At 8/3/09 01:01 PM, Depredation wrote:
ie every brick falls indivualy and shatters and breaks to an atomic level. Then i think we will have reached the true peak of 2D immersion.
First of all, I think that Crysis has done a fucking good job on the physics. There's a lot of videos on youtube showing some spectacular examples of their physics engine. Calculating interactions on an atomic level is completely useless - there's no benefit at all in rendering reactions that are smaller than a pixel. Things that are as big or bigger than a pixel can be rendered using approximations. You don't need to calculate collisions on the atomic level to know precisely enough where a brick breaks in half when you throw it on a wall. Doing so would be absurd, and would require unimaginable amounts of processing power. I think we already have reached the peak of 2D physics for games, it's just that this peak has been reached by phyiscists / computer scientists, and not by flash game developpers, which is why it's still kinda rare to see a game with really nice physics engine.
Oh and btw, it would be impossible to compute things on an atomic scale, for the same reason that determinism is being questioned. You would think that knowing the positions and speeds of all particles in a closed system, you could do computer simulations to predict the exact state of the system and any given time, but it's not possible.
and speaking of quantum mechanics, last week I met one of my dad's old friends who works as a physicist at the Weizmann institute of sciences in Israel. he's working on ways to resolve quantum mechanical situations in a way that they can be used to build a quantum computer. According to him, we might be able to build fully functional quantum computer in the next 30 years, which, although it sounds like a lot of time, is really cool considering that quantum computers are really a science fiction thing. you'd be able to do certain calculations in 30 mins that would take the age of the universe on a classical computer. i might talk about it more later, because it was very interesting. i gotta go now