So, from what I understand, there will be no random natural hazards such as lightning storms or earthquakes. What I'm inquiring on is if there is going to be controllable, map-changing hazards (Besides throwing a big space rock at a planet or shooting heavy nuke artillery at the land) such as firing at the base of a tall cliff to have rocks crumble on an opposing force, or shooting edges of an archway to block a ravine.
As I understand it, currently there are only a couple of weapons that are going to be set to be terrain deforming; asteroids and possibly nukes. I don't think there are plans to go Red Faction and let tanks shoot a tunnel through mountains. I'm also pretty sure that the terrain deforming engine is not being "properly" realistic with the deformation (also like Red Faction); it's overlaying a hole rather than calculating rock stresses and applying gravity in a realistic materials science way. I doubt you'll get avalanche options unless they end up scripted in as part of a custom map.
Yeah, it would be too taxing on the engine to have every weapon deform terrain. The way I understand the craters work is that they are essentially deleting geometry at the site of impact and replacing it with a big hole with exploded textures. I don't understand how this works from a technical perspective though, the geometry bit I get but their texturing system is over my head. It would make sense for large artillery pieces to be able to make craters though, or orbital super-death-rays. I am honestly really hoping that they vie for a bit of realism in crater-forming impacts, so that when a crater is created, the rock and dirt that was there before goes flying outward as large kinetic projectiles and a big mushroom cloud of dust. Also, assuming an asteroid is a big chunk of terrain, that means all terrain *can* have physics. I'm thinking of something along the lines of a special subterranean explosive unit that burrows under a cliffside, and makes a special explosion. This explosion has calculated fracture points where the terrain splits off the cliffside and falls down.
Not necessarily. The moons are just planets, but asteroids are actually separate entity types all together from what I remember them saying.
Well, they can be named 'peanut butter spreading devices', but they're still celestial bodies that are vaguely round. Just names, you see. :mrgreen:
Not from a technical perspective. Either an asteroid is a planet or it isn't, and if you choose to name it a planet is irrelevant.
So no, an Asteroid isn't round by definition. If its round, its a Planet. /pendantic intermission end
what makes a rock an asteroid or (dwarf) planet is whether it has achieved gravitational hydrostatic equilibrium.
