Games Featuring Advanced Physics

NOTE: This page is still under construction, there are more games to be added.

In the early days and especially during the sixth and seventh generation era of video games, details and physics was a novel tool that could be used to create more immersive and dynamic gameplay experiences. "Thrasher: Skate and Destroy" on the PlayStation harnessed the power of ragdoll physics, allowing players to experience the chaotic and often humorous consequences of extreme skateboarding stunts. Trespasser (1998) experimented with arm-based controls, while classics like Marble Madness (1984) and Thrush (1986) showcased the early potential of physics-based gameplay. By the mid-1990s, games like A-10 Attack!/A-10 Cuba! pushed the boundaries of physics simulation with full rigid body dynamics. Even the original Space War (1962) demonstrated the fundamental principles of physics, with spaceships orbiting a singularity. These early examples laid the foundation for the intricate and realistic physics systems used in gaming. However, as years passed, the focus of game development shifted towards visual fidelity. Factors like effective marketing, the engineer's dilemma, hypermaterialism, digital storefronts, and the increasing influence of refinement culture, prevailing political trends, and censorship in mass markets, all contributed to a sense of cultural stagnation in gaming. Weak console launches with the eighth generation and beyond, and the realization by big developers that details and physics don't sell as well as visual fidelity (e.g. higher resolutions, polygon count, higher resolution texture and frame rates), often overlooking the diminishing returns beyond a visual quality threshold established in prior generations. Ultimately, this shift has led to a prioritization of monetization-focused live-service design and microtransactions, content delivery system abuse (patching and updating), rental models, competitive multiplayer and service-dependent open world game design, and visual fidelity which came at the expense of edgy storytelling, immersive sound design, innovative gameplay ideas, sandbox mechanics, advanced physics, good AI and dynamic systems. While physics-based gameplay has seen a resurgence in recent years, particularly in indie games, it still remains a niche area within the mainstream gaming industry for quite some time now. As mainstream market and general consumer taste continue to evolve[1], it is possible that we may see a renewed focus on physics-driven gameplay, providing players with more immersive and interactive experiences, reminiscent of the golden age of gaming.

A Comprehensive Overview

Physics engines are the backbone of classic titles, responsible for simulating the real-world behavior of objects. They provide the foundation for realistic interactions between characters, environments, and objects within a virtual world. Advanced calculations such as choosing kinetic energy based approach and momentum based approach depending on case and need, inelastic collisions and bounciness etc. further contributes to realism.

Core Physics Concepts

• Rigid body dynamics: This involves simulating objects as rigid bodies with mass, shape, and velocity. Gravity, rotation, and collision detection are fundamental aspects of rigid body physics.
• Soft body dynamics: For more deformable objects like cloth or flesh, soft body physics is employed. It accounts for elasticity, plasticity, and tearing. This one is crucial for gore elements.
• Fluid dynamics: This branch of physics simulates the behavior of liquids and gases, crucial for games with water, smoke, or fire effects.
• Aero physics: For flight simulations or games with aerial combat, aero physics models the interaction between objects and air, including lift, drag, and thrust.
• Particle physics: This involves simulating the behavior of individual particles, often used for creating effects like sparks, explosions, or rain.

Advanced Physics Features

• Ragdolls: These are physics-driven character models that simulate realistic physical behavior when injured or killed.
• Inverse kinematics: This technique allows for natural-looking motion by calculating joint positions based on desired end-effector positions (e.g., hands or feet).
• Collision detection: Accurate collision detection ensures that objects interact realistically, preventing penetration and clipping.
• Weight simulation: This feature allows for realistic weight distribution and balance in characters and objects.
• Destruction physics: This enables objects to break apart realistically under stress or impact.
• Responsive volumetric smoke: Counter-Strike 2’s smoke technology, uses a voxel grid to simulate dynamic, interactive smoke that fills spaces naturally, reacts to lighting, and allows bullets or explosions to carve paths through it, enhancing tactical gameplay. This way, results could even more impressive than Mafia II smoke physics when Nvidia PhysX turned on, or Batman Arkham Knight's interactive smoke & fog powered by Nvidia GameWorks.

Integration with Other Game Systems

• Dynamic lighting and Self-shadowing: Physics-based interactions can influence lighting, such as shadows cast by moving objects or reflections on surfaces.
• Dynamic sound effects: The sound of objects colliding, breaking, or moving can be generated dynamically based on physics interactions.
• Dynamic weather systems: Physics can be used to simulate wind, rain, snow, and other weather effects, influencing gameplay and visuals.

