Regarding HL2 & General Havok's Physics....

[OCybrManO]

When it says the real-time requirements are a 1.7GHz P4 or the equivalent Athlon, 256MB of RAM, and a T&L capable video card... how much can you do with that system?
Would that be just to simulate one guy or a group of them?

If you can only do one guy with all that, it might be a while until we see computers that have the power to handle that for lots of enemies and still have processing power for all the rest of the calculations required for a game.

I wonder if some hardware company would make a PCI (or pci express) card (like ClearSpeed is doing with their CS301 floating-point chips) that is dedicated to do the ACT work the processor would be doing.

Since the hardware would be designed only to do that, the calculations could be done much faster (like how video cards with 300MHz processors can do graphics calculations a lot faster than a CPU) and it would free up the CPU... and allow widespread use of A.C.T in a few years, without sacrificing other aspects of the games.

The real question is:
"Who would spend the needed R&D and manufacturing money to make a piece of hardware that has such limited uses?"

I doubt it would happen.

 

[UDHA]

Somebody may have said this allready, but I just need to say it before I forget

There is a problem with the current implementation of ragdoll physics, I noticed in one or two of the bink videos that a combine's legs were shot out, and he fell over the edge of the railing, the problem here is, who DIES staight away from a shot to the knee!?

Key frame animation with rag doll phsics would look MUCH more realistic, as he falls and 'rag-doll' interacts he could also be reaching for this very painful knee making it more realistic and believable

 

[Athlon7]

Trespasser had ragdolls.

 

[OCybrManO]

UDHA - That's what we were just talking about in the last few posts about "endorphin" and Active Character Technology (ACT).

EDIT: Until that is feasible for use in games... they could just make a "not-quite-dead-yet" stage where the character's hands reach for the last injured place through the use of Inverse Kinematics in combination with the ragdoll, maybe rock around on the ground a bit, and combine that with a grimacing facial expression...

When a person goes into a low magnitude of negative health they would go into this "not-quite-dead-yet" stage and after a certain amount of time (or if they get shot some more) they would go full ragdoll.

... but if you get shot by some big-ass sniper rifle in a critical area and your health goes way into the negatives you skip past this stage and go straight to full ragdoll.

 

[Top Secret]

Actually, I believe the first game with ragdoll was Thrasher: Skate and Destroy which came out on the playstation 1 in 1998.

 

[MultiVaC]

Originally posted by Top Secret
Actually, I believe the first game with ragdoll was Thrasher: Skate and Destroy which came out on the playstation 1 in 1998.

lmao, I remember playing that game at a friend's house. I forgot all about its ragdolls, probably because I had no idea what they were at the time. It was pretty wacky and looked like the characters died when they fell, not too realistic for a skateboarding game. But it was pretty fun

 

[OCybrManO]

I remember that game... I played that with one of my skater friends.

The craptacularity (I'm going to start inventing words) of their ragdoll effect was worth a few laughs, but it got annoying after a while.

 

[Tarkus]

is there anykind of techdemo of havok that ppl can try?? i'm really curious to see havok in action...

 

[Dhoco X]

Havok rok !

 

[arcturus]

Originally posted by Tarkus
is there anykind of techdemo of havok that ppl can try?? i'm really curious to see havok in action...

I think you can use tokamak which (I think so) is something like havok, and it's possible to try freely tokamak. but I believe you need to be able to use a langage like C++

 

[iamironsam]

Originally posted by Tarkus
is there anykind of techdemo of havok that ppl can try?? i'm really curious to see havok in action...

Here's their demos.

http://oldsite.havok.com/xtra/