RTIME and MathEngine Team Up to Merge Networking and Physics

RTIME and MathEngine announced a multi-tiered deal today to fold their two engines, one networking and one physics, into a single package aimed at making realtime games faster to build, better, and more believable. Phase one hands developers the source code for a tank game built to demonstrate MathEngine’s physics running on top of RTIME’s realtime multiplayer. Phase two puts both companies’ engineers on shared R&D toward one integrated physics and networking model, the idea being that a developer gets multiplayer support transparently instead of wiring the two systems together by hand.

For the unfamiliar: MathEngine simulates real physical dynamics on the fly rather than playing back scripted or planned animation, and RTIME’s Interactive Networking Engine handles realtime interaction between players anywhere on the Internet, including shared text and voice, with mixing technology that lets one application serve both dialup and high speed connections.

Physics and netcode are the two hardest things to get right in a game, so middleware that claims to handle both at once is worth keeping an eye on.