This episode explores the evolution and challenges of physics engines in video games, featuring Dennis Gustafsson, an engineer with extensive experience in the field. Gustafsson begins by detailing his early fascination with game physics, particularly rigid body simulations, and how this led to the creation of Mekon Research, a company aimed at providing physics middleware. Against the backdrop of early 2000s game development, he notes the difficulty of selling physics engines when physics integration wasn't a standard part of game design, and the company's eventual acquisition by AGEA. More significantly, the conversation pivots to the intricacies of game physics, including the use of iterative methods for solving equations, the importance of fixed time steps for stability, and the challenges of parallelizing physics computations across multiple cores. For instance, Gustafsson discusses his work on mobile games like Sprinkle and Smash Hit, highlighting the trade-offs between visual fidelity and computational cost on limited hardware. The discussion further covers the development of Teardown, a voxel-based destruction game, and the technical innovations required to achieve real-time destruction using ray tracing. Emerging industry patterns reflected in Gustafsson's journey include the shift from CPU-based to GPU-accelerated physics, and the ongoing quest to balance performance with accuracy in game simulations.
