New Physics ?

http://www.naturalmotion.com/endorphin.htm

hope we see a firstlook for this soon ........

heh, considering LL is a listed customer of theirs....

Any LL staff want to comment on this one?

After looking over the website more for the product, seems not a replacement physics engine but a system for avatars. This would be nice to have in SL. But SL would need a new physics engine to handle it, sorry folks but Havok 1 is just too outdated and the stress it is under now, sims would crash trying to calculate ragdoll physics on an avatar let alone 40 to 100 avatars.

This feels like part of the expressive puppeteering that LL announced about a year ago, part of which was ragdoll physics on avatars.
As I caught here :
linky

Whilst I enjoyed watching the numerous tutorials on the product.. please don't encourage LL's techies to salivate and swing their attentions to apply yet another layer of 'eye candy' to this old engine that can barely cope with the basic dynamics of the Havoc 1 engine..... lol... we live in hope...

Google is your friend..

http://blog.secondlife.com/2005/11/21/if-i-ruled-the-world/
http://www.secondlifeinsider.com/2007/05/03/endorphin-to-change-your-expression/

Fascinating physics simulations and MOCAP blending...however, SL is FAR from implementing a physics engine of this caliber...the entire engine would need an overhaul.

This technology is for animated movies and gaming...not for virtual environments that stream massive amounts of data at one time.

Today's massive bandwidth is tomorrows narrow pipe.

Seams interesting. Perhaps this can stack upon the other stuff we expect in 2.0? lol...

This tool would be fantastic for creating anims. I doubt it will be built into avatars any time soon -- though that sure would be cool!

I also doubt it's affordable for anyone who isn't making high budget movies or commercials. You won't find it on ebay for $300!

Anyone know if the export function can create encapsulated .bhv files? No doubt if there is, the frame rates and articulation of the avatar would possibly be muted slightly more than intended...

It should be possible to adapt the technology in a way that limited data is sent and the Endorphin module in the client is used to generate animations from that.

Yes, there will be adaptations--this is what future tech is all about. This goes for bandwidth and data streaming as well.

We'll definitely see it in the future. You won't, however, see complicated ragdoll physics in SL for another few years.

If you look at Sony's Playground, you'll notice they have a model-based physics setup...but still they don't have ragdoll for the AVs.

Multiplayer games have ragdoll physics, but there is always a cap on the amount of people in a given server (not to mention, I think in some games, ragdoll is client side, because in CSource you can shut it off on your end for performance increase). At the moment, the amount of data involved in streaming real time quality physics to a massive sim isn't feasible.

The engine would need a huge overhaul, or a competitor company will have to start from the ground up.

Intense ragdoll physics (like endorphin) takes massive amounts of calculation and if you're streaming this real time, massive amounts of bandwidth for the population.

Perhaps when CPU cores number in the hundreds, and we all have Fibre optic connections direct to the backbone.. connection speeds in the hundreds of gb's... TB's of Ram and video ram... there will still be lag LOL...