Game physics

[dentist guba 0]

whats so bad about the GTA 4 physics then. better than most current games and a lot of it was made completely in house.

[ArMoGaDoN 0]

I'd _like_ to see simulated tide / current and wind effects on vehicles.

Aircraft would have to steer to compensate against wind-currents, side-wind landings etc would be cool to have in-game, so would gusting winds.

The wind direction and strength would also affect the lift of wings/rotors.

Boats and ships would move with the current, but also have to drive with/against the flow of water.

Combine wind and tide-flow together and you'd be able to even sail a boat around...

[layne_suhr 0]

Yes the ability to CRUSH vehicles would be fantastic! Imaging crashing an aircraft into the side of a mountain! No more rusty body, just a scrap pile... Hitting vehicles into other objects should crinkle the metal (besides most armoured vehicles).. especially in cars and aircraft/choppers

[LJF 0]

I just want to be able to fly a plane and clip the wing on a tree and have something realistic happen, not have the entire plane explode after a five second wait. The physics were terrible in ArmA, at least, the collision physics were. PLEASE, PLEASE UPDATE THE PHYSICS!

[LJF 0]

Is anyone alive out there?

A thought just occured to me, the next best thing after a new physics engine (plane clips wing on tree and either spins around or wing comes off) or major tweaking would be decent vehicle physics, now I know they are good at the moment, but they just feel wrong, you know what I mean? I would like to be able to spin the wheels when on grass, so it feels like there is poor traction, not just a 1bhp engine driving through syrup! Please! Tyre spin? Even if it was just an effect that had no influence on handling at all, it would make the game so much more fun.

[Kirq 0]

I woudnt expect big changes in ArmA2 physics. It looks like AmrA2 will be like ArmA1 wirh better graphics, multicore optimalisation, improoved AI and lots of new features, weapons and vehicles but engine stays the same.

[Pyronick 21]

Something like euphoria would be ideal, you got the have the resources to acquire something like that though.

It would save hours on developing labour aswell.

BIS just needs a good physics programmer and try to develop something special dedicated for games like Armed Assault 2.

In simulators you need good physics simulation, racesim developer Blimey! knows this so they hired programmer Eero Piitulainen, the mastermind behind the physics of Richard Burns Rally.

[PuFu 4591]

Something like euphoria would be ideal, you got the have the resources to acquire something like that though.

It would save hours on developing labour aswell.

BIS just needs a good physics programmer and try to develop something special dedicated for games like Armed Assault 2.

In simulators you need good physics simulation, racesim developer Blimey! knows this so they hired programmer Eero Piitulainen, the mastermind behind the physics of Richard Burns Rally.

That euphoria hype has been posted several times before, and it has been explain the issues with it...

I agree that physics needs some improvements, but euphoria is not the only way to go..

[Taurus 20]

Has someone mentioned ballistics?

And if Arma 2 doesn't have a real artillery piece and or howitzer in it I'll get angry.

Now i'm not talking about the "so called" artillery added in warfare, where BIS cheats when firing the round and setpos it to 0,0,0 and then createVehicle/setVelocity some explosion effect where the round should land.

I'm talking about

1: Howitzer

2: Aim, elevate(calculated by AI gunner if AI is present) else player needs to do this. in conjunction with a spotter.*

3: Fire

4: Round flies away

5: Hits area.

Also the possibility to chose round type and detonation type

And I dunno if this falls under the "physics" area.

I would like to see those howitzers be tow able.

So a howitzer platoon could hitch the howitzer to their truck and go somewhere to deploy it.

* Preferably the AI gunner would need a spotter too, as the laser target designator works today.

take the Laser guided bombs for example.

I didn't try that the last time I played arma since I didn't think it should work without scripting the whole event.

But I am amazed over this.

1: Put AI Recon guy somewhere

2: Put some enemy tanks nearby(not too close)

3: Put harrier with a WP near or close to the tanks.

4: Watch with amazement.

[Chaos 0]

Wow, VBS2 will become NVidias PhysX engine? I will it in ARMA 2 too    

BTW - what the hell sounds better? PhysX or Euphoria?

[max power 21]

They aren't really the same thing.  PhysX is a physics solving library like Euphoria is, but it's intended to be hardware accelerated with the PhysX expansion board (but it is not required).  PhysX also doesn't have all of the character animation blending stuff (afiak). Also, afiak, the PhysX board only accelerates physics calculations using the PhysX library, so Euphoria can't access it.

[gsleighter 0]

I'm hoping for physx support, really benefits from my 8800GTX!

[Spoock 3]

PhysX vehicles in VBS2, what is it?  

VBS2 take technologies from ArmA2, I am so very curious about it

[Dwarden 1124]

PhysX is available only via NVIDIA's CUDA on NVIDIA cards and ofc calculated on CPU(s)

laterly it shown up that some of new feature aren't working on original AGEIA PhysX cards

and vice versa some of features which worked on standalone PhysX cards werent yet enabled for NVIDIA GPUs

in short PhysX is nice PR trick for NVIDIA but pain in ass for developers because they need split title's physics into 3 parts

A) user with only CPU or AMD.ATI,INTEL,S3 GPU

B) user with NVIDIA GPU

and optional C) ) user with AGEIA PPU

in the end most of developers either go CPU route (in that case many choose Havok) or do own physics

so wait for OpenCL and DX11's compute shaders

p.s. with MP title it's even more complicated due need to sync all events related to physics correctly

[Michael_Wittman 0]

Please...also fix the RPG maximum range and parabolic fall... they are now working pretty arcade.

