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madppiper
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Smash Hits

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Smash Hits

-WIRED




Videogames are getting seriously physical: The engine is the real-time force of nature. Now when you fight, the entire game environment fights back.


The cartoon babe on the screen has blond pigtails and a sexy leather outfit with strategically placed peepholes in the pants. Her expression radiates confidence as she floats in black space above a thin white line representing the floor. She's ready for anything.

"I'll turn on the gravity," says Mike Skolones, an athletic, sandy-haired engineer at MathEngine, a British software firm whose US branch offices occupy a rustic building in Petaluma, California.

He punches a key and the figure drops to the ground. Landing on her feet, she flaps her arms and nearly falls on her face. She manages to find her footing and stands upright again, beaming.

"Watch what happens when I drop her from a greater height," Skolones says. This time, her knees buckle upon impact and she crumples forward - still smiling - into a heap of twitching limbs. It looks painful.


"One of the neat things about building physics into a game is that things don't happen the same way twice," says Skolones, who holds a PhD in physics from UC Davis. "See, I'll drop her from the same height again." She hits the ground, tumbles backward, and flops to one side.

When you see a typical game's spectacular crash-and-burn scene for the second or third time, the illusion of being in an alternate universe evaporates and you find yourself sitting before a video screen. But whenever Skolones' model falls, it happens differently, as though she were a real body plummeting through real space onto a real floor. Her body's every twist, turn, and tumble is computed in real time by MathEngine's physics toolkit, a package of code that lets programmers define virtual objects and environments in terms of physical characteristics. "To reproduce that behavior using conventional animation," the engineer says, "you'd need to animate an infinite number of sequences."

I witness a more subtle demonstration of real-time physics simulation at the tiny Palo Alto office of Havok, a competing physics-engine shop. On the screen, a computer-generated sailboat floats in a stone-lined pool of water. The company's genial Irish-born cofounder, Hugh Reynolds, shows me how to push the boat with a mouse. When I nudge it, air fills the sail, causing the ship to tilt leeward. Ripples in the water deflect off the stones, intersecting with one another. I urge the boat onward, and it glides effortlessly into the wall. Reynolds tosses in a handful of virtual coins; they spin through the air, splash into the water, and sink.

"It's so much fun to play with this stuff that it's hard to get our engineers to do any work," Reynolds says with a grin.

I don't doubt it. I've never encountered a digital simulation that seemed so real. It isn't the graphics; I've seen better CG demos. But here the world behind the screen doesn't just compute, it responds. It's as though someone sprinkled pixie dust on the processor. Suddenly, there's a there there, a tangible world inside the box.




After decades of academic research, industrial use, and government development - and one notable commercial flop - real-time physics simulation is pumping games full of dynamic realism to match their visual verisimilitude. MathEngine and Havok (which, after swallowing various contenders, have no direct competitors apart from each other) have already licensed their engines to some two dozen gamemakers.

MathEngine signed up Argonaut Games (creator of the best-seller Croc: Legend of the Gobbos) and Vivid Image (developer of Street Racer). Sony Online recently used MathEngine's algorithms to spice up its demo of PlanetSide, a follow-up to the multiplayer smash, EverQuest.

Havok counts among its licensees Acclaim, Blizzard, Ubisoft, and Valve. Now it's poised to storm the Internet; last May, Macromedia incorporated Havok technology into the latest 3-D-capable version of the popular Shockwave multimedia player.

In an unnamed adventure title in development at Nihilistic Software, Havok's code is being used to liberate the game world's inhabitants from the constraints of scripted action. "We have a character who's very agile; he can grab a wall or leap onto a pole, and do all kinds of wacky acrobatics," says RobHuebner, Nihilistic's technology director. "Physics is the core of our gameplay."

And it costs. MathEngine licenses its software development kit, or SDK, for $50,000 per title; Havok charges between $40,000 and $70,000 per game, depending on options. Little surprise that some gamemakers are brewing their own physics code. Texas-based developer Motorsims, for instance, hired both a former Boeing engineer and a PhD with expertise in vehicle collisions to help develop its racing games AMA Superbike and Trans Am.

Why the sudden frenzy of interest in physics? For the most part, the answer lies in the dramatic improvements in game platforms. New home computers and the latest Net-ready consoles (notably the Xbox, which incorporates a 733-MHz Pentium III plus a 250-MHz graphics processor) free up the central processor for physics calculations by delegating rendering tasks to a dedicated graphics chip. The Xbox and, to a lesser extent, Nintendo's GameCube and Sony's PlayStation 2 are capable of running programs that would have brought earlier generations of hardware shuddering to a halt. So, animations that once could be viewed only after waiting minutes or hours can be calculated on the fly.

