The Laws of PhysX

Warmonger, Operation: Downtown Destruction

By now, Warmonger had finished loading and although the game is in pre-alpha stages right now, we were still able to get a look at this post-apocalyptic multiplayer game. There wasn’t a lot of polish on the game, but that’s to be expected of a game in this early stage of development.

Michael took control of the game and was quick to show us just what the physics engine was programmed to do in this game – blowing off tiny details and single bricks in piles of rubble before pulling out a rocket launcher and getting down to the intricate art of building demolition.

“Say, I’m in a sniping position here” he said, taking a prime position at the top of a ruined building, “I want to make sure that nobody can sneak up behind me, right? What I can do here is turn around then and blow up the staircase with the rocket launcher”

Yep, you could and that’d be cool – but you’d give away your location and there’s nothing to stop people someone blowing up the rest of the building with you in it. Sometimes even those in the industry are a bit n00bish.

Still, Warmonger looked interesting even at this early stage and we can see how the building destructibility would substantially alter the gameplay as players would never be able to memorise specific locations as the level continually changes.

Conclusions

With our time together drawing to a close, I took the opportunity to nibble on a few free biscuits and ponder how exactly my opinion of PhysX may have changed after the demonstrations. To somebody like myself, with a strong (nay, obsessive) gaming history but a lack of in-depth technical knowledge, the most important factor on my mind was the gaming support for a PhysX card and, while GRAW 2 is pretty enough, it doesn’t require a PhysX card to run at all and the plan for Warmonger is along similar lines.

So, what games are there in the future that may make PhysX an obligatory piece of kit? While Unreal Tournament 3 looks promising, it too doesn’t require the card either and though the UE3 engine will definitely force use of the PhysX software, hardware will not be a requirement for the engine necessarily, as proved by games which have licensed the engine but which don’t require the hardware such as Bioshock and Gears of War.

We pushed both Michael and Dan for details about games which support PhysX beyond the upcoming Unreal Tournament 3 and the farther off Warmonger, but they couldn’t speak about specific titles at this stage and I was left with the distinct impression that Ageia is hoping and praying that Unreal Tournament 3 will be able to give it the boost it needs to make PPUs a hit.


With a hundred licensees already signed up for the UE3 engine, it sure looks promising that Ageia may start shifting PPUs a lot faster than before, but as someone who has learned to be a PhysX sceptic the hard way after my experiences with CellFactor, I think I’m going to have to wait until the game hits the shelves before I purchase an Ageia PPU for myself because, while we know that the PhysX system can do some incredibly complex things, such as cloth physics, it’ll all be for naught if there isn’t a decent killer app which takes advantage of the hardware in a way that makes it a must have.

Maybe Unreal Tournament 3 will be that game which first crosses the line between simply providing extra eye candy and providing a fundamentally different game experience with a must-have status, but we won’t know it until the game is released and this is what really illustrates the problem Ageia faces. Without a string of must-have games set up to use the PPU, few gamers will risk investing in a new piece of hardware, but with few gamers willing to invest in the hardware it still remains to be seen if enough of the big developers are willing to take the plunge and develop games which will require the PhysX hardware.