[mr.g-c 6]

I tend to believe that we don't see "major" improvements in physics in that engine.

However, what i'm very much hoping for, is that "g-force" is fixed in Arma2.

In Arma1 you can jump like 100 meters with 100 tonnes tanks and landing "soft" like on a pillow.

Same for every other vehicle. In Arma1 "nothing" feels like having any weight, which is very very sad.

So please BIS, make ge-force much stronger this time - tanks/cars/apcs/whatever should really "feel" like being a damn heavy steal-beast

[dentist guba 0]

euphoria would be brilliant but i guess the most viable choice would be to use a modified HAVOK engine (stable, good for large amounts of objects), doubt that is the case for ARMA 2 though, they would probably have made a bigger deal of it,

[wipman 1]

Hi, right now in the ArmA (v1.14) i loose like 15fps or so when ever

i aim through the ACOG sight and look thru the grass and much

worst when im in dense (or just above the standard) wood areas;

this has been one of the main playability hits that i've had from the

begining, and will be really good if that big problem wasn't there in

the ArmA2. That needs to be revised in my opinion. Let's C ya

[Deadfast 43]

Sorry, but what does this has to do with physics?

[Pyronick 21]

PhysX is available only via NVIDIA's CUDA on NVIDIA cards and ofc calculated on CPU(s)

laterly it shown up that some of new feature aren't working on original AGEIA PhysX cards

and vice versa some of features which worked on standalone PhysX cards werent yet enabled for NVIDIA GPUs

in short PhysX is nice PR trick for NVIDIA but pain in ass for developers because they need split title's physics into 3 parts

A) user with only CPU or AMD.ATI,INTEL,S3 GPU

B) user with NVIDIA GPU

and optional C) ) user with AGEIA PPU

in the end most of developers either go CPU route (in that case many choose Havok) or do own physics

so wait for OpenCL and DX11's compute shaders

p.s. with MP title it's even more complicated due need to sync all events related to physics correctly

Exactly!

The DirectX 11 and OpenCL GPGPU compute shader standards are the way to go, not some proprietary bullsh*t.

CUDA will die slowly, taking PhysX with it.

And it will probably take dedicated 3D audio hardware with it aswell, since that can be offloaded via these compute shaders...

Every other physics middleware focussing on these compute shaders and multicore solutions will win.

But still, those standards aren't officially finished until somewhere next year.

Maybe something for ArmA3?

Quote[/b] ]They aren't really the same thing.  PhysX is a physics solving library like Euphoria is, but it's intended to be hardware accelerated with the PhysX expansion board (but it is not required).  PhysX also doesn't have all of the character animation blending stuff (afiak).  Also, afiak, the PhysX board only accelerates physics calculations using the PhysX library, so Euphoria can't access it.

PhysX and Euphoria are just middleware packages for the developers who quickly need to hype up their game.

A homemade dedicated solution is always better, if the developer has the resources and knowledge to do this though.

Prime examples are

I know BIS has to resources, look at the dynamic sound system from Operation Flashpoint for instance.

Nothing similar has been reproduced for any other game afaik.

With the new compute shaders, you can harness the full power of the GPU next to the CPU.

This could offload the new Mega SEF sound system and the physics engine from the CPU, leaving more CPU power for Micro AI and landscape streaming.

See the following image:

[DespairsRay 0]

Just would like helmets and backpacks to be separate from the soldier models.

In ofp, they could be added as "weapons" (Rucksack) so SLX/ECP (I forgot) allowed them to drop and fly off the models as did other weapons (like rifles) and another script allowed helmets to fly off, but nobody really ended up using it which was disappointing to me.

Also hope that helmets and backpacks have their own damage counters. Instead of having to do the eventhandler stuff.

[nephilim 0]

i´d just like prople collsion models so at last cqb coul be possible in houes.

the ones in arma were just impossible to handle..

[baddo 0]

Maybe you mean animations, nephilim? What have collision models to do with handling of the character being difficult in houses? They are there, they collide, yes, but that's not why it is difficult to handle the character.

The culprit for that are the animations I think.

Also I think one problem might be that ArmA is single-threaded on the application level and it means if one part of the game is running slow then the whole game is running slow. I mean if you put input (keyboard, joystick etc.) reading into another thread then that should improve the responsiveness of the character control. Now it is clear that on a slower computer for example aiming is quite difficult, and it clearly improves on a faster computer. The same thing that causes the aiming difficulty on slower computers also affects how easy it is to control the character overall in the game.

By putting input handling into another thread then it can handle input at an independent rate, say 120 Hz, when the rest of the game is running at different speed, for example logic+physics thread can run at 50/60 Hz and graphics thread can run at whatever speed it is possible to run it. Or input handling could be together with the logic+physics as it is closely related to logic. This is still much better than having it together with the graphics which is very slow.

It will be interesting to see how well BIS manages to multi-thread ArmA 2 and how responsive it is regarding user input. I expect a major improvement over ArmA 1 in this regard.

[kalasnikov471 0]

I think its a bit too late for this but it would be cool if BIS makes crash phisics which means that if you crash a car for example the body will bend and bake. I dont think its possable to add in to ArmA2 at this stage but it would be nice to see in projects after ArmA2

[NeMeSiS 11]

Maybe you mean animations, nephilim? What have collision models to do with handling of the character being difficult in houses? They are there, they collide, yes, but that's not why it is difficult to handle the character.

Try turning around in a small confined space in arma, you will bump into everything and cant make the full turn.(Or you have to lower your weapon so you can make a 180 degree turn). I think she means that.

I completely agree on your point about controls being to unresponsive on slower computers though.