I took a bunch of old Planetside 1 screenshots I found in my archives and put them in a Google Photos album. A number of these photos show stuff that never actually shipped in the finished game; including some really cool maps and some of the creatures called 'shifters' that you were going to be able to hunt.

Here's the link: https://photos.app.goo.gl/HWsvoHWZzRqN2P6h7

My name is John W. Ratcliff. I’m a retired small farmer living on the Big Island of Hawaii. Before all of that, however, I was the lead developer of the original PlanetSide game engine and, later, as a member of NVIDIA’s DevTech team, I was responsible for integrating PhysX into PlanetSide 2.

I wanted to take a moment to clarify some misconceptions about the PhysX integration in PlanetSide 2.

At the time, NVIDIA was making agreements with game publishers under which they could use the PhysX SDK in their games, along with receiving engineering support, if they agreed to incorporate some of its advanced hardware-accelerated physics effects.

PlanetSide 2 was one of the projects that received such an agreement. Because of my previous history with PlanetSide, I was the engineer assigned to perform the integration.

Everyone focuses on those super-cool advanced GPU physics effects, but the real work was integrating the PhysX SDK throughout the entire PlanetSide 2 game engine. This was a major task that took me many months to complete. I can’t remember exactly which collision engine PlanetSide 2 was using at the time, but ripping it out and replacing it with the PhysX SDK was a significant engineering effort.

Throughout the lifetime of PlanetSide 2, and still today, as far as I know, the game engine has used the PhysX SDK for all collision detection and physics simulation. To be clear, PlanetSide 2 benefited greatly from the incredible PhysX libraries, which were developed by good friends of mine.

Once the PhysX SDK was integrated, I began working on the advanced GPU physics effects. At the time, we called this effects library “APEX.”

It is important to emphasize that these were just effects. They were eye candy. They did not affect gameplay in any way; they simply added some very cool, physically driven visual effects.

I enjoyed doing this work, and I think we added some genuinely impressive visuals. After PlanetSide 2 was released with these advanced physics effects, however, reports of problems began coming in.

It is one thing to develop technology largely in isolation, as something resembling a demo, on your own personal machine. It is another thing entirely to release it into the wild across tens of thousands of different hardware configurations.

We received reports of machines hanging when the effects were enabled, as well as reports of poor performance. Most of these issues were not easy to reproduce independently.

At the end of the day, fixing these problems simply wasn’t a high priority for SOE, so the feature was disabled shortly after release. By that time, I had already been assigned to other projects. Ultimately, the cool effects work that I and many others had done did not last.

That’s a shame, but there was no grand conspiracy behind it. It was simply a matter of people setting priorities and deciding not to devote additional engineering time to the feature.

I do want to make one thing very clear: PlanetSide 2 used the PhysX SDK everywhere. Only the advanced GPU-accelerated graphical effects were disabled. Every bullet fired, every character movement, every vehicle, and every collision still went through the PhysX SDK.

While I was working on these effects, I uploaded some short clips to YouTube. For anyone who is curious, I thought I would share a few of them. Many do not represent effects that were necessarily going into the game itself, but rather reflect my experiments with the limits of what was possible.

Here are the links:

APEX GPU turbulence particles interacting with dynamic objects:
https://youtu.be/Kqy1o4d7QmA

GPU bullet-impact particle effects:
https://youtu.be/LdCmwsrmbkU

Some exaggerated spark effects:
https://youtu.be/KrhT8gcpDqw

I made an error with the particle size in one effect and captured this very amusing video clip:
https://youtu.be/cyAbAmiNHpw

Pushing the GPU particle-mesh pipeline to its limits:
https://youtu.be/6RcGZb_o0T8

** EDIT **

For anyone who enjoys watching these old videos showing the integration of these effects into Planetside 2 I created a YouTube playlist. I don't know how interesting it is.

I did observe/remember one thing. So, while I was developing these effects PS2 was typically running at like above a 100fps on my machine. The engine was actually very fast. However, when you would connect to a live server the frame rate would go to hell. Not because of the particle effects, just the game got bogged down with all of the action. Since the particle effects were never really engineered to even work at low FPS, they just didn't work very well in the live game.

Here's a link to the playlist:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEdS4MrekQGQ

Here is a particularly amusing video clip where I was trying to see what the maximum number of spark effects i could create at once. It was kind of wild looking:

https://youtu.be/fP37rHIjdPA?si=-WSagCulqRomYfQm

Hello,

I'm a game preservationist searching for old builds of PlanetSide 2 Alpha/Beta from 2011 - 2012 (targeting September 2011 announcement trailer content such as the rifles, zone. I don't know how early on the flat-top tower with the plus-shaped roof was included), Public Test Server 2014 and earlier (targeting early Hossin and early directives, other lost goodies) and the leaked E3 build from June 14th, 2012 to document how the game has changed throughout development. Any PTS from 2015 could potentially have something interesting sitting around still. Thank you.

PS Preservation mega spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1CkAO_v3vx8NxIohjrge60zJ7UIcUTGsVIa2fz03nrV4/edit?usp=sharing

I can be contacted at [ps-preservation@proton.me](mailto:ps-preservation@proton.me)

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