The Dark Mod on the Crysis engine?

[Tels]

Today I installed Doom on an N770 internet tablet, just because I can. This is possible because the engine is open source and it can run on almost anything technically capable of doing so. If the Doom 3 stuff is opened up, I may one day be playing TDM on a device the size of an Ipod. Hell, this could be done in less than ten years for sure. Just look at the Pandora. If it had 2 gigs of ram instead of 256 megs, it could probably do it with low settings.

 

Now the Penumbra engine... *that* would be awesome. It is *already* open source, and can do mind bending things. I was astonished when I pulled a chair in front of a projector and was able to read the text in the projected image as it passed along the wood on the chair. All of the leavers and switches in the world are triggered by physics, and not just by you clicking on them. This means you can jam a wooden plank under a leaver to prop it up and keep a machine running, or hang a bucket from the leaver to way it down and keep it going the other way. You can also pick up objects and swing them around. If you let go of the mouse button, they will fly in that direction. Try building catapults with random junk you find in the game world too. Also, notice that desk compartment becomes harder to open/close as you place more objects into it.

 

I also took a glass bottle and set it in a metal garbage can. Then I started shaking the garbage can around very quickly. The glass bottle broke, and then I was able to pull the individual shards out of the can and toss them around in the game world. You can also just flip the can over and watch as all the shards spill out.

 

There are demonstrations of this engine on youtube, but the developer didn't do a good job showing off what it is really capable of.

 

Well, porting TDM to *any* engine is out of the question (too much work).

 

However, since all the "features" you described above are basically a "good physics engine", it would be possible to replace the crappy physics from Doom3 with a real one. It is less work, but in the past 3 or so years nobody has ever attempted it. (Which validates the "porting is too much work" if people can't even build in bullet physics or whatever

[aidakeeley]

I may one day be playing TDM on a device the size of an Ipod.

 

That would be great!

 

Except it wouldn't be any fun at all.

[nbohr1more]

Would the "Physics Improvements" JC Denton mentions in his SDK mod not count as the type of work or aptitude to get that accomplished?

 

JC Denton SDK

[demagogue]

Reading his description, that just looks like a few tweaks of physics behavior in the existing system. What Doom3 would need is a new, accurate physics system altogether. Orb (I think; edit: probably Ishtvan actually) posted before about what that might entail. It'd be an all-or-nothing thing; you can't just change a few things, but need to create a whole new system from the ground-up. And it would be a monumental task. That doesn't diminish how cool it would be, though.

[Tels]

Reading his description, that just looks like a few tweaks of physics behavior in the existing system. What Doom3 would need is a new, accurate physics system altogether. Orb (I think) posted before about what that might entail. It'd be an all-or-nothing thing; you can't just change a few things, but need to create a whole new system from the ground-up. And it would be a monumental task. That doesn't diminish how cool it would be, though.

 

Actually, I think with a pre-made physics engine, it might be as "simple" as:

 

* compile new engine in

* change the main doom physics object to use the new engine instead of the old one, transparently, under the hood.

* ???

* profit

 

There are of course a lot of small details (like how to convert the existing clip models to whatever the new engine uses, when to let the new engine calculate new entity positions, how to feed the new engine the world geometry etc.). But it is not insurmountable. the current physics engine is quite decouped from the rest (except the parts where it meshes, of course, like updating the entity positions). Unfortunately, we don't have noone who could say work for 2 weeks straight on only this problem.

[nbohr1more]

Well that's a very tantalizing suggestion.

 

Perhaps a recruitment thread specifically for this work in our "I want to Help" forum?

 

(or a fund-raiser so one of you Team Members can take a brief vacation? ...never did understand how you guys afford this site...)

 

loot?

Edited July 8, 2010 by nbohr1more

[demagogue]

I was just going off of memory from one of Orb's Ishtvan's old posts.

As long as we're talking about it, the physics engine that Penumbra uses (Newton Game Dynamics) does have an open license available; works on Windows, Mac, & Linux; v2.0 is much faster than previous versions; and seems like a good fit (after looking at some of the other ones out there). It wouldn't hurt to read up on it at least, thinking ahead.

[GameDevGoro]

I'm butting in a tiny bit maybe but I agree whole-heatedly on deploying newton game dynamics as a replacement physics engine when and if such a task is at hand.

I've used it in my engines in the past and it's exactly like any physics engine should be. It's easy to deal with and it's fast (with 2.0 even faster).

 

I'm just going to.. uh... slink back into the shadows now.

[Tels]

I'm butting in a tiny bit maybe but I agree whole-heatedly on deploying newton game dynamics as a replacement physics engine when and if such a task is at hand.

I've used it in my engines in the past and it's exactly like any physics engine should be. It's easy to deal with and it's fast (with 2.0 even faster).

