Enabling old school PhysX support?

[Zep]

Super speed or fly through a pile of newspapers and watch them fly everywhere and get sucked up in the partial vacuum behind you.

 

All sorts of things interacted with the in game debris.

[Obduran]

I remember having that Phys-x card, and boy was that a blast.  One of most pointless and coolest physics implementations I've EVER seen in a game.

 

This was one of the things that made this so cool. Not carefully crafted set-pieces or the occasional wall that could be broken. It made the world more alive and vibrant by simply being, and not being the whole point.

[Zep]

I never owned the physx card, it didnt take Nvidia too long to take them on as competition and add software to allow NV cards to also do the same thing.

 

NV now owns the company that was making the card (forgetting name of it right now).

 

Getting purchased by NV prob made someone rich.

[Healix]

I remember speed-running back and forth in front of the ATM machines in the trams and watching the money fly out.

[Number Six]

Cross-posting this from the patch notes thread in case it gets buried there. Some technical details about what was done in the latest patch if anyone is interested:

 

I'm curious, how does one change the graphics calculations from the GPU to the CPU?

 

To clarify on this a little, this patch note is about the PhsyX effects for particles, debris, etc. When it was originally introduced, it required an Ageia hardware card, or there was a software mode which had reduced effects. Later, NVidia bought Ageia and ported the drivers to use CUDA on NVidia GPUs for hardware acceleration.

 

At some point, Paragon Studios updated the PhysX software from 2.4 to 2.8. Something broke when they did this, and since then the effects were still present, but didn't work right. Most of the small objects just disappeared immediately instead of hanging around, usually by sinking through the floor, though in some cases they would float upwards if your framerate was higher than expected. It also failed to detect newer NVidia cards as usable for hardware acceleration.

 

Recently there was a bunch of attention paid to this subsystem and someone made a change to the Issue 24 source to import a newer version of the driver, which was said to "re-enable" these broken effects. I haven't been able to independently verify this, and looking at that particular change it appears to be a minor version update - from 2.8.4.5 to 2.8.4.6. That's a minor bugfix release and based on the patch notes for that version it's not clear to me how that could successfully enable true hardware support again. We decided not to implement that particular change as it would cause conflicts with other servers using the same base game files, specifically the PhsyX DLLs.

 

Since we were looking at it anyway, one of our developers decided to dive in and see if they could find what originally broke these effects. It turns out that some relatively minor tweaks to the way geometry is "cooked" for the PhysX software was all it took to prevent objects from falling through the world and make this feature behave the way it's supposed to. We then wrote a separate fix to handle framerates higher than 60fps.

 

Along the way, we also deprecated the "HardwareOnly" flag, which is what the game used on FX in order to spawn extra objects when Ageia/NVidia hardware is present. Full PhsyX support is now enabled for both hardware and software simulation modes.

 

The best part of this is that even with this relatively ancient version of the PhysX software, the physics simulation happens in a separate thread from the rest of the game. That means if you have a multicore machine, you can easily run it at the highest settings and one of the spare CPU cores that the game isn't using (it normally can use 2 at most) does all of the math for it, effectively filling the same role that the add-on card used to. That way you get the full experience even if you don't have an NVidia GPU to do true hardware offload. Even if you do, using otherwise idle CPU capacity for this rather than adding to the GPU's already busy load may be a net win.

 

So if you have a CPU with 4+ cores, I highly recommend going into graphics options and cranking "Physics Quality" up to Very High. Ignore the warning about no PPU being present - it no longer really applies to modern hardware and will be removed in a future patch.

[jubakumbi]

So if you have a CPU with 4+ cores, I highly recommend going into graphics options and cranking "Physics Quality" up to Very High. Ignore the warning about no PPU being present - it no longer really applies to modern hardware and will be removed in a future patch.

 

Awesome sauce, looking forward to playtime now!

[khy]

At some point, Paragon Studios updated the PhysX software from 2.4 to 2.8. Something broken when they did this, and since then the effects were still present, but didn't work right. Most of the small objects just disappeared immediately instead of hanging around, usually by sinking through the floor, though in some cases they would float upwards if your framerate was higher than expected.

 

This is the part I'm REALLY hoping can (eventually) be fixed. I tried out the Rebirth/Pleiades servers since they have updated clients, but even there I was underwhelmed and slightly disappointed by the physics. While some of the extra debris is present (leaves, shotgun shells from the assault rifle 'slug', propel objects) the empty shell casings from burst and from mastermind mercenaries were still disappearing when they'd hit the floor. I could get very, very small amounts of debris present, but I couldn't have literally mountains of spent shells littering the warehouse that I'd cleared out.

 

I know it seems small and insignificant but it's one of those little things that really stands out in my mind. Spending twenty minutes going through a mission and at the end, instead of hitting Exit I'd run back to the entrance and see the trail of destruction I left in my wake. City of Heroes is the ONLY game which ever managed to make the hardware physics stand out as being impressive to me, which is likely why I am so eager to see it hopefully become re-implemented!

 

Leandro - thanks for the reply and the additional information, I really appreciate all the work you guys have been doing. I'm super thankful for everything the team's done and I look forward to all the exciting stuff happening in the future!

[Number Six]

khy, that was fixed in the patch that went live this morning. :)

 

[khy]

Oh, well in that case, Leandro (Actually ALL THE DEVS working on homecoming!) are gods among men and I cannot tell you how happy this makes me. My Mercenary/Storm Mastermind will once more stalk the streets of Paragon and the Rogue Isles to cause mayhem and destruction in her wake!

 

EDIT : Except I just realized, I am in hell because I won't be home from work for another 8 hours and this will be all I can think about until then.

[Erydanus]

Thank you so much for the concise but satisfyingly nerdy explanation for us.

 

Frankly, it makes me really happy to read words like "one of your CPU cores that normally sits there doing nothing will do this minor thing that makes you happy."

[Number Six]

...I cannot tell you how happy this makes me. My Mercenary/Storm Mastermind will once more stalk the streets of Paragon and the Rogue Isles to cause mayhem and destruction in her wake!

 

If you can find a mailbox (I know there's one in PI near the arena I was using for testing), Hurricane and the power nobody takes - Whirlwind - are quite satisfying to use in its vicinity.

 

Tornado near a trashcan might be a good bet, too. Or find some rikti drones to asplode.

[khy]

...I cannot tell you how happy this makes me. My Mercenary/Storm Mastermind will once more stalk the streets of Paragon and the Rogue Isles to cause mayhem and destruction in her wake!

 

If you can find a mailbox (I know there's one in PI near the arena I was using for testing), Hurricane and the power nobody takes - Whirlwind - are quite satisfying to use in its vicinity.

 

Tornado near a trashcan might be a good bet, too. Or find some rikti drones to asplode.

 

In the past I used to feel that BEST way to test out physics powers is Mayhem missions!  ;D

 

Trash cans, cardboard boxes, payphones, Parking Meters (COINS EVERYWHERE), mailboxes, they all spew out ridiculous amounts of debris!

[Marshal_General]

Is this an automatic setting as the option still will not let me change it?

[WanderingAries]

I'm happy that Leandro says they'll look into new features and stuff later on; it's great to see continued support. I hope that once the capability to enable Physics like we used to have, that the team can put it in without much hassle.

 

And then the patch notes drop... :p

[Zep]

Thank you so much for fixing this!!!!!!!!

[Healix]

I have noticed a difference. Lots of bullet casings on the ground, more steam coming from vents and money flying out of the tram ATMs when you dash back and forth in front of them.