Panties? half life - portal

[Crowbar]

source engine in an mmorpg eh? sounds interesting.

[Kruten]

Half-Life 2 uses the Havok physics engine.  It's actually been around for years, and has been in many, many games, used mostly to calculate car physics, or player jump physics - that sort of thing.  It has been used since 3DMark2001, and before.  I also think Black&White was one of the first games to actually use it to great effect. (I could be wrong on that one, though.)

 

Max Payne 2 and the more recent games (aside from DooM 3) use Havok 2.0 physics.

 

...the thing is, VALVe bought a license to use the Havok engine way back when they got serious in their work on Half-Life 2.  They did so much work, customizing and tailoring the physics simulator to every aspect of their game that Havok took their changes, tweaked them to their liking, used VALVe's input and created Havok 2.0.

 

...technically, Havok 2.0 is a better physics simulator, but Half-Life 2 is connected to Havok at the very core of its gameplay.  Nobody's done anything with Havok 2.0 other than add some cars that can go over hills, and bodies that fall randomly when shot up.  Nobody has used more than 10% of its potential, whereas Half-Life 2 demanded so much of the Havok simulator, that they basically created the new engine, in their work with Team Havok.

 

That's not to say that VALVe didn't do any work on the Source engine.  On the contrary.  Source is absolutely mind-blowing.  What it's capable of, and how much of its current potential was tapped during Half-Life 2 was stellar.

 

...but we're talking about two different engines, here.  Havok and Source.

 

The Havok engine is a physics simulator.  That's it.  It calculates speeds, and parabolas, bouyancy and kinetic energy.  That's pretty much it.  If a game just used Havok...  ...well, it'd just be a bunch of quadratic formulae on the screen.  Source is where the game shines.  Source is VALVe's render engine.  It handles 3D video and 3D audio.  IE: pretty.  Very pretty.

 

If you ask me, Half-Life 2 blows DooM 3 out of the water in terms of visuals.  id Software has the better engine...  ...but they didn't do enough with it.  They forgot to put the art back in, and to me it came off like a tech demo, as did Quake III Arena.

 

Anyway, yeah.  When Troika licensed the Source engine, they also got use of Havok physics.  Generally the physics solution is included with the purchase of any game engine.  It would suck if you bought the license to Quake III Arena, in order to make your own retail game, but had to rewrite the way characters jumped, or walked along the floor, because they deleted the physics calculations.

 

The next game supposedly using the Source engine is an as of yet unnamed MMORPG.  Out of the box, the Source netcode handles 256 players.  (likely not with the same 5000+ poly / 50-75 hitbox per character limit of HL2/CS:S)  Of course, the new owner of the engine is more than welcome to tamper with that in any way they want.

 

PS:

 

      Sorry for the essay.  Handling too many topics in one reply.  Bit of a bad habit of mine.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

So to sum it up: Valve used the Havok engine but just upgraded it?

[Clueless]

This just goes to show the geek factor involved here, this started with panties and ended up in something that sounds like it should be in star trek

[Norguard]

To sum it up, to make theoretical characters move, they used Havok 1.0, and basically helped engineer Havok 2.0.

 

...but a couple of people mistook Havok for Havok 2.0, and a few more mistook Havok for Source, which does everything but calculate kinetics. Source is a render engine, a network engine, a positional audio engine and an input engine.

 

...and the question was asked, I just figured I'd share the answer.

 

Oh, and by the way... ...though purple really does accent Alyx's skin tone, I don't think a thong matches her personality. It's the largest incongruency I find with the story. VALVe, I hate you forever!!!!oneoneoneoneeleven (...I think I've spent too much time on the Steam forums...)

Edited January 1, 2005 by Norguard

[Primus]

Guys---This is absolutely too funny!!!

I think you can look at all this 2 ways:

 

1. Was it really necessary to put panties on her along with being anatomically correct.

2. Who has that kind of time to notice!!---

[appalachian_fox]

Nor, thanks for the distinction. Cleared a lot of things up. I thought Source was just the name of Valve's flavor of Havok (or Havok2, rather).

 

Hey...hrm...this topic did kind of turn around, didn't it? Clueless, I think I'm to blame for the geek factor with the engine questions up top. But I'm a math geek, it's genetic, I can't help myself sometimes!