Josh

I think you probably have to pay big licensing fees on consoles and mobile devices, but I will look into it further. I don't think Newton's development is going anywhere. I do like that bullet has motorized joints built in, and displays joints visually in a creative way. Not sure how Bullet stacks up against PhysX. Assuming there are no iOS/Android licensing issues, and considering that open source is either neutral or a negative to me, why would anyone choose Bullet over PhysX?

No, this is not supported.

I don't think the PhysX SDK is available for download for iOS. I can only get Windows and OSX versions from the dev site.

With physx you have to set up each object to break a certain way, and it always breaks the same way. They just make the task of creating the predefined break pieces a little easier. I doubt people would use this much because it means more work in the art pipeline for something that is not that big a benefit, and it still won't break realistically if you shoot out a support or something. You can see in the udk videos where they shoot the bottom of a wall out and the top floats magically in the air. The way they implement it, it's just slightly better particles shooting off the walls. If a truly dynamic solution is possible I would prefer that, even if it is slower or doesn't look as nice as predefined breaks.

Looking around, it seems destruction is just as primitive as it's always been. Newton has some features coming out, and physx has some demos, but they always rely on pre made segments, which I find more trouble than they're worth. I understand the hardware isn't up to the task of simulating breakable solid objects, but the stuff they are doing in the meantime is pretty gimmicky, and a lot of trouble to set up. I am somewhat interested in performing realtime slices of csg solids. You could mark some solids to be breakable and they would fracture around the point of impact. The nice part is this would require no special setup or anything, it would just work. Of course it would be limited to just shooting concrete off of rebar, and stuff that doesn't alter the underlying structure. If you shot a support column out, it wouldn't make the ceiling collapse

PhysX destruction looks very compelling at first until you realize the artist has to generate a break pattern for everything, and define "support" pieces that tell the whole structure to fall over when broken. :\ Bullet has soft bodies, and is probably easier to compile across platforms, but I don't see any other advantages to it. What I would really like is "real" destruction as well as soft bodies.

Why?

Havok is free on PC. I don't know if they have built it for mobile devices yet. Only one library will be officially supported, and the base physics driver class will be designed around it. Other physics libraries may not work in the same way, and I am not counting on anyone designing a full implementation with all the same functionality, but it will be easier to test different physics libraries if you feel like tinkering.

Vote here.

That's where writing your game comes in. We give you the commands you need, the rest is up to you.

It removes the entity from the global lists, and may do other specific things depending on the entity type. The garbage collector will automatically delete the memory allocated for it. You might be able to still call some commands on a freed entity, but you definitely should not.

But that isn't what he's asking about.

I think InMotion is competing with, and in the same league as, GoDaddy and the other cheap hosts. Like GoDaddy, they have more expensive options, but their primary focus is on expanding and getting people to open up their $6 hosting for their blog. They're very well-rated, and probably the best of the bottom-of-the-barrel competitors, but I think their reputation is probably based on affiliate link sites. Our service with them was not cheap, but the fact they even offer budget hosting means they are focused on low-quality expansion. It would be like if Mercedes started selling an economy car. I'm leaning towards WiredTree at the moment. They don't do any low-cost hosting, which presumably means real businesses are their primary focus, and the speed tests we tried are giving good results. I appreciate the offers from several members here for hosting, but I would prefer to keep that separate. Things often go wrong so I'd like to keep the web hosting company a separate entity that can be ditched if need be.

Cable is better!

You can have a million triangles drawn and be fine, but it's a complex issue. Character polys tend to be relatively expensive compared to terrain. I would keep the polycount as low as possible, and most of all make sure the extra polycount is justified by more detail. I've seen 10,000 poly characters that look much less detailed than 4000 poly ones. We've passed the point where more polys = more realistic. It also matters how many of these characters you expect to have onscreen on average.

What kind of connection do you have?

1. Wired Tree (Chicago) http://speedtest.wiredtree.com/100mb.bin 2. InMotion Hosting (Los Angeles) http://leadwerks.com//100mb.bin 3. Limetric (The Netherlands) http://www.limetric.com/misc/100mb.bin My results Location: west coast USA 1: ~700 kb/s 2: ~2 mb/s 3: ~300 kb/s PM me a link to a 100 mb file if you have another URL you want me to test.

Leadwerks Engine 3 would be perfectly suitable for 2D games, since it includes an OpenGL 1 renderer with very low hardware requirements.

All LE3 functions are in an le namespace.

I'm just waiting for the next formulaic response so I can ask them what they think of having a backup system with a 100.0% failure rate (3 out of 3, so far).

Yes any geforce 8800 or 9800 is great. When buying gpus all you need to look at is number of stream processors. You want at least 80 on an nvidia card and 400 on an ati card

The robotic responses I get are maddening. "we're sorry but this backup does not contain any databases. If you have any other backups you would like us to restore we'll be happy to try them".

Don't buy that. It has 16 stream processors. That's less than a mid range card five years ago. I recommend a GEForce 9800 if you can still find one and need something inexpensive. It should be around $100.

It's InMotion Hosting. They're a very well rated host that is supposed to specialize in business hosting, which is why I chose them. I'm paying $75 a month for a virtual private server. The speed and everything else has been great, until now. Got a call this evening, but it doesn't sound like they have anything else to try. I don't know if anyone is working on the problem or what they are attempting. I think they just look at it as "oh well, that's only one customer that might not renew, no big deal". If their normal protocol is to only run daily backups, and only on sites with less than 10 gb, and all the backups I saved don't actually contain the data in question, then there is nowhere that data could be retrieved from.

Thank you Herbert. I am aware of this option. I chose full website backups because I thought it would give a better snapshot of the server at any particular time, the description says it includes MySQL databases, and tech support told me it would include those. I know how to save individual databases, but I didn't know the full website backup didn't actually work. If I had known that, it would have been simple to just save the database individually.