So far I've not seen any game get this all truly right.

[aldo_14]

I think fire dynamics will probably be the 'next big thing' once physics (or rather, solid object interaction) is considered done; that and fluid water dynamics.

Worth noting that wood splintering, etc, is being done now by-engine (i.e. in response to area of impact, not predefined points).  I remember hiding behind a metal sheet from the chopper in HL2, and having the sheet be realistically torn apart from gunfire.

[Blaise Russel]

To bring some balance to the thread, I thought HL2 was infinitely better than Doom 3.

[WMCoolmon]

Ack, no! HL2-good-or-bad debates have been gone through with nearly as much fervor as religion debates.

[CP5670]

I was absent during those debates though, so I might as well join in the fun now.

[Tieowbeijas]

Well...
I like both games, they have their ups and downs but I really don't prefer either overall.
Discussions about "Game X is better than Game Y" usually makes about as much sense as "My dad can beat up your dad", since it's usually just two sides saying that the other side/other game sucks. There are of course exceptions, but that is usually when just about everyone can agree on that Game Z really sucks.

[Admiral LSD]

FPSes are starting to suck in general (not that they were *really* good in the first place but there were a few standout examples). Pretty much everything that can be done with them has been and so their expanding into the only real indefinite area: graphics. Unfortunately, since they're one of only the handful of genres the PC can do *really* well, we're doomed to seeing endless cookie-cutter clones ad infinitum

[Tieowbeijas]

The problem is that no company is really wanting to risk everything on a really innovative game, so they just go for a standard FPS game with a few things special so that it sells well.

[Ghost]

I dunno, I kinda liked the Half Life story. I don't know why so many people had problems with HL2; I recently finished it for the first time(we were slow to getting it on the main computer) and my only complain is that the G-man is a *****.

[achtung]

Doom II had the ultimate of everything1!!1!1!!!11oneone

[Nico]

Originally posted by Tieowbeijas
The problem is that no company is really wanting to risk everything on a really innovative game, so they just go for a standard FPS game with a few things special so that it sells well.

Well, at least, we know pretty well what Doom has always meant to be. They experience more on Quake, imho, Doom has to be resumed in two words: gloomy and violent. If you change it, it's not Doom anymore.
You wouldn't like FS2 being turned into a realistic space sim, I believe, you'd want prettier graphics and some cool effects, and basically no gameplay change. That's what they did for Doom3.

[Tieowbeijas]

What I mean is, you don't see many new franchises, and the new ones don't really try to be something unique and different, they try to be like everyone else just so that the company is guaranteed to get som money.

[TrashMan]

Originally posted by Kalfireth

Doom 3 has really rocketed in my estimation lately. Since I got a decent sound card / RAM I've been able to run it in Ultra High mode with all the settings tweaked and the high detail mods at about 50fps consistently.

Fact is that that engine seems to work really really nicely. Things can be a little shiny but generally the whole world seems to be well put together and far better polished than HL2s. Everything quite simply seems to work.

Then I guess it's pretty subjective since I found HL2 a lot better than Doom 3 in all respects.
to me allmost everything in D3 looks like it's made of plastic.. But it does have the horror feel done right.

on another note, in case you haven't heard, there is a physix processor (actualyl a whole card) coming out soon, and many games in development have allready annaunced that they will support it.

So basicly PhysiX is ANOTHER carg that you will put next to your graphics/sounbd card who's only job is physics. It can calculate and simulate over 100000 objects hyper-realisticly.

Some say they might put the processors on the graphics card together with the normal one. Needles to say, the power consumption of the average PC will allso increase, but at least we will have REAL physics without sacrificing fps.

[Tieowbeijas]

Originally posted by Tieowbeijas
That may be (kindof atleast) solved with the AGEIA PhysX chip (http://www.ageia.com/). Seems like Epic is implementing support for it in some future game (UT2K7 I'd guess). So all that is needed is that game developers start giving the bodies realistic weight properties if they also chose to support the PhysX chip.

But yeah, the card will help , I've noticed in HL2 (and CSS) that the FPS goes down the drain when lots of objects are moving and colliding, once me and a friend managed to "crash" the physics in HL2 : DM by simply taking most of the stuff in a map and laying it in a big pile.
But I can see two problems with physics processors:
 1) Games must have specific support for them, hopefully it will catch on like 3d-accelerator cards. It seems likely that it will be used since atleast Epic will support it.
 2) No support for older games unless they become patched, and there's a large chance of that since I'd guess some companies wouldn't want to fork out money so that they could incorporate support for a physics card in a patch for their game.

[ZylonBane]

Originally posted by Nico
You wouldn't like FS2 being turned into a realistic space sim, I believe, you'd want prettier graphics and some cool effects, and basically no gameplay change. That's what they did for Doom3.

You're either a liar, or terminally unobservant. Doom 3 plays quite differently than the originals.

[Ghost]

Followup to ZylonBane's post: or really, really stupid. 2D != 3D

EDIT: yes, people, I know that DooM 1 and 2 aren't really 2D. I should hope you have enough sense to understand what I said.

[ZylonBane]

Actually that's not at all what I meant, but whatever.

[Turnsky]

Halo 2 is much better than either!

[Deepblue]

Originally posted by Turnsky
Halo 2 is much better than either!

Gameplay, story, and multi-play wise, yes.