Physics Games and Physics-Based Game Downloads

Tom’s Hardware has posted a 9-page article asking whether Ageia’s PhysX hardware for accelerating physics simulation is failing. It questions whether the hardware is even required for some of the effects it’s being used for and speculates on the future of the company’s efforts:

This is the second article looking at Ageia’s PhysX processor and the future for Ageia is not easy to predict. Currently it is an evangelist striving for better gameplay and effects physics, but Ageia needs more content utilizing its SDK and hardware for both gameplay and effects physics.

Read the entire article here.

Valve has released the video trailer for their recently-announced physics-based puzzle game, Portal. The game appears to be a new version of Narbacular Drop, a student project featured in the IGF Student Showcase last year. As mentioned in an interview with Gamastura:

GS: Do you (yet) have any success stories or positive experience based on showing the student game to people in the game industry (praise, actually getting a job in the biz, etc)?

Every year, DigiPen puts on an expo for the senior class to allow developers to take a look at our final projects. We were lucky enough to have the opportunity to speak with representatives of Valve and they were excited about what we were doing. Because of Narbacular Drop, our team is now collaborating with Valve.

Enjoy the video:

GameSpot and others are reporting on Valve’s recent announcements at EA’s summer press event. Team Fortress 2 was announced as a real, impending, bona fide product, which is kind of amazing in and of itself, but what caught my eye was Portal, a single-player game that will also be bundled with Half-Life 2: Episode Two.

The official press release describes Portal as:

Portal is a new type of single player game that changes how players approach, manipulate, and surmise the possibilities in a given environment in a manner similar to how the Gravity Gun changed our approach to how an object may be leveraged in any given situation.

Apparently, the gameplay revolves around a “portal gun”, which fires projectiles that open up into Prey-style portals. The GameSpot article describes one physics puzzle as:

That’s the simplest example of how to use the portal gun. In other situations, you may be under fire by a gun droid. So all you need to do is shoot a portal open over the gun, then shoot a portal open beneath a crate, then watch the crate fall through the hole and crush the gun.

The article also quotes Gabe Newell as saying, “We wanted to take physics out of this domain as a tool that lets you bounce grenades around to how can we really change the game experience for our customers.” Sounds amazing. Half-Life 2 is well-known for incorporating physics into the gameplay experience, so I can’t wait to see what Valve has up their sleeve. Look for a Portal trailer sometime early next week.