NVIDIA announced today that Funcom’s Dreamworld 2.5, a game engine for MMO games, now features server-side PhysX SDK integration.

“We are excited to be working closely with NVIDIA to integrate PhysX technology into our Dreamworld 2.5 engine,” said Rui Casais, chief technology officer at Funcom. “Server-side collision using PhysX will allow us to add a new level of realism to our online worlds, and we look forward to implementing other enhancements as well, including NVIDIA APEX clothing and destruction, to make our games even more interactive and immersive.”

Server-side PhysX SDK, used by Funcom, is specially modified 64-bit Linux version.

Dreamworld 2.5 currently powers two popular MMOs: Age of Conan and Anarchy Online, with a third, the Secret World, currently in development. The updated Dreamworld Engine 2.5 with server-side PhysX integration is now live in Age of Conan.

After long period of beta-testing, Unity 3.0 game development platform is available officially.

Apart from other substantial features and changes, like Deferred Render, Beast Lighmapping technology, Umbra Occlusion Culling and Unified Editor, Unity 3.0 also includes updated physics engine, based on  recent version of PhysX SDK.

Physics Improvements:

• Upgraded PhysX to 2.8.3.
• Cloth and clothing simulation: use the new InteractiveCloth, SkinnedCloth and ClothRenderer components.

New in Unity 3 are two kinds of cloth: Fully physically simulated cloth effects that interact fully with the rest of the environment. The other, Skinned Cloth, is an optimized solution for garments on animated characters.

You can use it for animated shirts, trousers, skirts, capes and hair in a physically accurate way. It is highly optimized and can handle high poly animated cloth pieces.

• Layer based ignore collisions: use the Physics inspector or Physics.IgnoreCollision().
• Continuous collision detection, to make sure that fast moving colliders will not pass through other colliders. See Collider.collisionDetectionMode.
• Added Physics.SphereCast() and Physics.CapsuleCast() to implement volume raycasts.
• Added Rigidbody.SweepTest() to check if a Rigidbody would collide with anything if moved into a certain direction.

You can check most of Unity 3.0 features by yourself directly from your browser, using newest Unity Bootcamp Demo (unity webplayer is required).

As we mentioned previously, one of the many features of upcoming Unity 3.0 engine is going to be improved PhysX SDK integration. Now, when pre-purshase betas of Unity 3.0 are shipping, additional details have emerged.

According to developers, highlight for Unity 3 is cloth physics on arbitrary and skinned meshes – video of new cloth feature in action was uploaded to YouTube by one of Unity demo team members.

In addition, PhysX core was updated to version 2.8.3., collision layers and “thick” raycast were added.

Update: Another cloth test, with tearing | Cloth features overview from one of beta users

Update #2: official presentation of cloth feature

Update #3: Release notes

• Cloth and clothing simulation: use the new InteractiveCloth, SkinnedCloth and ClothRenderer components.
• Layer based ignore collisions: use the Physics inspector or Physics.IgnoreCollision().
• Continuous collision detection, to make sure that fast moving colliders will not pass through other colliders. See Collider.collisionDetectionMode.
• Added Physics.SphereCast() and Physics.CapsuleCast() to implement volume raycasts.
• Added Rigidbody.SweepTest() to check if a Rigidbody would collide with anything if moved into a certain direction.

Keep an eye on beta preview thread for further details.

As it was announced recently, new v7 version (currently in development) of free 3D Rad game engine will switch from ODE physics engine, used curently, to PhysX SDK.

According to developers, advantages from this decision are going to be following:

• faster physics processing, both on normal systems and on systems equipped with recent NVidia cards (where hardware processed physics simulation will allow a very high number of simultaneous simulated bodies).
• more accurate and robust polygonal collision detection (no more crashes on triangles that are too stretched, too small or too big)
• additional collision detection primitives (boxes, capsules), with the ability to stack a high number of objects to create large collapsible buildings.
• built-in breakable joints support, to effectively make in-game objects fully and realistically destructable.
• advanced tire/suspension simulation for cars
• soft bodies
• physics-enabled particles/fluids
• cloth simulation
• bult-in advanced character control
• volumetric force field simulation

UNITY is popular multiplatform development tool, used in many titles, from numerous iPhone games to major one like Interstellar Marines.

Internal physics system in Unity is using custom driverless version PhysX SDK – unfortunately, since main SDK core is very old (2.5, afair), it’s missing not only recent updates and bugfixes, but some features like fluids, cloth, forcefields and even GPU-acceleration. While Unity Technologies were keeping PhysX un-updated for years in a matter of “combability”, such renovation was actually needed by developers.

And, finally – recent announce of long awaited Unity 3.0 engine promises not only iPad and Ps3 platforms support, deferred render, built-in lightmapping system and unified editors, but “major updates to Unity’s.. physics features“

No details were revealed, but Tom Higgins, Unity Product Evangelist, made a short sneak-peak

We are upgrading PhysX but will be saving the specifics until later, let’s just say it will have some juicy new features for sure!

