Turning Failure Simulation into Success

So after sending an email to Volition (the makers of Red Faction: Guerrilla) I got a response that went somewhere along the lines of "details of how this engine work precisely are not available to the public". Understandable as it is an extremely modern piece of software and companies our out to protect their technologies, it is all commercial after all. Still and unfortunate development however. Nonetheless I was directed to a couple of interviews related to the information I was inquiring about, so here are some relevant snippets (Digital Foundry is a techonology website, Dave Baranec was a senior programmer for the game)

"Digital Foundry: In what way do you tinker with the mathematical precision of the physics to make a more crowd-pleasing effect? Is pure realism in itself a bit too boring for a video game?

Dave Baranec: One of my favourite phrases about game development is "we're not making simulations, we're making games". This is often used to chide a young programmer who is trying to get too fancy or complex with a new piece of code. A corollary is "perception is everything". Now, RFG is definitely violating this law a bit – to get a simulation that looks and feels as realistic as ours does, you have to go in and do some real simulation-y work. There's just no way around it. But as with many things in game development, our physical model is a very rough approximation of reality. Civil engineers use something called matrix finite-element analysis to examine the true forces acting on a complex structure. It's very formal, expensive, but ultimately unnecessary for a game. So, we came up with some approximations that don't look much like the real thing under the hood. What was important was to get a bunch of eye-pleasing objects flying around and crashing into each other in believable ways. Better to have a game than a mathematically correct simulation that takes 30 minutes to render a frame."

[Found at http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-red-faction-tech-part-two-interview]

"Digital Foundry: I suppose the real question here is just how much further can you push the GeoMod technology? Do you have any tentative plans for how you intend to push the technology in any potential sequel? Perhaps explosions that impact the terrain as well as structures?

Dave Baranec: In terms of an improved feature set, anything is possible. The original Geo Mod engine was a boolean solid operation engine, which made it ideal for terrain modification. While this is a distinct piece of functionality from Geo Mod 2.0, there's nothing inherently stopping them from being rolled together into one world. What I find really exciting is that the tech is trivially expandable as hardware improves. The core system is capable of doing much more than you see in RFG. What limits us currently is how much rigid body simulation modern hardware can do. In that sense, the engine is very much a mean nasty dog that we have to keep leashed (for now)."

[Found at http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-red-faction-tech-part-two-interview?page=2]

Now to break this down a bit. This statement from Baranec;

"Civil engineers use something called matrix finite-element analysis to examine the true forces acting on a complex structure. It's very formal, expensive, but ultimately unnecessary for a game"

; is perhaps of most interest. He makes a completely valid point here, games are designed to be completely visual experiences. There must be some point where we cannot visually realise the difference between GeoMod 2.0's approximations and real life structural behaviour. Any complexity beyond this is pointless.

This is still in the mindset that games engines and made for games alone. With the advent of such engines as professional modeling tools, we should see a shift in this thought. Also it's hard to say how long this transformation could take, considering the large population of the gaming community compared with that of firms willing to use this technology on projects. We can imagine two separate technologies developing, one for the game and one for the professional (each with a markedly different price tag). This is something that should be avoided. The price of the model creation tools for an engine is typically the cost of the primary game that utilises that engine ($100AU, much like how UnrealEd is packaged with Unreal Tournament and Sandbox II is packaged with Crysis) and it should remain like that as it is one of the softwares biggest draw cards. Prices can be lower because the purchasing community is larger, and splitting these communities would surely be detrimental to both.

Baranec also stated;

"What limits us currently is how much rigid body simulation modern hardware can do"

So what is "modern hardware"? Well typically we can assume its what the company considers an ordinary gaming PC's specifications. The computers that run structural software in engineering firms are likely to be faster and better equipped than this. As engineers we don't require the 'visual' aspect of structural analysis (or more poignantly, we don't need to witness a structures complete and utter destruction) but merely need numbers on the screen that indicate to us its stability and areas of weakness. If run separately to a full visual profile of the software could we expect "modern hardware" to handle it?