On the weekend of August 29-31, teams of game developers will join the OLPC Physics Game Jam in a race to create a unique physics-based game for the One Laptop Per Child XO Laptop.

An OLPC Jam is a sort of intense workathon where developers, artists, and other 'creatives' throw themselves at a problem over a short space of time. Previous Jams have created educational and medical resources for use with the OLPC in developing countries and the organisers are confident that the talented geeks putting themselves forward for the Physics Game Jam will come up with something special.

All the code will be open source, so it is not impossible that the games created in the Jam will see the light of day in web-based games or other platforms down the line.

If you have any coding, game design or artistic chops and fancy helping out, get in touch here. There are prizes — including XO laptops and other goodies — for the best creations, plus a lovely warm feeling from helping a good cause.

OLPC Physics Game Jam For an XO [Slashdot]

Game developers and publishers should have no trouble at all creating realistic worlds and populating them with realistic people as NaturalMotion and NVIDIA announce a partnership that pairs the former's morpheme animation engine with the latter's PhysX technology in one powerful force of realistically moving goodness.

"We're deeply impressed by NVIDIA's commitment to push physics to new levels of fidelity and performance, and their investment in development and support infrastructure across all platforms," said Torsten Reil, CEO of NaturalMotion. "NVIDIA's PhysX technology provides a robust, high-fidelity foundation for our advanced character animation algorithms and tools. Through our close collaboration, we will help game developers bring fully interactive and believable characters to a wide range of games."

It's two great tastes that taste real together! Hit the jump for more details on the partnership between physics powerhouses.

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My undergraduate thesis was long, kinda boring, and involved dead imperialists; two students at McMaster University have created a Half-Life 2 mod called Half-Life Havoc for theirs, and attached a little paper on the history of video game physics.

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Not precisely a game, but there has been talk lately of physics (and science in general) in games, and this is a neat little program that's fun to spend a while playing with. It's still in beta and has the requisite bugs you might expect, but here's what the creator has to say about it:

Phun is a Master of Science Theises by Computing Science student Emil Ernerfeldt for supervisor Kenneth Bodin at VRLab, Umeå University. The solver is based on work by Claude Lacoursière

Phun is meant to be a playground where people can be creative. It can also be used as an educational tool to learn about physics concepts such as restitution and friction.

You can snag the download (Windows only for now, but an OSX version is apparently on its way) at the Phun website, where there's more information. There's also a thread going over at the GameDev.com forums.

The Havok engine just got a much-needed kick in the fluttering cloth pants with the unveiling of Havok Cloth and Havok Destruction at GDC, two products that will provide developers unprecedented control over cloth and destruction in their games. Havok Cloth, as seen in the video above, allows for scalable clothing that will stretch and flow as a character moves, while Havok Destruction is all about breaking stuff - dynamic fracturing, shattering, and deformation of objects. While just a nifty video clip to the layman, this is exactly the sort of thing that gives game developers - male and female alike - intense, uncomfortable erections. Hit the jump for the full press release.

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All hail the Enlightenment — Thomas Freeman has an interesting look at science and attitudes towards science in Half-Life and Portal. What do such attitudes spell for future releases?

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Wondering what NVIDIA's plans are for the PhysX tech it acquired recently? The Tech Report has confirmation from NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang that the company plans to incorporate support for that hardware-accelerated physics middleware into its GeForce 8 range of GPUs.

But it won't be doing it in hardware. It doesn't need to. The massively parallel nature of the GPU is already designed to handle the type of processing required for hardware physics. All it takes is a bit of software magic, and PhysX will run happily on GPUs that support CUDA.

What's CUDA? It stands for Compute Unified Device Architecture, and put simply, it's a tech included in the GeForce 8 range that allows the GPU to run general purpose code. According to the TR article, NVIDIA will port the PhysX middleware to a variant of the C programming language that can run on GPUs. Then it's just a matter of executing the code on the video card and voila - hardware PhysX support without the need for a PhysX card.

If anything's going to help the adoption of the PhysX middleware, it's knowing you only need one piece of hardware to take advantage of it. Note that PhysX is free, while Havok is not, so the latter will undoubtedly be keeping a close eye on this development.

Huang didn't put a date on support, but I suspect it'll come in the form of a driver update in the not-too-distant future.

GeForce 8 graphics processors to gain PhysX support [Tech Report, via Blue's News]

FiringSquad got in touch with NVIDIA recently to chat about its acquisition of PhysX designer AGEIA. I found it a curious decision, considering NVIDIA's GPUs support Havok's hardware-accelerated physics implementation, not to mention PhysX hasn't exactly taken the world by storm.

Now it looks like NVIDIA's plans for AGEIA's technology aren't just games-related.

You can head on over to FiringSquad for the entire interview, however, here's the meatiest part of the short talk:

Second, the computer industry is moving towards a heterogeneous computing model, combining a flexible CPU and a massively parallel processor like the GPU to perform computationally intensive applications like real-time computer graphics. Physics is a natural for processing on the GPU because, like graphics, it is made up of thousands of parallel computations, and with our CUDA technology, which is rapidly becoming one of the most pervasive parallel computing programming environments in history, we can open this exciting parallel processing world to applications desperate for a giant step in computing performance—such as physics processing, computer vision, video/image processing, and a world of exciting applications we’ve not yet imagined.

What I'm getting from this is that NVIDIA isn't so much interested in AGEIA for hardware-accelerated physics in games, but more what the massively parallel design of the hardware can be used for in certain general processing tasks. This is something AGEIA's PPU and the GPU have in common.

Is NVIDIA looking to take on Intel and AMD? There's definitely a place for this sort of hardware in specialised markets.

NVIDIA AGEIA PhysX Acquisition Interview [FiringSquad]

Here's the Crysis editor at work. Hard work. Someone has piled up 1000 nuclear canisters in the Crysis world editor and made them go ka-boom. The explosion that follows shows how the game engine renders physics for individual particles. Kinda interesting to see the engine's wheels churn!

Gamasutra has an interesting piece up on the use of physics in games by Pascal Luban, on the current applications, limitations, and future possibilities. It's worth a read through if you're interested in game design, even though physics is one of those things that ought to be invisible. The potential uses are interesting to ponder, and with better technology and some creative designers:

Physics is extremely demanding in terms of resources and some of the ideas that I have developed here are not currently achievable -- but the advances in the tools and technologies are foreseeable, giving us the power in the future. From now on, gameplay can be improved with uses that are not just cosmetic. The development of dynamic game environments that the player can change on the fly is already a trend in today's level design. Physics makes this evolution possible.

Physics is more than skin deep? It's a short article and not too heavy on the science speak.

Physics in Games: A New Gameplay Frontier [Gamasutra]