The game industry is betting on physics as a follow-up to the galvanizing impact of 3-D imagery. In fact, graphics have gotten so good that they're making other aspects of games look bad. "As you increase visual quality," says Seamus Blackley, who coded physics engines for DreamWorks Interactive before heading up Xbox development at Microsoft, "it becomes more important to make the dynamic reality as sophisticated as the visual reality."

Most objects in a game act as though they've been painted on a theater backdrop. If you try to use them, the facade falls down. "In Super Mario 64 or Doom, you come across things like boxes that can't move as they would in the real world," complains Chris Hecker, who programmed 3-D graphics at Microsoft before founding his own game company, definition six. "How come I can't use one of them to prop open a door? How come I can't do all the things that come to mind when I'm trying to solve a puzzle?"

With real-time physics, there's no reason why not. In fact, every creature, piece of machinery, prop, tree, and dirt clod can behave with the same predictability - and unpredictability - as its physical counterpart. As physics engines become more commonplace, says Will Wright, cofounder of Maxis and designer of best-selling titles like SimCity and The Sims, "you'll be able to interact with more and more of the surroundings, to the point where you can pick up a crowbar and pry a nail out of the wall."

But why stop at inanimate objects? For Skolones, the ultimate goal is to create "lifelike characters that interact with one another and their environments." MathEngine's latest demo, a fistfight set on an industrial catwalk, is an early step in this direction. Like conventional game characters, the two boxers spar according to prepared animation. But when one strikes the other, the physics engine begins to exert its influence, more or less depending on settings in the characters' joints that determine their resistance to external forces. An especially forceful blow sends one of the combatants sprawling down a flight of stairs, now fully at the mercy of momentum, gravity, and the metal steps. With the laws of nature firmly in force, life on the other side of the screen is about to get much more interesting.

On-the-fly physics engines free every creature, prop, and dirt clod to behave with the same predictability - and unpredictability - as its real-world counterpart. Spring-mass systems can unleash gelatinous monsters capable of oozing through keyholes.




Unless you're charting the paths of atomic particles or planetary orbits, Newton's three laws of motion are sufficient for predicting the behavior of inanimate objects. The first law states that an object moving at a certain speed and in a certain direction will keep going until some external force acts upon it. The second says that an object's acceleration equals the force applied to it divided by its mass. According to the third, every action begets an equal and opposite reaction.

The simplest kind of simulation involves interactions between rigid bodies - objects that can't be squashed, stretched, or otherwise deformed. The boat and the wall in Havok's virtual pool, for instance, have values for mass and inertia tensor (how an object's mass is distributed in relation to its center of gravity). Then there are surface properties (coefficients of friction and restitution, or bounciness) and kinematic attributes (position, orientation, acceleration, velocity, and angular velocity). Finally, values are assigned to the forces at work, which include net force and torque.

Once the objects and forces are defined, it's just a matter of advancing the simulation. The engine takes an inventory of the pool environment and solves equations that describe the boat and the wall at a specific time in the future - usually one-thirtieth of a second later (since most games run at 30 frames per second). The result? The boat bobs on the water until you push it, whereupon it glides smoothly into the wall and bounces off.

More-complex objects and interactions can be simulated by connecting rigid bodies with various kinds of fasteners (hinges, springs, and joints) to create structures known as articulated bodies. Skolones' blond victim at MathEngine, for instance, has a skeleton of 22 interconnected bones. A collision-detection algorithm (the same technology that enables projectiles to destroy their targets in shoot-'em-up games) keeps her arms from passing through her torso.

These three elements - rigid bodies, articulated bodies, and collision detection - form the core of MathEngine's and Havok's capabilities, sufficient to create things like swaying bridges, lumbering robots, and interstellar dogfights. Havok's software provides even more-sophisticated behaviors: the fluttering cloth of the sail on Havok's boat, soft fur, undulating water, oozing slime. These types of effects are staples of prerendered CG productions like Toy Story 2, but they've never appeared in an interactive context.

Moving beyond rigid-body basics requires special techniques, often involving what's known as a spring-mass system. A soft body like a quivering lump of jelly, for instance, can be represented as a group of particles, each with a specified mass, connected by virtual springs arranged in a geodesic dome. Varying the springs' stiffness and damping (friction that reduces oscillation) makes it possible to simulate gelatinous objects of different densities and viscosities.

At Havok, Hugh Reynolds shows me several soft-body demos. One lets me squeeze a rubbery blob through a ring. When it comes out the other side, it falls to the ground, undulating from the impact. It's a nifty effect, but it barely hints at what the technology might do in the hands of a hyperkinetic developer. For instance, Headfirst's Call of Cthulhu, scheduled for release by Christmas on the PC, will feature Havok-fueled gelatinous monsters capable of pursuing players by squeezing under doors and through keyholes.

