Havok 4.0

[zaelu]

Could this help Air Sims? Youtube demo (quality not impresive but...)

 

All is made by the GPU and it has some nice tricks... like simualtion (sort of faking) the wind.

 

I can't think now more than more acurate simulation of flight by making invisible particles of air "coliding" with the airframe under calculated conditions, like giving friction or producing presure, etc.

 

Wind, turbulences, propwash, flutter or whatever....

 

 

Also some very nice crashes coud be made :D.

 

What do you think?

[britgliderpilot]

I can't think now more than more acurate simulation of flight by making invisible particles of air "coliding" with the airframe under calculated conditions, like giving friction or producing presure, etc.

 

Wind, turbulences, propwash, flutter or whatever....

 

 

Also some very nice crashes coud be made :D.

 

What do you think?

 

Accurate simulation of flight by precisely computing the interaction of the air with the airframe is called Computational Fluid Dynamics - you're probably familiar with it from pretty multicoloured images like this:

 

 

 

We're several decades away from being able to do that in real-time ;)

IIRC, turbulent flow in CFD is even worse . . . .

 

Properly computed flutter would combine CFD for the airflow with finite element analysis for the airframe - it'd be accurate as long as you had a 100% accurate model of the structure and materials of your aircraft. Otherwise . . . . . it's just much, much easier to use some scripts and assumptions ;)

[zaelu]

I am aware that accurate computation are very dificult to do (my CO is working in this field and I saw som shots from his work) but I was refering at simplifying the computations for a AirSim game.

 

Something similar with the rendering in CGI. You have a real complex world of light that you can fake it with some tricks (in our case you fake the real aerodynamics with some scripts) but, you can make some "scale models" and reduce the number of "photons" lets say or "rey of lights" and you can get some very photorealistic scenery. Shure thing even in SGI the best optimisations cannot be done in real time but things evolves fast and I was thinking that maybe first small steps could be made now in "aerodynamics" simulation. If not done already :) .

[Chizh]

Very impressive!

[Starlight]

We're several decades away from being able to do that in real-time ;)

 

maybe, but there are some "shortcuts"

 

X-Plane uses an implementation of the Finite Element Method (FEM) applied to aerodynamic surfaces.

The FEM is obviously an aproximation of the "real thing" but the fact that is used in many engeneering applications explains how well it works.

Basically it's an aproximation of the problem that it's going to be modelled and also the mathematical equations are brought in a simple and finite form.

 

This allows a easier computation and also, finite calculus is much more appreciated by computers than symbolic calculus.

[Weta43]

That's pretty damn cool looking, but the commentary says several times that the Havok particles only exist in the GPU - not the CPU ("no extra load on the CPU"), which would mean they'd have no 'physical' effect on the player/plane. Presumably something similar could be handed off to a physics card if you wanted full interaction with the other objects in game.

 

Did you notice that the top of the firs tower you look down on breaks & starts to expand before the ball hits it?

[Shaman]

X-Plane uses an implementation of the Finite Element Method (FEM) applied to aerodynamic surfaces.

The FEM is obviously an aproximation of the "real thing" but the fact that is used in many engeneering applications explains how well it works.

 

I've never seen more wild and unrealistic behaviour of airplanes then in X-plane. I also got deceited by this marketing trick, tried the demo flew the planes they provided and never seen more irrational flight model (stock planes) in something that's supposed to be a hardcore flightsim.

[Zayets]

Actually,flying X-Planes made easier for me the passage from Mig-29 to Su-25T. If only I have time for X-Planes too. But I don't :(

[l3th4l]

That's pretty damn cool looking, but the commentary says several times that the Havok particles only exist in the GPU - not the CPU ("no extra load on the CPU"), which would mean they'd have no 'physical' effect on the player/plane. Presumably something similar could be handed off to a physics card if you wanted full interaction with the other objects in game.

 

i think you misunderstood ;)

 

there is full interaction with the player (could be seen for example when they showed the player walk through some objects and smoke and it reacted to that more or less realistically. what he meant by 'on the gpu' was merely that the calculations were done on the gpu instead on the cpu. that doesn't mean the resulting data is seperated from what was calculated on the cpu...

if you've heard about this physX (or something) card thats been out a short while now you know what i mean. kinda funny actually even though im not really surprised - moving physics calculations onto the gpu which renders that card pretty much obsolete. hehe, could have said 'i told you so' :P

 

 

edit: mhh.. come to think of it: an easy way to think about this is as multithreading not only on seperate cpu(-cores) but on the graphics card as well. and that processor is a lot more sophisticated(sp?) than your average cpu.

[Weta43]

"there is full interaction with the player (could be seen for example when they showed the player walk through some objects and smoke and it reacted to that more or less realistically. what he meant by 'on the gpu' was merely that the calculations were done on the gpu instead on the cpu. that doesn't mean the resulting data is seperated from what was calculated on the cpu..."

 

I think there is a uni-directional interaction. The world acts on the particles (footsteps, tornado, wind) and the GPU works out how they should act accordingly, but there is no reaction on the part of the 'world'. Particles hitting the player, ball, wall etc do not impart energy/moment of inertia - whatever - to the player, ball etc. If you run through them they don't slow you down. If they did, the CPU would have to re-calculate the motion of the primary object, which would increase the CPU load, which the video explicitly stated Havok4 did not do...

(watch the ball hitting the wall, towers etc. No change in speed or direction.)

[yamangman]

Multiprocessor systems (dual and quad) will make that 'Physx' card redundant soon enough when they are used effectively, and core 2 will force parts from both AMD and Intel to make them cost effective solutions very soon. And I imagine the new Havok technology will suffer from the same redundancy. All though it's an appreciably 'clever' means of performing additional calculation on modern machines. I understand various distributed computing software like UD and seti may take advantage of unused GPU cycles soon.

 

As for physics search the web for the 'Alan Wake' tech demo recently shown at Intel IDF.

 

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=alan+wake+tech+demo+IDF&btnG=Search&meta=