CellFactor: Revolution Q&A - Physics, Characters, Story, and Psychic Powers

By Staff, GameSpotPosted Aug 7, 2006 3:56 pm PT

This physics-heavy action game will offer first-person shooting action and psychic powers that will let you smash the landscape to bits. We've got updated details.

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There was a time when action games put you in static worlds, where the only things you could affect were enemies you could shoot; keycards you could pick up; and maybe, if you were lucky, barrels you could explode with a few well-placed gunshots. Thanks to the miracle of modern science, computer games now offer much more interactivity; you can blow up chunks of your environments and toss them all over the place thanks to advanced-physics programming--including the physics supported by hardware manufacturer AGEIA's "PhysX" chip.

This upcoming PC action game will let you use guns and paranormal powers to tear up the landscape.

One game that got some attention at this year's Electronic Entertainment Expo for its use of physics was CellFactor, a technical demonstration that will now be coming home to the PC as a new game called CellFactor: Revolution. Artificial Studios' president and lead developer Jeremy Stieglitz sat down with us to give us an update on this sci-fi shooter that will let you shoot, run, and tear up your surroundings.

GameSpot: We understand that CellFactor started out as a tech demo using AGEIA's PhysX technology. Tell us about how the demo eventually ended up becoming a full-fledged game product.

Jeremy Stieglitz: In January of this year, we got our hands on some prototype PhysX hardware. We decided to use what limited resources we had at the time--Artificial is a small, independent developer--to put together a uniquely styled first-person shooter demo. We thought development of CellFactor would end there, but to our surprise, the gaming community seemed genuinely interested in the concepts in the demo, so we managed to secure some backing to put together a full multiplayer PC game. Our goal at the time was to produce CellFactor: Revolution without affecting our other title in development, Monster Madness, and the solution has been to create a second team at Artificial to develop it.

GS: Tell us about the game's use of advanced physics--just how much of the game's environments can be moved and deformed? Will manipulating the environment be a big part of gameplay?

JS: In the tech demo [shown at E3], there are several thousand rigid-body objects within the environment that can be used as weapons, and there are some cloth and fluid elements, but beyond that, you're basically in a static environment. Not so for Revolution. Our goal for this game is now to make the environment as interactive as the objects within it, and our primary way of doing that is to construct architecture from breakable-jointed dynamic objects rather than static geometry (as was done in the tech demo). This allows explosions to shatter stairwells, psychic powers to collapse pillars (the debris from which can then be used as weapons), gunfire to chip pieces off concrete, and all manner of environmental destruction. The downside is that joints are very complex computations, so the performance difference between software and PhysX hardware is more extreme. Thus, we find that some environments simply don't run in software anymore, but that's a worthy trade-off for the havoc you can unleash on a destructible environment. It really makes some of the psychic powers rather insane to see in motion, as everything around you collapses and shatters.

GS: Is the game being developed mainly for users that will hopefully have purchased high-end computers with physics-accelerator hardware by the time the game ships? What kind of hardware specs are you targeting?

Artificial is attempting a game it hopes will, with the aid of physics processor hardware, be explosive and chaotic.

JS: The primary target user will have PhysX hardware, and a portion of the game's content will require that the hardware is present on the system. The game's content will still be accessible to users in software physics, but that will be limited to environments without the robust interactivity of the hardware levels. As far as graphics go, the sheer number of objects onscreen pretty much requires a GeForce 6800 or ATI X800 generation video card, but if you have a GeForce 7900 or ATI X1900, you can crank up the high dynamic range lighting, per-pixel motion blur, and texture resolution to enjoy some eye candy along with your physics. CPU requirements are not as great, since much of the most intensive calculations are off-loaded to the PhysX processing unit, so you can capably run the game with a single-core processor with a speed of about 2GHz.

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60 Comments

  • Light_Power

    Posted Nov 23, 2007 1:50 am PT

    sounds good...lets see if it looks as good too...I have a Cross-Fire application with 2GB of total Video Ram HD2900XT running DDR4 and 8GB of Kensington pc11000 Memory with a new 45nm QuadCore CPU at 3.0 12mb L3 Cache and have a Raid SCSI320 Drives at 15000rpm 32mb buffer...
    So, Even Crysis couldn't shake my rig.......this game I'm sure it won't ether...But will see how much of the graphics blah blah is true as to what they say it looks like.

  • unforgetible

    Posted Aug 21, 2007 6:02 am PT

    Is there a single player part of this game??

  • tobygjohnson

    Posted May 12, 2007 6:37 pm PT

    Will this game take advantage of my 8800gtx physics processing capabilities?

  • jakeboudville

    Posted Sep 4, 2006 5:18 am PT

    kinda interesting...

