I'm not too much into arcade games but I find one thing interesting: It began with physics and it will end with them.
The first video games (even if non-commercial) were indeed based on physics. Examples are also "Pong" (incidence and emergent angle of the ball), "Asteroids" (kinetics) "Lunar Lander" (gravity) and pinball simulations (gravity and those funny angles again). Some games are weaker than others in their physics use, of course, but others really emphasize it like Lunar Lander and Spacewar.
Some of these games were made by very intelligent people - often with a mathematical or physics background. So it probably was natural to use this knowledge.
Then games really got commercialized and mass marketed. For several years, physics in games weren't really explored, IMHO. Shooters often had the same mechanics, racing games weren't really simulations at first and pure simulation games were just emerging.
Often games don't really had much room for physics (adventures with video sequences, 2D rpgs), while there were some exceptions (throwing things in Dungeon Master or Ultima Underworld). "Trespasser" also had - some people say - too much physics: It not only had immensely high system demands at that time but also was uncomfortable to play.
Physics make or break simulations but I'm not sure if those pure, hard-core games (flight simulators for example) had more than a limited audience after the mid-eighties. Today the genre seems to be rather small.
Nowadays every game seems to need a "physics engine" like Havoc or PhysX - expecially games where you can drive, destroy or kill something (or all of it). People are sick to always see the same kill animations and want to play with the corpses ;-)
With already very high graphics standards (often outsourced to the graphics cards) one has to use the free processor time or put several cores to work and physics are a great thing to use them ol' cycles. Physics are here to stay.
I'm not too much into arcade games but I find one thing interesting: It began with physics and it will end with them.
The first video games (even if non-commercial) were indeed based on physics. Examples are also "Pong" (incidence and emergent angle of the ball), "Asteroids" (kinetics) "Lunar Lander" (gravity) and pinball simulations (gravity and those funny angles again). Some games are weaker than others in their physics use, of course, but others really emphasize it like Lunar Lander and Spacewar.
Some of these games were made by very intelligent people - often with a mathematical or physics background. So it probably was natural to use this knowledge.
Then games really got commercialized and mass marketed. For several years, physics in games weren't really explored, IMHO. Shooters often had the same mechanics, racing games weren't really simulations at first and pure simulation games were just emerging.
Often games don't really had much room for physics (adventures with video sequences, 2D rpgs), while there were some exceptions (throwing things in Dungeon Master or Ultima Underworld). "Trespasser" also had - some people say - too much physics: It not only had immensely high system demands at that time but also was uncomfortable to play.
Physics make or break simulations but I'm not sure if those pure, hard-core games (flight simulators for example) had more than a limited audience after the mid-eighties. Today the genre seems to be rather small.
Nowadays every game seems to need a "physics engine" like Havoc or PhysX - expecially games where you can drive, destroy or kill something (or all of it). People are sick to always see the same kill animations and want to play with the corpses ;-)
With already very high graphics standards (often outsourced to the graphics cards) one has to use the free processor time or put several cores to work and physics are a great thing to use them ol' cycles. Physics are here to stay.
take care,
Calibrator
take care,
Calibrator