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Comment by spacemanaki | Hacker News Reader

What would be the advantage of highly realistic physics though? In some cases it would improve gameplay (I remember the Newtonian physics in the Independence War games resulted in relatively novel gameplay) but in a lot of cases I don't think it would. Minecraft especially is kind of abstract, and it already struggles a bit with performance on some larger multiplayer games. Super realistic physics would just make this worse and not add that much to the gameplay, IMHO.

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Well, yes I can see in games it being just eye candy maybe, but even in incredibly flashy renderings (like heck even Target commercials) there's just sort of a basic Verlet integration of speed and acceleration or deceleration but not many things like air drag, friction on the surfaces, little "oops" that happen with uneven surfaces and random errors in trajectories, etc... I have seen SIGGRAPH white papers that contain a lot of these sorts of things and more as a group, and well, lets hope those eventually get read and used. The current state of the art reminds me of when I first learned Photoshop and I couldn't stand any magazine covers I saw (actually I guess I still can't heheheh)

Target commercials aren't really a fair comparison to Minecraft. One is the work of a team backed by large company and gets rendered once on powerful hardware (I think... I don't know what you're specifically referring to but I assume it's some computer animated spot) and the other was largely the work of one programmer and has to run on cheap PCs and Macbooks (sure it doesn't have to but I would argue that's part of Minecraft's success: you don't need a gaming rig to play it, as you do to play something like Skyrim).

I definitely understand where you're coming from but keep in mind that you likely have a much deeper understanding of physics than most game players (and likely most game devs).

Minecraft does have terminal velocity, though (it's obvious from the very first shot showing the pole while falling), therefore it does have some implementation of air resistance. So as soon as the video says "assuming air resistance to be negligible," it's oversimplifying, as Minecraft clearly does not have negligible air resistance.

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