No physics API in the works, says Microsoft

[dafloppyone]

A job posting spotted on Microsoft's website last month suggested that the company had a "Direct Physics" application programming interface in the works. However, Microsoft's Windows Gaming Business Director Rich Wickham has denied the rumor in an interview with Maximum PC:

The September issue of the magazine reports that when braced on the matter Wickham noted he wrote the ad almost a year ago, and Microsoft has "no plans for a physics API", but rather are merely trying to "be on top of the situation" in an up-and-coming area of gaming interest.​

That statement makes sense, but Microsoft's own job posting still mentions a "growing team responsible for developing Direct Physics" as well as "simulation and collision algorithms ... that are optimized for the GPU." Perhaps Microsoft simply changed its plans since the posting was put up last August. Beyond3D says Direct3D 10 will bring extra support for general purpose computations on GPUs, and both ATI and Microsoft are reportedly prepping general purpose GPU-oriented APIs. A Direct Physics API could have been made redundant by those efforts.

 

[Una]

Yeah I think they will add some physics functions to one of the API's.

There is traditional CPU-based physics, GPU based physics and dedicated PPU's . One API that allows them to scale all abstractions will be useful.

My guess is something like this will come in XNA.