Didn't see anything on this so just putting it out there, no idea if its possible with the game engine or what not, or if physics are planed in the game where we're see bits on tanks ect.. flying all over the place when they get destroyed? Was thinking it'd be pretty awesome to see bits of units and buildings flying, big explosions making huge craters in the terrain. Side note: Think Tsunami's would be awesome as well if an asteroid hits it in the water and turns the planet into a water planet with few islands lol
Question, did you perform any searches when looking? You can also use the sticky threads like the Topic Index and the Confirmed Features List. Mike
Yes but there was absolutely nothing on the physics or destructible environments, and yep no searches came up with anything about physics either. Was the first thing I did seems as I've been on the forums a lot recently. Unless you can point me to another thread?
craters from the commander going nuke, and just craters from the destructible environments are completely different, and the other thing your talking about yes, water has been talked about a little bit... but there was nothing in there about actual destructible environments and the physics side of that... so you didn't really, not for topic of this thread...
And the threads on deforming terrain should make Uber's stance quite clear on the matter, there may be some deformation applied to large scale weapons(Nucks and KEWs) but that they don't feel that Deformation is core to the gameplay that it should be more widely applied. I think you need to be more clear with specific examples as to what you feel is "Destructible Terrain", the only solid one you've provided so far is crashing an asteroid into a body of water, which wouldn't raise the planets water level. Mike
thanks knight i'll check that out... didn't even think to look for deforming terrain..... Edit: This post from neutrino summed up everything I wanted to know about the destructability really... "From my understanding of how RTS unit movement works, fully destructible Voxel based terrain would make the pathfinding much more difficult to compute. Plus, how would the spherical planets be rendered in squares? You'd get lumpy terrain. Our algorithms have gotten more sophisticated. I think a height map would be the best solution. For both terrain deformation and possibly as a "wink-wink-nudge-nudge-physics" approximation for water/magma simulation. Heightmap to me is a fallback position. I want more complex topology. I would love to see major impacts break the crust and create areas of magma that have to slowly cool and harden. Exposed magma would do massive damage to any ground unit and medium damage to any air unit passing overhead. The magma layer would serve as an effective "minimum size" for the planet, providing a stopper to keep players from breaking all the way down to the core. The height map terrain deformation would be easier on pathfinding because you could just limit the steepness of slope that a unit can climb. This would also allow for certain units to be better at climbing, making mountain bases tactically viabile This is basically how TA worked."
And then Uber implemented height apps and all was well in the world. No. That's... Not how it works. The engine currently uses purely geometry (specifically arbitrary polygons) for everything; unit movement, path finding, physics, etc. etc. Implementing heightmaps would quite literally require a redesign of the entire engine. Well, maybe not the rendering engine, but everything OTHER than the renderer would have to, at the least, be adapted to work with heightmaps. Most entities would have to be entirely rewritten. Also heightmaps make for HORRIBLE representations of real life, IMHO, and Uber is taking a step towards the future of RTSes.
There are many things height maps can't do - overhangs, bridges, arbitrary terrain, anything with multiple "heights" per point. It also gets a bit whacky with spheres and concave shapes, as it can't handle pure vertical surfaces (see, for example, Sup Com). Nav meshes over 3D objects are in many respects quite superior to height maps.
Well yeah, I get that. Maybe they should make some sort of spherical oct-tree data structure . However, overhangs in RTS games are not super crucial to begin with.