By mastering these concepts and techniques, game developers can create immersive and believable virtual worlds that captivate players. To enhance visual fidelity and realism, games often incorporate a variety of animations, sound effects, 3D models and objects, including damage models. Interactive foliage such as touch bending vegetation or when a character is hit, the game dynamically switch to a damaged model, animation set and appropriate sound effects with visual effects like blood, bruises, or clothing damage. This level of detail examples can significantly enhance the player's immersion and sense of realism. While physics engines strive for realism, game developers often employ optimization techniques to ensure acceptable performance. One such example is the use of 'limited amount of active 3d models and objects on the screen simultaneously', which allow for only small number of objects to be present in the game world without overwhelming the physics engine. However, this can sometimes lead to trade-offs in realism, such as models that may lose their physics or disappear after a certain period of time to conserve resources. In some cases, game developers employ alternative solutions to reduce the workload, such as using "LOD technique". However there are techniques without sacrificing the huge chunk of performance such as Parallax occlusion mapping, but this kind of implementations needs dedication and resources. Especially in the early days of FPS games there are instances where developers implement workarounds due to technical limitations, such as player in first person viewpoint only see the arms and gun, with no visible body, players may even notice differences in character models between first-person and third-person perspectives or variations in models seen by different players in multiplayer games.

Physics Engine Integration in Game Loops

A typical game loop incorporates a physics engine in the following steps

1. Begin Frame: This marks the start of a new frame.
2. Do Pre-Physics Gameplay Logic: Any game logic that needs to occur before physics simulation is executed here. This might include player input, AI updates, or other game-specific calculations.
3. Send Object Locations to Physics Engine: The current positions and orientations of all objects in the game world are sent to the physics engine.
4. Simulate Physics via the Physics Engine: The physics engine calculates new positions, velocities, and rotations for objects based on their current state, forces, and collisions.
5. Update to New Object Locations from Physics Engine: The game updates the positions and orientations of objects to match the results of the physics simulation.
6. Do Post-Physics Gameplay Logic: Any game logic that depends on the updated object positions is executed here. This might include character animations, object interactions, or particle effects.
7. Packaged/Send All Final Object Locations to the Renderer: The final positions and orientations of objects are prepared and sent to the rendering system.
8. Renderer Processes Objects: The renderer determines how each object should be drawn, considering factors like camera position, lighting, and materials.
9. Renderer Sends the Results to GPU: The renderer sends the rendering data to the GPU, which is responsible for actually drawing the graphics.
10. GPU Does What the Renderer Says and Produces the Final Image: The GPU processes the rendering data and generates the final image that is displayed on the screen.
11. Frame Ends: The current frame is complete, and the process repeats for the next frame.

Physics Processing on Hardware

See wikipedia:Physics processing unit page.

• NVIDIA removed support for 32-bit PhysX on 50-series GPU.[2]
• There are also physics related software libraries released such as AMD GPUOpen (incl. AMD TressFX), Nvidia GameWorks (incl. NVIDIA Hairworks), but some of the components of these are kinda abandoned in favor of current offerings such as RTX.

Unveiling the Hidden Link Between Visuals, Sounds and Game Physics

Due to overuse, misuse or even performance reasons for competitive gaming, most people believe some of the visual or post-processing offerings are just performance-draining visual cosmetics and undesirable effects.[3] For example, many early seventh-generation titles especially Xbox 360 ones exhibited filters such as yellow tint[4] and excessive bloom[5]. Instead of poorly implementing cheap visual fidelity options, developers could properly implement and use advanced techniques, using it conjunction with physics systems significantly enhance the visual appeal of the game physics.

• Per-Object Motion Blur[6][7] which is only applies motion blur to geometry that is actually in movement in the 3D space of the world, rather than a general motion blur filter.

• Post-processing effects, filters and visual options such as depth-of-field, lens flare, auto exposure/eye adaptation, chromatic aberration, camera motion blur, volumetric fog and film grain can mask visual limitations (similar to CRTs[8][9]), significantly enhance immersion and create a more believable virtual world.

• Perspective Corrected View[10]; which is a technique for video games where the visual output is manipulated to more accurately reflect real-world perspective from the viewpoint of the player compared to traditional perspective projections. The primary goal is to enhance immersion by ensuring that objects appear more realistically as they would in a real-world scenario, particularly in terms of size, shape, and position relative to the camera or player's viewpoint. Perspective Correction can influence interactions with objects by providing a more accurate visual feedback to the physics engine's calculations, like object collisions, depth perception, or spatial relationships. Correct perspective also helps players judge distances and angles more intuitively.

• Ray tracing, is a rendering technique, and significantly enhances visual realism. By simulating the behavior of light, ray tracing creates more accurate lighting by tracing individual rays, reflections, and global illumination. This can greatly improve the overall immersion and visual quality of a game.