  • evildeathbear

    Posted Aug 30, 2006 10:21 am PT

    My reply to this would definitely be a bit late, but Grinch, Ageia updates the engine from time to time, the drivers just enable the features and improve performance and such, though I think everytime they release a new engine you'd have to update the game via patch to support the new enhancements.. Thats where eyecandy turns into interactivity I'd assume. Cellfactor the demo has some performance issues with fluids a bit, though they dont interact with anything at all other than game world apparently, and they look like jumbo globs of.. weird stuff I wouldnt want sticking on my shoe. Anyways, they said Cellfactor: Revolution will be taking full usage of the PhysX chip whereas the demo only used 50% of it's capabilites, in other words, there's a slight chance some CPU stuff was being done, I don't know being as I'm not really "knowledgable" with the hardware's full capabilities, since according to Ageia, we've yet to see them. So apologies if my post seems a bit low in those areas.

  • olehberg

    Posted Aug 14, 2006 1:44 am PT

    strange thing that a game requires that much of a gamer that we will have to buy a new chip to the video-card only to make it be as good as it gets but anyway, thank god for nvidia GTX 7800... sry guys can't help it hehe!

  • Grinch123456

    Posted Aug 12, 2006 5:05 am PT

    The PhysX2, if that comes out, will hopefully be an improvement, since the current Physx adds only eye candy in games like GRAW. The great concept, but it could have been implemented better. That and maybe the PCI slot is slowing down, oh, and, the price.

  • amioran

    Posted Aug 10, 2006 2:56 pm PT

    room420,

    I know what 7950 is, it's only that I'm not english and sometimes I don't explain myself as I would like.

    About the thing that time will tell, probably you are true, in the sense that is too early to see how things will behave, but I think what I think for good sense.

    First, it's true that the GPU will use part (not all as you said, part) of the second chip to do what the PPU does, but, as I explained, the future will prolly be Quad-Sli, so in this ipotesis, only one of the three will be devoted to physics. Think about it, being this not the case, not Quad-SLi in any case for the buyer there's not much choice where to go on. Poor budget: better a single GPU + PPU than a dual-GPU card (as the 7950) or SLI? Medium budget: better SLI + PPU than Quad-SLI? Price is a bit more but of how much?

    Second, developers. Usually they do what they think it's best. I don't see at all they are working on the Aegeia powers apart the techs payed to do so. I see quad-sli prominent, and already some background test done with havok to use one chip. I simply don't think that in the future things will go the way of Aegeia being more easy to go the GPU route. But maybe I'm wrong? Maybe, don't seems so however.

    Third: the PPU is still another card in the PC. For example I have a single PCI card in my PC and I will not know where to put it since I have a SLI system. Simply having two more cards in a quad-sli or single-sly system is really prohibitive. Unless they plan to do Aegeia an integrated solution (maybe in future GPUs or on the MBs) I don't believe it will have an easy ground against what Nvidia and Ati are doing.

  • room420

    Posted Aug 10, 2006 9:27 am PT

    amioran,
    First, the 7950 is more than just two processors on one PCB (Printed Circuit Board), It is two complete 7900 GPU's physically mounted on top of each other and adapted to connect through a single PCI-E slot. It is a duel gpu single slot solution.

    Second the way both ATI and NVIDIA plan to use GPU's to do physics relies on one of two things,
    1) the down time experienced by the pixel and vertex shader pipelines when rendering scenes. For example a scene might heavily tax the pixel shaders but leave the vertex shaders basically idle. Both Nvidia and ATI would use that idle time to calculate the physics for that scene, in theory.
    2)The use of a second gpu to do the physics calculations (graphics calculations are similar to physics and can be performed by GPU's). While this solution provides the best performance it also requires a second GPU dedicated to physics. That in turn puts us in a multi-card solution to physics processing which is what Aegeia is trying to do.
    So if you wanted to use your 7950 to do physics and rendering you would have to sacrifice one of the GPU's to Physics.

    This all changes with Direct 3d10 (Direct X10).One of the intent's with DX10 is to unify the shader pipelines (pixel, vertex, and soon to be geometry) in order to use the entire GPU for rendering. That means no down-time for the pipelines which means physics and rendering must be performed on separate GPU's. The only advantage Nvidia And ATI have then is that you can use your old card to do physics instead of trying to sell it on eBay when you upgrade.

    The bottom line is it is to early to tell whose solution will ultimately be the best. There are no games released that use either solution (GPU or PPU) so basing an opinion on current reviews is a little naive (CF dos not count because it is a tech demo in its current form). If you must Have someone to lead the race I would say it is Aegeia. Nvidia and ATI are still in theory and test phase. Give it a year.

  • amioran

    Posted Aug 10, 2006 6:09 am PT

    decebal,

    As I said Nvidia already has in his newer card (7950) integrated hardware to do what aegeia does. It has also in the 7900 line but with different approach, so to make things simpler I will explain only how things work for the 7950.

