....games, sims call it what you want but lets not get pedantic.
Anywaaaaay the subject matter I will be touching on for todays little deena conversational is the deployment of emergent physics in Perfect Golf, I knew the game was going to be great but in the back of my mind I had one nagging doubt (until this morning), and that was this:
'WGT has VEM, it is non deterministic, and as good as this game [PG] might become and as many parameters as it might employ if the outcome is deterministic you might as well be playing a fancy atari version of golf because there are games which have VEM and those that are trivial, no matter how much you hate the way VEM has been deployed its results are non deterministic, it's the most advanced thing out there and WGT have got patents all over it.'
And then came the revelation 
.....
From some posts regarding an issue quite unrelated to, but none the less affected by it, I suddenly realized what they have probably been saying all along but I was just to thick to notice:
This game employs emergent physics.
What is emergent physics though?
Its 'as you go processing,' on the fly, realtime, instant convolution - just add golfer!!
The computer does not know in advance where the ball is going to end up because it has not gone through the series of dynamic transfer functions yet, thats club-to-ball (you, shot type, club e.t.c..), ball to air (spin, power, wind, trajectory....), and ball to ground (geometry, material.....) - this is all emergent and is why you're going to need some hefty processing power inside your computer, but at the end of the day it gives a 'non deterministic result'
Even better is the fact that emergent physics gives a non deterministic result the real way, the proper real life way - by stewing over the series of real life transfer functions, it's the real deal in every sense of the word whereas VEM is basically non deterministic by substitution, and as those who have played WGT know it's the 'by substitution' part of that sentence that has failed so miserably.
By attempting to cut out the middle man (the series of transfer functions emergent physics has to go through) WGT have used an application of statistics thereby giving a non deterministic output by substitution of what happens in real life using a black box that spits out variable outputs based on statistical distributions - but essentially it IS A RESULT WITHOUT JUSTIFICATION, it simply cannot justify itself - there is no physical reason why the ball might end up here or here or here - and thats what translates to the feeling of the game playing itself and you rolling dice - which is quite ironic for a gambling platform really, but not to the gambler who's basically throwing dice as much as he is using his own skillz -
In fairness to WGT they have employed the only thing they could employ to assure non determinism in their game - you see the whole thing is based on stills, pictures that come to life (to a point), but because the environment is not modeled they simply cannot employ something like emergent physics - there's no substance there for it to sink its teeth in to if you like, but lets keep to our own PG path.......
So let's revise that statement above to:
'there are games which have emergent physics, those that are trivial and those that have no justification'
In effect emergent physics is the stealth technology of golf and 'there are warplanes with stealth and those which are targets' to quote some US air commander - even lower spec planes that have stealth will murder a fleet of planes with superior flight capabilities (assuming its loaded up with enough long range stealth weaponary), because they have that one piece of technology that the others don't (invisibillity in the case of stealth, but generically speaking they have an absolutely essential technology that even not all things being equal (the other plane can be superior in every other way), will simply override everything else on offer - there is no question, it is superior).
Even in its development incarnation perfect golf will have its own stealth technology - that overrides everything else any golf game has to offer and there is no question - it makes it superior .
THAT (emergent physics) is in a nutshell why you should buy this game, its why this game is better than anything else and its why PG have got to be aggressive on the patents front - they probably already are.
You have the future at your feet PG