 

I'm just going to.. uh... slink back into the shadows now.

 

Yeah. Newtons sound sensible to me. If it works for Penumbra, it will work for TDM. Alas, I am quite busy right now ather finish one thing then start another.

[Serpentine]

While I really don't care much for the topic and think people should keep a pretty optimistic view of ever changing this stuff;

 

Newton is quite esoteric and closed source, while it's speed and such is pretty good and the example games using it are ok its feature set is surpassed by ODE and Bullet, while ODE suffers in having no real future Bullet is very rapidly being developed and has the backing of Intel, AMD (who commit code daily) and to some extent nVidia. At the moment TDM uses no non-portable components (Win/Linux/Mac arn't the only platforms). You might as well look at Havok of PhysX if you want to do this, they have better support and feature sets.

 

A lot of people think that Newton is amazing because of Penumbra, but the physics in Penumbra was a focus of designing models and game elements around, unlike pretty much any other game (besides physics games, but those are hardly worth thinking about). At the end of the day you want something which isn't going to run away and will hopefully carry on active development and adding new features as well as conforming to traditional constraints like performance and scaling.

Edited July 8, 2010 by Serpentine

[nbohr1more]

I think that Newton may be of interest because Penumbra's source code is GPL so it might be quicker to glean what they've done to integrate the two than to figure out all the integration from scratch...

 

(unless it's simply that Penumbra looks like Doom 3 kinda-sorta... )

 

 

But I see that Irrlicht Engine has Bullet integration... so Bullet FTW (as you've stated...)

 

Ahh, pipe-dreams...

 

Yeah this part of the discussion should be carved into a new thread with a better name before jdude hunts us all down...

 

Did I mention that I think Doom 3 physics is fine.

[HMart]

While I really don't care much for the topic and think people should keep a pretty optimistic view of ever changing this stuff;

 

Newton is quite esoteric and closed source, while it's speed and such is pretty good and the example games using it are ok its feature set is surpassed by ODE and Bullet, while ODE suffers in having no real future Bullet is very rapidly being developed and has the backing of Intel, AMD (who commit code daily) and to some extent nVidia. At the moment TDM uses no non-portable components (Win/Linux/Mac arn't the only platforms). You might as well look at Havok of PhysX if you want to do this, they have better support and feature sets.

 

A lot of people think that Newton is amazing because of Penumbra, but the physics in Penumbra was a focus of designing models and game elements around, unlike pretty much any other game (besides physics games, but those are hardly worth thinking about). At the end of the day you want something which isn't going to run away and will hopefully carry on active development and adding new features as well as conforming to traditional constraints like performance and scaling.

 

Serpentine i think you are wrong about your opinion of the newton physics engine ODE is dead in the water and newton is still being updated, but i must say that newton is slower compared with the likes of bullet, PhysX or Havok but because it is more accurate and robust, newton is used in more them games also in scientific circles and so the developer didn't made any shortcuts, is physics calculations for real, for games, accuracy is not important so the other engines are full of tricks and shortcuts to be faster.

 

For TDM Newton engine is like a match in heaven, it has all the necessary features even fracture support and is VERY robust, when i say robust i say that on newton is rare to see physic bugs like objects jumping like crazy or going trough the floor (Oblivion), and others. The penumbra guys liked it so much that they are using it again on their second game.

 

A quote from a Penumbra developer about the physics on their new game.

 

Notice how books just slightly slide along the shelf because of friction and so on. This is all due the nice simulations provided by Newton Game Dynamics. It was quite fun setting everything up on the table so that some fell off while pushing it, giving the a feel of urgency when trying to barricade the door. The table was also harder to move due to the weight from all the stuff on it, so had to give it an extra push to get into place (using the "throw" button). One never knows what going to happen with physics...

 

 

[Serpentine]

Serpentine i think you are wrong about your opinion of the newton physics engine ODE is dead in the water

Yeah shortly after posting that I actually went to check out the svn and saw it was actually quite active these days, I remember some period of inactivity as my last point of reference, but stand corrected

 

For TDM Newton engine is like a match in heaven, it has all the necessary features even fracture support and is VERY robust, when i say robust i say that on newton is rare to see physic bugs like objects jumping like crazy or going trough the floor (Oblivion), and others.

A match made with heaven that (in my mind) excludes itself by being non-portable middleware sadly :/

 

Still, all in all this is all pie-in-the-sky talk, until the code is released and we have enough dev power...

[nbohr1more]

It's too bad that you guys didn't catch Newton before they became popular. You could've convinced them to do the integration work to promote their Physics Engine...

[New Horizon]

The penumbra game engine is open source now, I'm guessing that means all their physics stuff would go with it. If it were ever possible, that would be one helluva physics update to incorporate. lol