   physX speed
  similar to my last question on this forum, but 3d instead of 2dHas anyone used physX with large numbers of ragdolls (500+) on a terrain (10,000s tris) + how fast was it?Ive downloaded physX, very nice though speed seems pretty slow (oddly even hardware only seems ~50% faster than cpu on my card, I was expecting more, anyways)From my numerous perusals of physics APIs they do there job superbly but are far too CPU intensive, theres no option to say 'give me a fast simulation even if it looks like crap, just so long as the things are sorta in the right spots, i.e. interpenetration ect is OK)Am I forced to roll my own half-assed ragdoll physics?cheers zed   
  looks like it. Ragdolls ain't easy though, they are CPU intensive. The number of tris on the terrain should have little impact, but 500 ragdolls is a lot.   ;  yes I was afraid of thatthanks oliii, I take your word as gospel WRT physics,Ill have a go tonight, perhaps I havent got the brains to make it work, in that case no ragdoll.   ;  Yeah that seems like a lot. I guess you could try less actors and joints (for each ragdoll), less iterations but I think its just too much. Though I wonder how Dead Rising is doing 7k zombies   ;  Well, at least with Dead Rising (and similar games, I assume) the thing is that not all 7k (or whatever) zombies are ragdoll at the same time, you have -I would guess- a maximum of 10 or 15 ragdolls at any one instant (and typically only one or two): the rest are either still standing, or have already finished their ragdoll bit and are lying motionless.zedz: do you actually need 500+ ragdolls at the same time? That does seem like a lot... what kind of game is this for? I remember your last game, you do like pushing the boundaries :-)   ;  actually thinking about it some more, I better attempt physx more thoroughly before I dismiss it, if it comes off it would save me a lot of brainwork, at worst I know a bit more than I do now about the API.Ill try it out for a couple of days.terrain is 128k->500k tris + other objects (so thats a bit painful WRT memory duplication)Codeka, yes in a worse case senerio, Ill post some game details in about a week on my blog   ;  followup for whoever's looking into this as well I shoulda posted this a while ago but FWIWwith standard ragdoll's + physx, u can have about 50-75 ragdolls at a reasonable speed.Im thinking now of not having proper models but have the characters be composed of blocks like I had originally, computional is it far less + it might even work out better than ragdolls gameplay wise   ;  Perhaps you could disable and enable the ragdolls based on the distance to the player?If the ragdoll is 1 kilometer away from the player then do you think it should have ragdoll enabled. I think not. All the 500 hundred ragdoll characters are not going to be close to the player all the time, or are they?   ;  in a worsecase senerio, yes they will be in the same areaalso FWIW WRT the number of tris on the terrain should have little impact is not strictly true going from 128x128 to 256x256 (rendering disabled) is quite a bit slower ~3x   