• Physically Based Rendering (PBR), is a computer graphics approach that seeks to render images in a way that models the lights and surfaces with optics in the real world. It is often referred to as "Physically Based Lighting" or "Physically Based Shading". Many PBR pipelines aim to achieve photorealism. Feasible and quick approximations of the bidirectional reflectance distribution function and rendering equation are of mathematical importance in this field. Photogrammetry may be used to help discover and encode accurate optical properties of materials. Thanks to high performance and low costs of modern hardware it has become feasible to use PBR not only for industrial but also entertainment purposes wherever photorealistic images are desired, such as video games or movie making. Today's mid to high-end hardware is capable of producing and rendering PBR content and there exists a market of easy-to-use software that allows designers of all experience levels to take advantage of physically based rendering methods.[11] To put it simply, PBR is more concerned with objects and materials, while ray tracing focuses solely on rays of light. It's true that both techniques try to realistically model the effect of light on a scene, but ray tracing does it more accurately (following the bounce from and to polygons in a 3D object).

• Physics-Driven Generative/Dynamic Sound Effects, in video games, sound design is a cornerstone of immersion, yet many games like racing titles fall short with lackluster, generic audio that fails to capture the visceral thrill like the audio experience of driving. Traditional sound design relies on pre-recorded clips triggered by events, such as a car accelerating or skidding. While functional and has impressive examples (e.g., NFS Pro Street, Gran Turismo combines samples with procedural tweaks to mimic engine behavior, though it leans on recordings. BeamNG.drive ties sound to physical states like vehicle damage, offering a glimpse of dynamic audio), this method lacks the dynamism and realism that some players crave. Physics-driven generative sounds offer a transformative alternative, where audio is dynamically created in real-time based on the game's physics engine, particularly for racing games where each individually modelled car components and environmental interactions could produce a symphony of authentic noise.[12][13][14] Unlike static recordings, this approach ensures that every sound is a direct result of the game’s physics, creating a seamless link between what players see, feel, and hear. In summary; this means simulating the behavior of each individual 3d model's sonic output:

Engine Dynamics: The engine’s roar could shift with RPM, throttle position, and load. A V8 might growl differently under acceleration versus cruising, influenced by fuel type or air intake.

Exhaust Resonance: Exhaust notes could vary with pipe length, muffler design, and engine backpressure, creating a unique sound signature for each car.

Tire Interactions: Tire sounds could reflect friction with the road; squealing on asphalt, crunching on gravel, or hissing on wet surfaces modulated by speed, tire wear, and pressure.

Environmental Feedback: Aerodynamic whooshes, suspension creaks, or the clatter of debris hitting the undercarriage could tie the audio to the car’s physical state and surroundings.

List

1. Notable games using Euphoria middleware such as GTA 4, Backbreaker and Max Payne 3
2. Notable games using Source engine such as Left 4 Dead
3. Notable games using Source 2 engine such as Counter-Strike 2
4. Notable games using PhysX middleware such as Mafia 2
5. Notable games using Havok middleware such as Psi-Ops: The Mindgate Conspiracy
6. Some of the EA Sports titles during the sixth and seventh generation
7. Crysis
8. BeamNG.drive
9. Teardown
10. Snowrunner
11. Mudrunner
12. Uncharted 4
13. Battlefield Bad Company 2
14. MX vs ATV series
15. 1NSANE
16. Test Drive: Eve of Destruction
17. Motorstorm series
18. FlatOut series
19. Wreckfest series
20. Baja Edge of Control
21. Stuntman series
22. Puppeteer
23. Little Big Planet series
24. Red Faction: Guerrilla
25. Far Cry 2
26. Breath of the Wild
27. Tears of the Kingdom
28. Little Nightmares
29. Noita
30. Exanima
31. Hydrophobia - fluid dynamics
32. Outer Wilds - models a solar system with legit gravitational effects.
33. Super Rub-a-Dub
34. Kerbal Space Program
35. Besiege
36. Instruments of Destruction
37. The Trine series
38. The Powder Toy, Powder and Powder 2 - Fluid dynamics

Casual & Arcade

1. Hellish Quart
2. Half Sword
3. Party Animals
4. Gang Beasts
5. Fall Guys
6. Switchball
7. BlazeRush
8. Good Job!

Simulation

1. DCS World
2. Microsoft Flight Simulator
3. American Truck Simulator
4. Euro Truck Simulator
5. Assetto Corsa
6. iRacing
7. Project Cars series

Simcade

1. Enthusia Professional Racing
2. Tourist Trophy
3. Richard Burns Rally
4. Forza Motorsports
5. Gran Turismo
6. SBK series

Competitive shooters

1. THE FINALS

External Links

• Crowbcat YouTube channel
• TerakJK YouTube channel
• NikTek YouTube channel
• EduardMackarchew YouTube channel
• Habibori YouTube channel
• Vynsent YouTube channel
• MAWK3: Modern AAA Games vs 2000s AAA Games
• Swaggacino: Modern Games vs Old Games | Lost Technology Edition
• SOFTDRINKTV: PS2 Madden Gameplay and Physics Breakdown w/ Ian Cummings