Well, unfortunately there's a lot of hush-hush about the specifics; I think that's just because there's no shipping product.
From what I could gather, it seems that the Source engine allows for texture parameters on objects for rendering purposes. For a tactile input device, the only major hurdle is mapping those textures to the actuators inside the Falcon.
With regard to your comment on realism: I think this is becoming more prevalent in gaming. Yeah in competitive gaming, you have people doing odd things like strip out the sounds, but you also have competitive gamers that utilize the audio extensively -- tree branches cracking indicate someone is sneaking up behind me.
In addition, AGEIA has put a lot of work into making physics processing an advantage in UE3. For example, cloth deformations visible due to the PhysX engine reveal greater detail behind canvas trucks, for example.
Over all, while I think gamers tend to strip things out of games, like level of detail, I think as the decade begins to close you're going to find games and gamers go the opposite direction. Flag this | Edit this post |
