NVIDIA® PhysX® technology continues to be the platform of choice for interactive entertainment. NVIDIA is making a number of new announcements on PhysX-enabled games and has been conducting developer roundtables with members of the press so they have a chance to discuss PhysX implementation with the developers directly.

The following interview is one of many developer roundtables to come, with each one highlighting a specific upcoming game.


Are you guys okay with telling at least some of the points in time in history that you’re going to visit in the game? Or is that a secret?

8monkey Labs: No, it’s certainly not a secret and it’s available up on the Web site. The player starts the game as a member of Custer’s forces at Little Big Horn. The player also experiences the Civil War from the Union side and the Confederate side. World War I is also included. Although instead of from the stereotypical British or American courses, you get to play as part of the Eastern front, which was much more bloody. So you’ll be on the Russian and the German side. There is also a battle in Pompeii. We don’t really want to go into too much on that because that would give away a lot of the story line, but suffice it to say by the time you’re in Pompeii, you’ll be using really, really exciting weapons!

You mentioned leaves blowing in the wind. Will the leaves obscure the reticle or pointer like some games?

Hopefully not. No, it’s looking pretty good and they are going to be pretty impressive. They’re going to be interacting with everything. You’ve seen a lot of the other demos that other games have done, that the PhysX people have put out. And it’s added a lot to the environment. I mean it looks nice.

We’re also going to be doing some of the less destructible particle effects that you’ve seen like debris flying from shooting at concrete and shooting at dirt and stuff. So it adds a lot of liveliness to these big battles that we’re trying to pull off.

And the World War I piece of it, what side do you get to play?

You play the Russian side actually.

Will the actions you take affect the future?

Yea, it will affect your pathway through the game. In many ways it’s up to the player to decide what weapon to use, when to use it, and what to shoot at that will affect how they go through the game.

In terms of game play, how large a play area will they be, given that you’re using different time periods? And is the game non-linear?

How large an area is an interesting question because since we’re predominantly outside, we don’t have the convenience of hallways to confine the player. We use actual battlefield maps to scale the world. The world itself is very, very large on the angle of miles or kilometers. But the action will pull the player through.

And as far as non-linear—it’s non-linear in the fact that we’ve given players the ability to choose certain points in the game where they want to go. So if you wanted to concentrate on filling all the missions in a certain time-period, you can concentrate more on that than another. So it’s non-linear to a degree, but of course to experience the entire game, you’d need to complete all the levels.

Will you ever have to fight yourself? Are you ever at risk of creating a time paradox?

I don’t want to give away too much about the story line, so some of this is a secret still, and it’s kind of tricky to answer, but no, you will never fight yourself.

How hard was it to put PhysX in the game?

Well, we started with PhysX from the ground-up, so all of our foundation uses that library. And so to integrate the effects themselves and to integrate Apex was actually a very smooth and straightforward process. We were glad to also have the help from NVIDIA as they helped us with the integration quite a bit. I was very surprised at how fluid things have been going so far.

Is there going to be a built-in benchmark?

Yes, that is in the works.

Any plans for a demo?

Demo, yes. We’ll have some form of a demo prior to our Q3 release and information on that can be found at the Web site, www.darkestofdays.com.

Do any of the PhysX effects actually affect the game play?

No, they are more of environmental effects. So they’re more meant to provide visual realism to the scene.

Will you be able to run the PhysX effects on non-Nvidia cards, even in slideshow mode? I was recently playing Mirror’s Edge in software mode on a GTS 250 and hit myself in the head for disabling PhysX while playing.

Right now the plan is to have PhysX run on everybody’s cards and it’s going to run on software no matter what video card you’re running on. But if you enable NVIDIA GPU acceleration for PhysX, you will also get the effects that we mentioned, including those delivered by Apex. So like the real smooth dynamics for the interactive smoke and haze on the battlefields and all of that stuff is going to be extra for now. We’ll see what the future holds.

As you know, PhysX runs on multi-platforms and on the PC we support GPU as well as the CPU. So you can run on a software mode on the CPU too.

Any plans for a sequel if the first game is successful?

Absolutely, since it’s a time travel game, we have lots of ideas for episodic content, version 2, version 3, et cetera.

On the volcanic ash and stuff, you said that it was going to be taken in Pompeii. And that was a fairly cataclysmic eruption where the smoke actually billowed. Using NVIDIA Apex to create this, how realistic have you seen it becoming to where when it’s being interactive with the player that it will actually seem like you are in this eruption with the ash and the smoke around you? How interactive will that be? Will it encompass you or is it going to kind of just come forward?

The ash that’s actually going to be flying around is going to be interacting with characters. So you’ll run through it and you’ll have little seas of ash blowing around you. Other characters can run through it and it can accumulate on the ground. It looks quite impressive and we’re very proud of it. Well as you go through the level, the ash becomes more intense but spilling all the beans of the Pompeii scenarios, you start prior to the eruption and the effects get greater—more ash falls, more ash accumulates and certainly notches up the realism a couple of bits when you’re trying to complete your mission.

Will the ash hurt you?

No, unfortunately it won’t. You’re wearing a very hi-tech suit at the time.

It sounds like there’s a ton of interest in this game!

Glad to hear it. We’ve been kind of turtles internal for so long, so it’s nice to hear that.

Question to NVIDIA: Can PhysX run on OpenCL?

NVIDIA: Any language out there that promotes GPU computing is something we’re excited about. Hopefully you guys saw the press release we put out that talked about us being the first to deliver an OpenCL driver for developers. It’s one of the reasons Apple picked this top to bottom on their notebooks and a lot of their desktops because we have OpenCL support; we plan on supporting OpenCL. We’re working very closely with Microsoft on DirectX Compute, but we’re also working on our C implementation that runs on our CUDA hardware architecture. So CUDA will support all the languages. It’ll support C; it’ll support OpenCL; it’ll support DirectX Compute.

In terms of PhysX, right now we’ve got a pretty large, deep infrastructure already built with PhysX the way it is, the toolset that we have. We’ve got multi-platform support across Wii, Playstation3, Xbox 360 and even the iPhone now and now on the PC we support GPU, CPU and if people want, even the older PPU is still supported. So right now our plan is to just keep PhysX the way it is moving forward and support the developers the way we are today.

Is it fair to say that Intel and AMD are more or less jumping on the OpenCL bandwagon?

NVIDIA: OpenCL is something we’re embracing. In fact, if you look at the Khronos Group that manages OpenCL, Neil Trevitt who works at NVIDIA sits on the board and is actually the head of the Kronos Group. So our plan is that anything that pushes OpenCL forward is something that we’re going to support.