Physx Indir
Kathryn Garivay
I remember playing the game all those many years ago, I got an nVidia graphics card and it had the PhysX support. When I turned it on, I noticed some amazing stuff - used shells from my (and my pets) guns would not disappear when fired, they'd LITTER THE GROUND. There were shells everywhere, and my powers would affect them. I'd see grenades send shells flying all over the room, storm powers would blast objects and shells everywhere around with gusts of wind.
My machine these days is light years ahead of that, and while it doesn't have the dedicated PhysX support it used to I imagine it should have no problems handling the extra opjects. Is there any way to turn all those physics objects back on? To make used shells from guns actually stay around and interact with powers? Is there any way to make all that fun and uselessly cool stuff still happen?
As I understand, COH's PhysX support was first built for Ageia's PhysX accelerator (yes, it used to be a separate hardware device) and hasn't been updated when Nvidia moved to GPU-based physics acceleration.
What's most likely happening is that the PhysX libraries used by COH are not compatible with the modern version of PhysX - something I've ran into with other games, eg Mirror's Edge and I believe also one of the Arkham games.
Since I never had a separate card, I'm sure that somehow I got it working with my nVidia graphics card back when they'd advertise that PhysX was a thing. If so, in theory, there should be some way to re-enable this, right?
Back in the day I used to run a Merc/Storm mastermind. The mercs would use full auto and just spray bullets and casings everywhere. I'd go through a warehouse, then run back out because there'd be literally thousands and thousands of shell casings littering the warehouse floor, and I'd have fun sucking them up with Hurricane and sending them all flying.
I kind of wonder if there'd be a way to enable 'persistent physics objects' (Bullet shells, paper and scraps from destroyed mayhem objects, etc) without the Ageia support using some config file or something? I dunno.
I know the server source code is out there, I don't know about the client-side and since all the physics stuff was purely client side I have no idea if some bored coder or experienced modder from other games would ever be interested in being lured over to take a look and enable those defunct options.
As I understand it, a lot of effort's being invested into "refactoring,' or tidying up the spaghetti code that is City of Heroes. I'd wager that's when the game's graphics will be brought into the modern era.
That'd be amazing, though I hope that someone out there within the extremely talented modder communities takes pity upon us and create some high res textures. I know a lot of games out there have had 4k retextures, but since CoH/V has been gone there has never been any reason for them to take a look our way.
Digging more... disregard what I said about PhysX 2.7. The DLLs that came with the last game version were using PhysX SDK 2.8.4 - which modern drivers are supposed to be compatible with ( cf -9.19.0218-driver.html , note that if you already have GeForce Experience installed then you most likely already have this driver installed ).
My assumption about SEGS was that they were trying to recreate the server-side stuff from scratch, since the code was never made available. Once the server code was made available, the advantage that SEGS had would have been twofold - being 100% legal by containing no code that was written by the NCSoft employees, and being potentially faster by being more optimized.
If CoH is using the latest PhysX SDK, however, it introduces possibilities. Slight, perhaps, but possibilities. Perhaps there's advanced options using Profile Inspector, I'll head home and dig around there to see if there's anything I can find that might enable support.
Getting Ageia's hardware is a non-solution unless you've got an old rig running XP or Vista on hand - the last official driver for it was released in 2008 ( 8.09.04 ) and only supported those systems. NB: there are copies on Guru3D: -categories/videocard-acceleration-physx--cuda.html
I have a GT550 that I could use as a PhysX processor, but nothing I tried would allow me to enable it in game. This card was released in 2011 and should be age appropriate. I use an AMD RX580 right now, and I was able to install the nvidia card with the drivers and all that running without removing or disabling the AMD card. Windows 7 came out in 2009, so maybe I wouldn't need to hunt down a copy of XP.
So I got a power dongle that will hopefully allow me to run both my AMD RX580 and the NVIDIA GT 550 at the same time. (I should have the wattage to do this, its really going to come down to airflow in my case. I can't fit a dual slot card in the bottom PCI-Express slot, so I have to use the one thats right below the very fat RX580)
"I decided to test this out for myself, and put my GTS 250 into my rig to see what the Physx would look like in CoH. Still couldn't enable the actual Physx option in game. After doing some digging around on the COH forums, it turns out that the game uses such an old version of Physx that it will only run on an actual Aegia card using the actual Aegia drivers. So, for anyone who is running the game on cards newer than the 8 series, going with the Aegia card is just likely to reduce your overall performance for only a minimal amount of increased eye candy; as, by all accounts of those who used the card, the Physx boost in CoH was so minuscule that paying anything for the Aegia card to have Physx in CoH was a ripoff."
Honestly I don't care in the slightest about the performance increase/decrease. What I care about is that when AGEIA is enabled, it produces a huge amount of persistent physics objects that otherwise vanish. Used bullet shells, debris from trash cans and destroyed objects in Mayhem/safeguard missions. Leaves from trees. Rocks and rubble from stone powers. They would stick around, and interact with powers in useless but visually fantastic ways.
Without being able to turn AGEIA Physics on, those objects are no longer persistent. The shells eject from weapons but the second they hit the floor they vanish entirely. Trash and debris does its own animation then vanishes into thin air. All I want is to be able to turn on the feature that makes those shells become permanent (While you're on the same map, at least) objects that can be interacted with by powers. The old, old option would actually have a max count of 1500 of these 'persistent' physics objects in the map :
I never had an AGEIA card, but I know that old nVidia cards would allow this to be turned on because at one point, ages ago, I had these physics enabled and working. I ran around with a Merc/Storm MM and they'd use full auto to just SPRAY the area with bullet shells, and then use Hurricane to suck 'em up and swirl 'em around. Gravity Controllers were amazing too - Lift would not only grab the target, but EVERYTHING Around the target would be flung up then down. Gravity Distortion would suck up all kinds of things. Super-strength stuff like hand clap would send everything flying in all directions.
One of you guys with a NVIDIA GPU should try jumping on the Ouroboros i24 test server, see if it works there. Maybe it's an i25 thing that's keeping it from being enabled? I'd do it, but I have an ATI GPU, so I can't enable it either way :(
The physics simulation extension omni.physx.bundle is enabled in Omniverse USD Composer by default - if you are using another Omniverse App, you may enable the physics extension in the Window > Extensions window.
Omniverse Physics consists of many extensions, there is a convenient omni.physx.bundle extension that groups together the most useful extensions and also gathers the changelog.The omni.physx.bundle extension has dependency on these extensions:
Green color represents core extensions required for physics simulation, this core is dependent only to USD and Carbonite, its the minimum set of extensions required to run simulation. Works for any headless mode, no direct Kit connection.
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