Quote:Original post by redrexblue
So, to conclude, why would you buy a physics engine? For support / documentation / tools ?

It depends on what you're doing.

For example, Havok puts significant effort into per-platform optimization, and can send support engineers to your site. Clearly, this costs money for them to do, so you end up paying them. From my personal experience with them (check out PsiOps), they do a good job, and using their product was a good call.

If you're doing a small game that isn't heavily physics dependent, would using their product make sense? Depends on the budget, the team, the timeframe, etc., but it's not as likely.

So, just like any other tool, the utility of the tool depends on the application. If you can provide any more specifics about your circumstances, perhaps we can provide more meaningful guidance.

Quote:Original post by redrexblue
So, to conclude, why would you buy a physics engine? For support / documentation / tools ?

Havok is a pretty amazing package. Well documented, good support, and a supa cool run-time visual debugger. It works on all consoles and PC. and, man, that debugger is sweet (seperate app you can click and drag around objects in your game world and they'll move in your actual game.

-me

Quote:Original post by drakostar

Quote:Original post by Promit

Quote:Original post by drakostar
For example, if you do go with PhysX and decide to sell your game, be prepared to pay them $50,000.

This is not what PhysX costs anymore.

Full details from AGEIA:
Free for non-commercial use, PS3 development, or if you make "significant use" of their hardware.
$50k for everything else.

Did they change the price and not update their site?

Then make significant use of their hardware (which basically involves having an option to run the particle systems through a secondary physics scene that runs on the hardware).