Although MathEngine and Havok make this kind of scenario a relatively simple programming exercise, there remain "a lot of very, very, very hard unsolved problems," as Reynolds puts it. Things like fracturing, buckling, shattering, and bending - events that happen as the forces acting on an object approach the limit of its tensile strength - now are accomplished only through prerendered animation. Using current hardware and software, these kinds of simulations run hundreds and even thousands of times too slowly to be practical in a real-time game. Reynolds figures the technology for creating worlds where things can be snapped, crunched, and crushed is about two years away. And in five years, he says, we'll start seeing human and animal characters whose senses of kinesthesia will allow them to walk, wriggle, and gallop realistically across the fast-expanding netherworld between dreams and reality.

Physics simulation isn't exactly new. The first accurate computational models for physical interaction arose in the 17th century, when Galileo's formulations of ballistics, falling objects, and inertia overthrew Aristotle's nonempirical theories, which had held sway for more than 1,000 years. Galileo laid the groundwork for Newton's 1687 work, Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, which spawned the science of classical mechanics - the study of how forces affect bodies. Engineers soon applied this knowledge to physical systems, such as dams, buildings, and bridges.

With the advent of computers, the military, aerospace, and manufacturing industries began to develop algorithms for complex physical simulations. In 1928, MIT's Vannevar Bush designed a mechanical computer called the Differential Analyzer that could trace a missile's path based on the relative speed of the launcher and its target, along with wind resistance and other factors. Early electronic analog computers were used to calculate flight paths and analyze the flow of liquids through hydraulic systems.

Physics first found its way into a game in 1958, when two employees at New York's Brookhaven National Laboratory devised an electronic diversion called Tennis for Two using an analog computer wired to an oscilloscope. The scope's 5-inch screen represented a tennis court viewed from the sidelines, the ball leaving a comet tail as it bounced over a vertical line, the net. The game simulated air drag on the ball, and players could adjust the gravity to experience the thrill of playing tennis on planets other than Earth.

But while electronic games advanced, their use of Newtonian principles remained limited. For instance, Quake, released in 1996, took into account the second law (acceleration equals force divided by mass), but only in a few circumstances. Savvy players discovered that they could fire a rocket beneath their feet at the moment they executed a jump, and the combined forces would increase their acceleration sufficiently to shoot them into the sky. Using a rocket launcher as a turbocharged pogo stick, they could do things the game's designers never anticipated, like leap directly to a level's exit, avoiding all the pitfalls along the way.

I swing the grisly, spiked mace and can actually feel tiny collisions between chain links, as well as the centrifugal pull of the ball as it swoops around the handle. The doors to the metaverse have been thrown open.

Physical accuracy played a larger role in games that simulated jet fighters or racing cars, such as 1997's Carmageddon. Many of the people who designed these titles honed their skills programming simulators for the armed services, where computer power was plentiful. Even so, the technology was rudimentary, since the points of contact between a car or plane and its environment rarely change. In the event of a crash, early vehicle simulators switched to prerendered artistry.

As Carmageddon rolled off the production line, current Xbox project lead Seamus Blackley was masterminding the first game to incorporate physics into almost every aspect of a virtual environment. Published by DreamWorks Interactive in late 1998, Trespasser was launched on a wave of hype. According to a contemporaneous press release, "The Trespasser engine's physics system represents a generational leap in computer simulations - it is a stunning new piece of technology that will change the way the industry thinks about games."

It was indeed a stunning piece of technology. Trespasser's dinosaur-infested world was a convincing physical environment in which players could try nearly anything to solve a puzzle or kill a reptile. Too bad the game sucked.

"Everybody was looking forward to Trespasser because of its advanced physics engine," recalls Will Wright. "But when the game came out, it was just horrible. The physical constraints overwhelmed everything else. Every time you'd walk through a door with a gun, it would catch the doorjamb and fall out of your hand."

Nonetheless, other efforts were already under way to capitalize on the potential of computer-based physics. In 1998, Hugh Reynolds and Steven Collins, professors at Dublin's Trinity College, decided the world was ready for a physics-engine company. As a student of digital animation, Reynolds had witnessed the rapid increase in computer-processing power since he started teaching college in the early '90s. Back then, he says, simulating something as simple as two boxes bouncing off each other required days of number crunching on Trinity's big iron. "You'd set it up on the mainframe on a Friday evening, head off for the weekend, and come back, hoping to see an animation at the end," he recalls. Soon, though, even a home computer could run circles around that mainframe. Collins and Reynolds secured a loan from Ireland's Business Expansion Scheme and launched Telekinesys Research as an umbrella company for Havok, its only division. Havok's first SDK was released in March 2000, three months before Telekinesys acquired Ipion, a German physics-engine company that had devised fast and easy-to-use collision-detection algorithms. A version for Macromedia Director appeared last May, bringing the technology to a broad community of developers and giving physics-based content an entrée to the Web via Shockwave.

