It looks like some sort of physics platform. I think what nesrulz is trying to say... is that AGEIA could be implemented for the crash physics or something.
Although it probably is a good system, it's only useful to use something like that if you do it from the start. It might be possible to use the rigid body dynamics and the collision detection, but it would probably take ages to implement that now.
we went over this many times before in the old forum
to use the physics chip the programmers need to use the novadex SDK. thats no good for lfs.
and anyway, a duel core system will most likely be more suitable for it (apart from the 128mb onboard ram on the physics card).
the only way this can/will become mainstream is if the card is opened up for developers to plug homebrew physics in. i doubt many developers will want to chuck out years of code. changing physics sdk is a bitch, not only do you have to change a *lot* of code but you also have to learn the new sdk and learn all the tweaks to make it stable (if it fakes the physics, and novadex does)
anything that takes full advantage of ageia makes it impossible to run on normal pcs. therefore shrinking madly the target machines lfs can run on.
if you gonna use ageia just as extension eyecandy, it makes itself useless because its not vital for the game.
As a speculation, Novadex is only general. i.e. vehicle physics are basic vehicle physics, rather than each indepedent part of the vehicle, and how it affects it as a whole. Whilst it maybe good at some things - like being using in a FPS (such as UT2003/4), its technically not designed for racing sim's, and a fair chunk of stuff would need to be written from scratch, to talk and add on bits that were missing, anyway - so why use Novadex? A lot of the physics is already written, stripping it out and replacing it with Novadex and rewritten code for Novadex compatibility would be nuts - its a huge task. 1 person can only do so much, and theres not much real benefit to do so.
Dont get me wrong, I like Novadex, its good, but it has its place. You wouldnt write a kernel in QBasic, because its the wrong tool for the job. The same applies here.
Also the Novodex SDK is said to be quite expensive; the commercial license price for a single title on one platform is 50 000 dollars. Or, thats what it used to be some time ago, it could have changed up or down but whatever it is now I doubt it would be worth it for LFS. Especially considering the time it would take to pretty much re-write most of the physics code already there, and the amount it would "alienate" the whole game (It would not work well or at all without the PPU card).
and if thats true then it might be good. if i can ship off my code to the physics chip instead of the cpu then fine. but if i need to go through novadex then no thanks.
Just looks like eye candy to me . . . Doesn't look quite right. I mean it's designed with consoles in mind ffs. It's certainly not right enough to be implemeted into LFS.
And anyway. Scawen already has a kick arse Physics engine. And it's one that will get even better.