Re:The Supermicro H11DSi Motherboard Mini-Review: The Sole D...
by leetcrew on Friday May 15, 2020 @12:50PM
(#23194323)
I think you're right; at least it jives with everything I've read about game dev. a common design goal in modern games is to never allow the game to fall into a state where forward progress is impossible due to a player action (excepting stuff like dying, of course). realistic physics simulation adds a lot of weird edge cases that need to be tested or hacked around. unlike cs:go, cs:source had lots of collidable physics props in the maps. they looked benign at first, but malicious players could use them to block important passages, make it impossible to defuse the bomb, or arrange them in ways that other players would get stuck in them.
here's a video of hl2 devs reacting to a speedrun of the game using many exploits: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sK_PdwL5Y8g
kind of a long video, but there's a lot of interesting commentary on how much work it was to make the physics puzzles robust against unexpected player actions.
In terms of physics usually the issue is if you have a rich physics envrionment it gets more fragile: it's easier for players to break it, intentionally or unintentionally. I've played some games with physics systems far in advance in terms of number of objects than could be achieved previously and they are all pretty much just 'buggy', not necessarily in terms of coding quality, just in terms of how rigid body physics is really prone to creating edge cases which create massive forces, velocities, and/or accelerations from apparently benign arrangements of objects.