At around the same time Reynolds and Collins were unleashing Havok, Alan Milosevic, a Welsh computer programmer and mathematician, formed MathEngine to develop what he called "natural behavior software" for game, movie, and engineering applications. After a successful round of venture funding, the Oxford-based outfit joined forces with Lateral Logic (since renamed Critical Mass Systems), a competing physics-engine company based in Montreal that had developed a training simulator to teach loggers how to control an especially unwieldy tree-harvesting vehicle. MathEngine SDK 1.0 hit the market in March 1999, but the general-purpose toolkit proved too cumbersome and inefficient. The team returned to the woodshed and emerged with a game-centric rewrite, Karma, in March 2001.

With two ambitious companies competing neck and neck to deliver a worthy solution, physics was ready for the game industry. But the unhappy fate of Trespasser poses a crucial question: Is the game industry ready for physics?




At Havok's office, I have the dizzy pleasure of speeding through the roller-coaster streets of San Francisco in a supercharged Austin Mini, courtesy of Top Gear Dare Devil, a Havok-powered game developed by Papaya Studio. The Mini responds to steering, acceleration, and braking as though it were a real car. The way it handles - bouncing over bumps and swerving around corners - resonates with my intuitive sense of driving, with one exception: I can ram the curb any way I please, but the car never flips over. I ask Havok's Hugh Reynolds why.

"They sunk the car's center of gravity about a meter underground," he replies. "Game physics is about consistency, not realism."

Although game developers like to boast about the realism of the experiences they create, they're actually talking about making sure that the world within a game, which may be entirely unlike the one we live in, is consistent and accessible. When a game's objects, environments, and characters are imbued with physical properties, they become extensions of, rather than stand-ins for, reality as we perceive it. In other respects, however, correspondence between the external environment and the one inside the box is beside the point. People play games to get away from the real world. As Trespasser demonstrated all too clearly, too much reality spoils the fun.

"Games are about reducing the world to a smaller but representative set of skills," says Robert Weldon, CEO of Critical Mass. "Softball is complex enough to be interesting, but simple enough to require only a narrow set of skills. Computer games are just the same. When you play Quake, you learn how to punch, shoot, and run. As you continue, you get more weapons, but these three underlying skills remain the same. That's what makes it fun."

Even if gameplay is brilliantly conceived, physics technology poses a further challenge: the user interface. Joysticks and buttons are fine for piloting spaceships and firing missiles, but it takes subtler kinds of input devices to navigate worlds where surfaces run the gamut from bouncy to slippery, and to manipulate objects that crumple, shatter, or melt. At Havok, I have a hard time using a mouse to move dolls around a simulated stage. Trying to place one doll behind another, I succeed only in lifting it and dropping it on top of the next one.


"What am I doing wrong?" I ask.

"Ah, the classic problem of controlling a 3-D world on a 2-D screen," Reynolds chuckles, and leaves it at that. Physics, apparently, only exacerbates a persistent computer-graphics conundrum.

One solution might be haptics (from the Greek word meaning "to feel"). Motorized joysticks, mouses, and steering wheels that convey force and texture - so that navigating a bumpy road, for instance, becomes a shoulder-jolting experience - can make the world inside the box much easier to negotiate.

I get a taste of the future when Steven Collins hands me a haptic touchpad built by Immersion, a San Jose-based innovator of input devices. The pad's springy, thumb-controlled button shakes and vibrates in sync with the action onscreen. Collins loads a demo program that displays a mace (the grisly medieval weapon, a spiked ball on a chain). Using the touchpad, I swing the mace and can actually feel tiny collisions between chain links, as well as the centrifugal pull of the ball as it swoops around the handle. With my eyes closed, I move the weapon in a circle.

After trying dozens of depressingly bad virtual reality systems over the past decade, for once I feel truly immersed. In Havok's and MathEngine's demos, I moved a cursor, and the cursor moved the simulation. Now I move the simulation, with one hand submerged in the virtual world. With equal amounts of giddiness and dread, I realize that the doors to the metaverse have been thrown open. Reality has a competitor.



~~~~~~
By Mark Frauenfelder





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Source:WIRED Magazine, Issue 9.08 | Aug 2001
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