Last Month the Japanese try to retrive this mod a little bit more. They played in the at 2pm CET. At the moment the gametracker,com Server Monitorring is off. Hope soon they turn it on. The ranking seems to work.
Registered Member #727 Joined: [ 10:25 ] [ 12 Nov 2004 ]
Teabag, you're right, I have no idea how this thing works, but neither do you. Some of the issues I wrote about earlier are rubbish, I admit, because I now could actually read the description page (site was down this morning) and it answered a lot of my questions.
However, there are still some points where I have no idea how they solved the inherent problems, and this makes it impossible to say whether the first generation of these things will have the same flexibility as current physics engines do. Of course, I've only worked with one of them (Newton) so far, so I am not an expert, but there are certain problems with the whole concept that will be hard to overcome. Integrating this into games will be a very difficult task for all companies out there today.
Edit: Bah, I just realised that I wrote a lot of rubbish without content here. Okay, so here are the issues I'm talking about: - A physics engine always needs input from the CPU to be any useful, and it needs a lot more customisable power than a GPU does. For example, what forces should be applied to what body - this cannot be load once and then forgotten about, this changes every frame. The code my game needs to update the physics engine every frame is already about 200 lines, and I've got only one moving object in there. - Synchronization. There needs to be a mechanism to ensure that the data the CPU has, the data the GPU has and the data the PPU has are always in sync, so that the GPU draws all objects at the right locations and the CPU can do all the other effects correctly. This problem is also very important when optimizing games to take advantage of multiple CPUs and can come close to a rewrite of major parts of the engine.
I am certain that they have solutions for this, because otherwise no major game studio would even consider supporting this, but how good they actually work remains to be seen.
<span class='smallblacktext'>[ Edited 21 Nov : 21:38 ]</span>