land deforming

I never build walls, as theyre never really any good - but given the destroyability of the planets in PA - wouldnt some kind of digger type unit, or upgrade to an existing unit (such as a higher level engineer or commander) to allow them to deform the landscape in some way be quite good?

Possible uses could be to dig through smaller mountains to create a pass (without having to smash an asteroid into it) or to create rivers/water to make units take longer routes to avoid areas which aren't easily defend-able?

Obviously a lot of balance would need to be taken into consideration here, but conceptually I think it would be useful.

Given the other post I jsut saw about building hydrocarbons on top of craters/lava, and the livestream saying that water would flow dynamically, this could be a good way of rendering said hydrocarbons (if they were a "super" power building) inoperable before an attack to knock all the enemies shields out or the like?

Mike

In Earth 2150, you could do this. You could flatten land, you could dig TRENCHES (awesome for putting defensive towers in, as it covers a decent amount of the building from ballistics/laser fire (until they blow up your trench with destructive cannons).

Seriously though, I like the idea.

I'd like to see an actual wall and not just a small obstacle that you can build.

Land deforming is going to be a critical aspect of the game. We know that asteroids can make devastating craters in a planetary surface, but it is unknown how small units will work with this. We also don't know if there will be any defenses against terrain damage. Any way it's set up, destroying terrain is going to at least play a huge role in the end game.

Planet design may also change how terrain damage gets dealt. For example, asteroids may be made of extremely fragile dirt, while bedrock is much more hardy against further damage. Metal worlds may be nearly indestructible.

Dune had one of the first takes on land deforming. Concrete pavement can be used to increase structure HP and protect against burrowing worms. In PA, a similar utility may allow bases to protect themselves against artillery craters and such.

Umm, I hate to break it to you but Dune's concrete wasn't really land deforming, as it never altered the height of the land underneath it- it was more like a decal that sped units up and allowed undamaged construction.

It was also worm proof. Like I said, it was one of the first takes at terrain control in an RTS. It was also one of the first RTS games.

I liked the system in various Spring engine games where the best method to dig a trench was to make a line of landmines. When the enemy showed up, bam! trench! It only worked on very soft ground, though.

Terrain control, true.

But no, it didn't prevent worm attacks. Ordinary rock did that on its own.

I think given the fact that the Uber guys eluded to dynamically flowing water that a number of cool things could potentially happen:

- Trenches double be dug / walls could be raised (though i think it would be best if you had to remove from somewhere to add to somewhere, so u would always have a trench/wall in the same place)

- Bases could be flooded? This could be devastating - maybe building walls/trenches around your base would be the only way to defend it from flooding?

- Rivers could be dammed to allow non amphibious units to cross, then un-dammed when an attack of un-amphibious units attack, which could destroy/damage them?

Re: Dune - my memory is a little hazy of watching my older brother play it back in the day - but I agree - the concrete was to stop damage, rather than anything else, but I see your point that it was probably the first game to include stuff that could modify the land's properties, albeit in a simple way.

Mike

Don't get too excited about all this. The current flowing only happens during map creation.
That doesn't mean we won't do something but don't expect some kind of fancy realtime water simulation because that isn't on the current radar. Things like tsunami's etc. can be done without that stuff simply by using FX.

YES! That's the way to go! Water simulation doesn't add anything into the gameplay that can't be done in a simpler way.

Neutrino, what about when a massive chunk of the planet is removed and that chunk is connected to an ocean? Clearly the water will need to fill the lowest points on the map in some way, even though it won't be a full featured water simulation (good god that would be expensive) and there has been some mumble about tsunami waves? I'm really curious as to how this will be handled

My favourite water "sim" in a game is definitely in "From Dust". The entire game used a fairly simple and approximate method of water simulation to have flowing masses of height-map-style water that would flow to the lowest point on the map, without having to fully simulate actual fluid dynamics

Yeah, that was awesome. However, it did take up all CPU resources, so it's not possible to have that in this game.

Yeah, and it doesn't need water simulation to do something like this
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gygcu0jMtnY

wow that tsunami in Anno looked amazing! Is that all just a height map with nice texture shaders? Something to that level of detail would be fantastic.

I'm confident in Uber's talent, they'll figgure out something good, I'm just really curious what they choose to do

Yeah that video is amazing! it would be very cool if PA could do stuff with water like that.

But I appreciate there are many reasons not to, but like an earlier post said - what happens when an asteroid crashes into part land/part sea? surely there isnt gonna be a big chunk of land missing but the water stay the same with some kind of invisible boundary where the land used to be?

Or if an asteroid crashes into a big sea, the sea level should go down as the asteroid made it deeper?

Ye, wonder how they will handle this actually.

That game was indeed unseen but no, you must have been running on some very very low-spec laptop because that game consumed close to nothing.

oh oh oh now people are talking about dune haha.

Either we must have a Dune remake on this engine.

Or add the worms from dune.

Ive always wondered why no other RTS had stuff like that, i mean those worms WAS the nightmare of anyone.

WORM SIGN DETECTED oh noonoooo
Snatch your harvesters hehe. good times good times.

some RTS had stuff like that but it was hard to implement. I don't know how the physics of smashing a planet into another will work. This is the most important part. Once Uber has finished putting that in and if they still have time then they can add terrain deformation.