scumble on 27/9/2006 at 20:36
Looks like they came up with an interesting solution to the problems of programming a game engine for multicore processors. From what I've read it seems like a nightmare of scheduling problems, but when the chap from remedy said they were using an entire core for physics simulation, it implied they've got some way for it to communicate with processes going on in the other cores, because in a game everything tends to be dependent on something else. I suppose that's a sloppy way of explaining, but it isn't a trivial problem by any means.
dvrabel on 27/9/2006 at 21:21
Inter-process/thread communication has been around for decades and is well understood.
The dedicated core for physics is probably a gross over simplification; you couldn't get maximum utilization out of all cores with a single physics thread. If I had to invent an modern engine on the spot right now I'd have a physics thread per core, a rendering thread per core and various other threads for input and sound and content streaming etc.
Edit: less sarcasm
Gingerbread Man on 27/9/2006 at 22:14
I wonder if anyone's got the balls to remake the first Silent Hill with this tech?
twisty on 28/9/2006 at 02:05
Quote Posted by Gingerbread Man
I wonder if anyone's got the balls to remake the first Silent Hill with this tech?
Not so much balls as time.
Scots Taffer on 28/9/2006 at 02:16
Finally caught this footage and the screens, wow. Still psyched for this one.
Sluggs on 28/9/2006 at 02:52
This is definately one to look forward to. This may poo on S.T.A.L.K.E.R :wot: Might even give Crysis a run for it's money!
Garrettwannabe on 29/9/2006 at 03:16
Not sure it's gonna matter how much this game is on release day - I'm gonna go get one and play this as soon as it's out.
I happened to be lucky enough to catch the story on Blues News.com right after Remedy revealed it at E3 2005. Like GBM stated above - I thought the screens looked like a movie from the game & couldn't possibly actually be the gameplay. :eek:
This one's is gonna take us to a whole new level of gaming just like the HL2 and Doom 3 engines did recently in my opinion. It so cool how close the industry is getting to realistic worlds & even cooler that we'll get to wander around in them.
I was thinking how cool it would have been like to have a game like Mafia look like this - where you had a small city and surrounding areas as the game to wander around in. :thumb:
Uncia on 29/9/2006 at 08:24
Quote Posted by sluggs
This is definately one to look forward to. This may poo on S.T.A.L.K.E.R :wot: Might even give Crysis a run for it's money!
An atmospheric horror game will poo on an RPG hybrid, or even an action shooter.
...waht? Unless you're talking about graphics, in which case, are there new STALKER shots I'd not seen? The last I saw didn't look that hot.
scumble on 29/9/2006 at 08:53
Quote Posted by dvrabel
Inter-process/thread communication has been around for decades and is well understood.
I was only referring to problems in terms of game engines as a specific application where processes have to be synchronised almost at each frame, further complicated by the fact that one can't predict what the player will do. At least that's the impression I got from (
http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20060906/monkkonen_01.shtml) this article on Gamasutra (and another one I can't seem to find).
So I thought that Markus Maki's mention of using a core for preparing data was an interesting device, as the task probably doesn't have to synchronise too often with the rest of the game loop.
