PhysX SDK Licence Changed to End User License Agreement

[jasonf]

I think I saw a video of this a while back, it looked very impressive.. thousands of barrels, girders and other objects being thrown around.. it gave the impression that it could handle any number of calculations.. Imagine.. a WW2 game where everything is destructable down to the brick level and flying bricks and mortar do damage to other things... real collapsing scenery, not just the scripted stuff we get at the moment... all of this being handled by the card while the CPU handles the orchestration of Graphics, Input, Sound and Network leaving the Video rendering, lighting and effects to the Graphics card, The Sound processing and effects to the Sound card, the Network management to the Network card. As long as the data transfer speed wasn't a problem (I imagine that you'd send all of the entity data to the physics card, it applies forces and deforms meshes which are then extracted and sent to the video card for transformation and lighting.)

But it does move the PC away from the Generic Do-Everything machine towards a Hardcore Gaming only machine which is essentially what a console is for.

[WILL]

I dunno... multi-core CPUs though they will indeed allow a great deal more to go on simultaneously, I would doubt that it would be a direct substitute for hardware-based physics acceleration.

I mean we are talking the difference between a 2nd 'generic' processor and specifically catered hardware functions to do the exact calculations required of that which now has to be manipulated in software.

It's a fair bit different in my honest opinion. Though yes, it could very well make the 'selling' of the idea of a requirement for physics acceleration a little more challenging. But I doubt it's a reason for not pursuing it.

As for starting a project, though I think this idea is great, I'm not the man for the job. I'm also trying to cut down on my many projects. As many know I'm still practically 'married' to building up the Pascal game development community at large still. Besides, it would be best to get someone more familiar with 3D physics to be the leading man here. Though I don't mind getting the ball rolling.

NecroDOME is person 1 and from what I can tell quite capable. Do we have at least a 2nd?

[Sly]

We are using PhysX in our current projects on PC, Xbox 360 and PS3. No-one here has the PhysX card even though it is available locally for around AUS$450. There are two manufacturers of the PhysX card: ASUS and BFG.

In software mode (which the majority of people use), PhysX runs the physics simulation on its own thread (at least one thread that I know of), so it does take advantage of multi-core CPUs.

Of course with more PC titles using PhysX, the physics accelerator card will be more attractive to potential purchasers. So Ageia are doing what they can to get more people using the PhysX libraries, then this should drive more sales of the hardware accelerated PhysX card.

p.s. This does not mean that I am an expert in using PhysX. I am a lead programmer, so most of my job is telling my coders that thing X needs to happen, then those coders go away and use the physics system to make that thing happen.