We’ll try to keep an eye on this, so stay tuned.

Update: new details on PhysX features for Unity 3.0 beta

Group of enthusiasts is working on interesting project – classic Unreal 1 engine enhancement with real-time physics, based on PhysX SDK. Current version supports only primitives like boxes and spheres, convex meshes and several joint types, but result is already impressive:

Future plans include vehicles integration, soft bodies and possible ragdoll support. You can download beta version of PhysX mod for Unreal v. 227 here

Hope this project will be more successful than this abandoned PhysX integration into Half Life 1 engine.

Eurogamer.net website has published some very interesting materials, related to upcoming Metro 2033 title.  Firstly, they revealed full specifications of proprietary technology behing Metro 2033, known as 4A Engine, which is called even by its developers “one of the most advanced engines on the planet”.

You can read full specs here, and we’ll quote only part related to engine physics system:

Physics System
Powered by nVidia PhysX technology, can utilise multiple CPU cores, AGEIA PhysX hardware, or nVidia GPU hardware.

* Tightly integrated into the content pipeline and the game itself, including physical materials on all surfaces, physically driven sound, physically driven animations
* Rigid body and multi-jointed constructions. Breakable fences, walls , sheds and other objects. Thousands of different physical entities simulated per frame.
* Cloth simulation, water physics (including cross-interactions)
* Destruction and fracturing, physically based puzzles
* Soft body physics on selected special game entities
* On hardware-accelerated PhysX platforms engine implements full physically correct behaviour of particles such as smoke, debris, etc.

For dessert – Metrospective, interview with 4A Games chief technical officer Oles Shishkovtsov about game engine optimizations and platform specific features.

Metro 2033 is coming out March 16 on PC and Xbox 360, PC version will include 3D Vision, DX 11 and GPU PhysX support.

Update: second part of interview with Oles Shishkovtsov was published on Eurogamer. Provides more in-depth details on PhysX SDK integration, and engine’s genesis in general.

Digital Foundry: The 4A engine integrates NVIDIA PhysX. What are the core advantages of the hardware acceleration, what sort of hardware do you require for the best experience?

Oles Shishkovstov: The core advantage is simply the performance. The CPUs just aren’t there to enable large-scale physical effects (although they are very competitive when processing traditional rigid-body things). However, when you offload costly PhysX processing to GPU, we’ve got less GPU time for rendering.

It’s a difficult question when choosing what hardware will provide the best experience. I’d say that dedicating another (maybe less powerful) GPU specifically for PhysX is the right thing to do!

Digital Foundry: Over and above the tech demo-style elements that make PhysX cool, can you explain to us how the physics add to the gameplay experience?

Oles Shishkovstov: We do not add PhysX effects if they aren’t integral to the gameplay experience. We don’t add an effect for the sake of an effect. Human eyes and brain are trained to see the inconsistencies. We are only trying to remove those inconsistencies in order to not distract from gameplay and not to lose that immersion we were heavily building brick by brick.

Digital Foundry: How did you integrate PhysX into your many-core engine assuming you don’t have hardware acceleration? Are the same principles in use in the Xbox 360 code?

Oles Shishkovstov: That’s easy. PhysX SDK has the similar notion of the “task” as we use. The SDK spawns them for every operation which can be safely parallelised, for example each rigid-body shape-shape collision detection, each cloth or fluid update, even the solver(s) is heavily sub-divided into the tasks.

We forward those tasks to our task-scheduler and they are processed in the same manner as everything else. The only “conceptual” difference is between their and our task-model – we “spawn-and-forget” tasks and PhysX uses a “spawn-and-wait” model.

Interesting video appears on YouTube today – it’s showcasing PhysX SDK integration with Meng Game Engine by Mindware  Studios. Meng was the technology behind recently released painkiller-style game called Dreamkiller.

Video is demonstrating some advanced physics simulation – tearable and pressure cloth, metal cloth based deformables, dynamic hair, and ragdolls, blended with animation using joint motors.

However, we haven’t spotted anything but ragdolls and rigid bodies in actual Dreamkiller game, so perhaps more complicated features are reserved for future projects.

Update: unfortunately, video seems to be removed by user.

Physics simulation component of Esenthel Engine was translated recently to PhysX SDK 2.8.3, which allows developers, among other things, to create 64-bit applications.

In addition, new SDK features, like hierarchical cloth solver or cloth constraints, can help to advance clothing simulation via Esenthel even further (current status is shown on a video below).

Even developed by one man – Grzegorz Slazinski – Esenthel is “complete game development suit“, which includes graphics renderer, physics, GUI, networking, animation system, etc.

User’s opionions on this engine are fairly positive.

Source: Esenthel forums

Following ACGI event, short demo video of Biart’s biEngine was uploaded to YouTube. biEngine is the technology behind U-WARS, tactical shooter with GPU PhysX support, slated for 2010 release.

Video is showcasing some nice explosions, destructible environment, physically simulated smoke, as well as underwater scenes.

Update: english version available