    Basically the 7950 is a two-chips card in one, i.e. SLI in one GPU. Apart from the obvious thing of doing SLI without having two GPUs and the possibility in this way to offer Quad-SLI (that will be the future since all software house in E3 had Quad-SLI in their test platforms) the card offers the way to do what Aegeia does. It works this way: if the engine (in this case Havok, and it has already been tested) is built around it the GPU takes part of the second chip to power the physics of the software in the same way Aegeia does now. This works with SLI also with two 7900, but naturally is better the way above.

    Since I suppose that two-chips in one will be what most card will adopt for the possibility of quad-SLI and also for the possibility of Havok to run part of one chip to do what I said, I think Aegeia will not have much future. Think about it, will you pay 400$ plus 300$ to have a single CPU (maybe with dual if you buy SLI) and an integrated PPU that is not supported (and will not) by the vast majority of software or you will prefer to pay 600$ for a dual chips in a GPU (with the possibility of Quad) that does exactly what the former configuration does and full support of software? What you think most people will do, and more importantly, what you think developers will put preference to?

    Selea.

  • ZosoFan

    Posted Aug 9, 2006 9:31 pm PT

    I have a physx card and i love it. Yes pricey, but i would buy it just for UT2007

  • sharder1234

    Posted Aug 9, 2006 5:39 pm PT

    You guys are just bashing it because it's PC exclusive.

  • Wyked

    Posted Aug 9, 2006 10:27 am PT

    This was by far the funnest thing i played at E3. I was very perplexed when i heard it was just a tech demo. First FPS in a long time that actually had me shaking and tense. Hope the full game stacks up.

  • beedouk

    Posted Aug 9, 2006 10:20 am PT

    if the game is coming out on the 360 does that mean it has a physx procseser or has the 3 way CPU got osmething to do with it ?

  • BounceDK

    Posted Aug 8, 2006 8:14 pm PT

    I'm not impressed. All I see is a bunch of stuff flying around and it all looks very boring. PhysX is just a waste of cash.

  • evildeathbear

    Posted Aug 8, 2006 4:06 pm PT

    As for the last guy, (george_h1 you can't precisely counter everything, similar to other games, it's all based on reaction times, I myself have a physx card, and I dont know how much different the gameplay will be in CF: Revolution, but in CF itself, no way in hell will you be fully defended from anything, cuz if a person were playing a "bishop" and were to do the psi-shield ability, they still wouldnt be able to take a nade to the face, in cellfactor (the tech demo that's current available) you can grab objects and use them to protect yourself but it wont save you from getting one of those gravity grenades thrown at you, which will pretty much throw you up if it's above you and slam you to the ground if thrown under you when you're in the air, not to mention it'll smash objects onto you too, Cellfactor itself is pretty fun the few moments I've been able to play it online with people, wish I knew people who I could play it with cuz of how funny it is to play, but yeah, bottom line is, use all the psi powers you want but they dont keep you from being killed, at all... Especially since most objects are destructible, so if a person sprays you they'll ultimately start shooting you and kill you if all you do is do the shield thing, Sorry for the huge post, felt the need to elaborate on my own experiences playing the CF:CT demo.

    BTW Miltox, it's being used in UT2k7 for effects only I think.. so probably more particles bouncing around and maybe some fluids (blood from bodies etc), also might be used to create a tech demo of someone throwing rocks at Bill Gates' head... You can never tell these days.

  • MiltoxBeyond

    Posted Aug 8, 2006 3:59 pm PT

    They still haven't perfected the PhysX PPU yet...

    Toms Hardware Guide had an article that showed that computers with and without the PPU were getting approximately the same Frame rate. Their software still uses too much CPU which hits systems hard.

    Oh before I get flamed:

    I don't mean to say that it sucks or anything. Its just not fully ready.
    And they need more software support to help em out.

    I'm pretty sure the Unreal3 Engine has support for the PhysX Processor. Can't wait to see if it makes the games on the engine betterer....

  • george_h18

    Posted Aug 8, 2006 3:22 pm PT

    What i would like to know is how is anyone supposed to kill anyone when it seems like you can counter any attack thrown at you with your "powers".

  • badjames

    Posted Aug 8, 2006 3:02 pm PT


    TintedChimes
    "Hope its fun instead of tedious, I like the fact that everything is destructible but without a good story line and great gameplay it will just be a nice game to show off a new video card. Hopefully it will be good."

    that is so true. well said TintedChimes. nobody likes a repetitive game. this game has the innovation but it also needs a great story and fun gameplay. if it has these things i'm sure it wiil be great.

  • TintedChimes

    Posted Aug 8, 2006 2:21 pm PT

    Hope its fun instead of tedious, I like the fact that everything is destructible but without a good story line and great gameplay it will just be a nice game to show off a new video card. Hopefully it will be good.

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