Guild of Writers

As I was playing around with my cloud experiments, I started thinking about how do we get things like physx to work. At the moment we are using the old physic engine.

Without even knowing if things we do will even work or will have to be completely reworked. Everything to date(as far as I know) is based on URU CC physics engine and not Ageia physx. Has anyone looked into it by chance. I was going to, but with my lack of programing knowledge and time constraints. I've never used the account I have with them as a developer.

So what about physics?

Essentially, all physics engine are going to work with the same type of input values (collision type, mass, friction, etc.).

The trick is going to be deciphering the PhysX object format and writing those values in the new format. However, the PhysX SDK is available to developers for free, so getting the format is going to be really easy.

What Paradox said. You do not need to know much about PhysX. That will all be handled by the Plasma engine. It will translate the physics properties of your age to its current physics engine.

I expected that Cyan would not change these input values if only to make ports to new physics engines easy on themselves. I do expect that a number of new physics properties were added in MOUL but is it a fact that the input values are completely different for existing physics properties, Paradox?

Even if the input values are similar I am sure that we would still have to heavily tweak the physics properties of our ages after they are ported from Uru CC/TPOTS to MOUL.

mass
friction
restitution
bounds type
group type
reportsOn
objectKey
sceneNode
worldKey

Then it reads some positional and rotational stuff, then the actual vertices of the collision mesh (if bounds type is convex or triangle).

I don't have any good documentation for the Havok stuff; but those parameters seem to match pretty accurately what is implemented in the plugin.
I would love to get my hands on a Havok API, but I can't warrant spending +300 USD on something that I would only be using for documentation purposes.

Would this explain why physics aren't working well in MOUL for certain moveable objects, like rocks, sticks, fire marbles? because Cyan hasn't had the time to change the values for the new Physx engine?

Chacal wrote:Would this explain why physics aren't working well in MOUL for certain moveable objects, like rocks, sticks, fire marbles? because Cyan hasn't had the time to change the values for the new Physx engine?

Last time I saw, they are easier to kick around than Havok.

The two engines certainly differ in small details, and maybe even in large ones.

Cyan has spent months banging the old Uru content to work well with the new physics engine. (They've made adjustments with almost every single release, and then we know that Ahnonay was delayed due to physics problems.)

It is realistic to assume that some of this work was tuning the engine to the game, and some of it was tuning each Age to the new engine. The former category benefits us "for free". The latter category is work we'll have to repeat, by hand, for every Uru:CC Age we import into MOUL.

In other words, they went through hell, and some of that hell is going to spill over to us. Inevitably. No software swap-out like that is ever pain-free.

belford wrote:The two engines certainly differ in small details, and maybe even in large ones.

Cyan has spent months banging the old Uru content to work well with the new physics engine. (They've made adjustments with almost every single release, and then we know that Ahnonay was delayed due to physics problems.)

It is realistic to assume that some of this work was tuning the engine to the game, and some of it was tuning each Age to the new engine. The former category benefits us "for free". The latter category is work we'll have to repeat, by hand, for every Uru:CC Age we import into MOUL.

In other words, they went through hell, and some of that hell is going to spill over to us. Inevitably. No software swap-out like that is ever pain-free.

This the reason I brought it up. It needs to be looked into. The more we know the better the ages we build will be.

Well, considering we probably won't be able to do the specialized physics that really need tweaking until such time that we'd actually e able to export to moul, I'm not gonna lose any sleep over that