Physics Props

Eternal

L69: Deviant Member
Jul 8, 2009
69
10
I've noticed very few maps official or otherwise include any physics props now. The beer bottle or occasional can you can knock around, or a destroyable barrel seem to have all but vanished from most maps. Besides the cost of the prop itself is there really any reason for this?
 

Terr

Cranky Coder
aa
Jul 31, 2009
1,590
410
Depending on some details, there may be a cost to the server, but there's always a cost to any client who hasn't disabled them.

They're cool and all, but they also make sense as one of the first things to go in favor of better framerates etc.

As people play more often, they don't even notice 'em.
 

A Boojum Snark

Toraipoddodezain Mazahabado
aa
Nov 2, 2007
4,775
7,669
Physics code in TF2 is purposely cut back and because of that they have very poor collisions with players. Which is to say none at all. Players can collide with them, but they will not collide with players.
 

Eternal

L69: Deviant Member
Jul 8, 2009
69
10
Interesting...

I was just noticing as I went through maps alone to look at details that the props had become more and more rare, even on smaller maps (like arena) the only maps I can recall having physics props are 2fort and Hydro IIRC.

And yes they are noticeably expensive (I put ONE beer bottle copy/pasted from hydro into my map just for testing purposes, and shooting the bottle makes my fps drop be nearly 25FPS.
 

Tapp

L10: Glamorous Member
Jan 26, 2009
776
215
Hmm. I try to keep physics props in my maps, and I haven't noticed a difference. Being as though a ragdoll prop is approximately 100 times as expensive as a physics prop, I don't see how it could make an impact. Heck, even with a room full of ragdolls (I was testing if my scaffolding would cause lag, so I turned on insta-respawn, insta-death and bots) I barely noticed a difference in comparison to material drawing and prop rendering (yes, it is pretty optimised, thanks for asking). Anyway, I find that physics props are a combination of left-overs from hl2, realism/continuity and a little bit of gameplay. If you're wondering about that last part, I personally use the cones in hydro and barrels in dustbowl as a communication device to say "we've set-up base, come on in".
 

Eternal

L69: Deviant Member
Jul 8, 2009
69
10
wow, I have several prop_physics_multiplayer in my map, but dont really notice an fps drop (an I dont have that great of a pc)

My computer is fairly good (I need a new video card eventually though, 320mbs of video memory doesn't go very far these days) but I'm able to run tf2 on 1600/1200 max settings 4x antialiasing and I noticed that on my relatively sparsely populated map if I shot the beer bottle my fps would drop from around 170 to 140, right after wards it would go back up though. (keep in mind this was inside my spawn room in an area set apart via area portals, most of the time in-game I get around 80fps but each update has lowered my fps more and more each time even after doing a defrag of the files several times)