Physics Games and Physics-Based Game Downloads

The Inner Product column in the latest June/July Game Developer Magazine has a great write-up by Mick West on using Verlet physics to simulate Gish-style blobs. Mick explains his first attempts at creating blobs, why it failed, and his resulting solution for increasing the stability of the blob system.

(Verlet Physics Blob Example Screenshot)

The article isn’t available online, unfortunately, although you can purchase a digital download of this issue for a mere $3.95. The source code of Mick’s blob test is freely available, although he does warn in the code, “Since this is based on my ongoing article code testbed it’s rather messy. Just ignore the other code (particles and event tracking).” Still a delightful find for anyone interested in creating games like Gish or LocoRoco.

Souptoys Toybox, the physics-based desktop toy software, has been released for free. It’s unclear if this is a permanent change, though, as the announcement is “While we continue to develop it, we have decided to make the Toybox free for everyone to play with and enjoy.” My guess would be the core package will stay free and addon toys will be available for purchase.

Check out the full Fun-Motion review of Souptoys Toybox, or head on over to the Souptoys webpage for the free download of toybox.

Sierra just released a new trailer for Most Wanted Entertainment’s upcoming PC real-time strategy game, Joint Task Force. The new trailer highlights the use of AGEIA’s PhysX hardware to enhance the fully destructable environment. I thought it was interesting as there are still precious few forthcoming titles with support for PhysX.

Is that extra degree of destructability really adding anything to the game experience? I suppose it’s inevitable that early PhysX support will end up as mere window dressing, since designing the game such that it actually requires the hardware would be financial suicide at this point. I’d love to see some physics-based games based on hardware physics acceleration.