Crystalline Physics Demo

Video games get more and more realistic as time goes by, especially when it comes to rigid bodies, which can already be simulated pretty close to reality. However, there’s still a lot of work to be done when it comes to how they behave in certain situations, namely when they have to react to strong forces interacting with them.

Crystalline Physics is a tech demo that aims to demonstrate the capabilities of the next physics engine used in the Crystalline video game. Rather than present you with a video explaining how the new technology works, the developers decided to provide an interactive demo instead, which allows you to witness the engine from a first-person perspective and watch it work in real-time.

On the other hand, there’s a single object available, which is not even a real object, but more of an extruded cube laying around. It is not textured and neither is the environment, but that shouldn’t matter, as long as you can put the engine to the test and see what it is capable of. To do that, all you have to do is point the mouse at it and click, which in turn applies a certain force on the margin you happen to look at when you click.

This action can be repeated as many times as you wish, which allows you to keep applying the force until you make the object spin. In fact, if you click fast enough and maintain the focus on the same edge or corner, it is actually possible to lift the cube from the ground, which is theoretically an effect of the exaggerated angular momentum.

There is not much else to do in the demo, but you can certainly think about the potential uses for the technology. Games would feel much more real with objects that react this way to your touch, but that might put too much strain on the process and cause severe performance issues. Regardless of that, it is nice to see that computers have come such a long way in the last few years, especially since engine is not even the best out there.

Crystalline Physics may not have any purpose outside of a game to utilize it, but it can certainly inspire people to utilize the concepts in other ways. Hence, some interesting games might result from it, which definitely a pleasant outcome.