Coders Corner with Raven. Plus! Newest Addition to Our Team! news - Earth's Special Forces Mod for Half-Life

We're going to switch things up a bit for this weeks update. I feel like the coders here at ESF haven't really been getting the red carpet treatment like the artists have. We're going to be talking about the new physics engine and I've conducted an interview with Raven our Lead Coder here at ESF. Before I get into the interview I'd like to introduce our newest team member Vassago. Some of our long term fans will remember who he is. He's been in the professional gaming industrial for a long time and he's worked on games such as Microsofts Forza Motorsport® 3. He'll be designing maps for ESF and he's already started on a map which will be featured in the near future. Please give Vassago a warm welcoming if you happen to see him in a chat.

so what u think about the in game physics? well I think they are great, still far from done but great nonetheless I kinda suggested using a new physic engine when we changed the way the maps worked. So we kinda chose between PhysX and Bullet, we went for bullet because PhysX lacks Linux compatibility.

what is the biggest change with the new physics? Well the biggest change noticeable for the player eventually is that we now have more or less perfect collision. Meaning e.g. a tree will have collision on each branch and not a whole box around it. Same with the the models that are used within the map. e.g. for round shapes. In addition to all that we of course have some real physics on objects as well. E.g. detonating a Kamehameha near a car or some other objects that we included in the loop will cause it to realistically fly away and spin, *lol* as realistically as it can be in a DBZ mod that is ^^

Going forward with ESF what do you see being the biggest obstacle as far as physics go? Performance. As we are still kinda limited and bound to some ways the engine works. E.g. physX has a great multithreading ability and runs with GPU support, and bullet, well it's not a real professional physic engine, it's open source and it still has it's flaws and bugs and we are fighting those atm. as most physic engine aren't really meant for such high speed gameplay as ESF has some objects are just too fast in ESF but we're working on solutions for that and i#m sure we'll succeed. Another problem with the perfect collision is that very tiny objects with lots of polies can cause lags as well, we g2 work around those by setting up bigger collision shapes for those same goes for any other too complex geometry. So once we solved our optimization problems we should be fine. But we're also hoping for the Bullet guys to further improve their engine and help us out with bugfixes as well.

What will do you think people will notice the most about the new physics in game? Well since physics are not necessarily related to the physics engine I think they will notice that we changed the way players fly a little. There is some sort of fraction/momentum we got now, I think I’m at liberty to reveal that since it’s really no big deal, but angle hits as people used to do them in 1.2.3 are a lot harder to pull off now. In Addition I think people will notice rolling dragonballs or that other people are physically affected by energy blasts. E.g. you are able to blast away a disc attack by detonating a beam next to it, or e.g. giving an enemy player a strong push due to an explosion next to him. Stuff like that I think are the additions that most players will notice immediately.