We know that asteroid impacts will create huge craters, and it seems reasonable to imagine that nukes might do something similar on a much smaller scale. Is there any chance that relatively light weapons, such as tank or artillery shells or rockets, will create small-scale deformations? This was an option in Spring, and it was a lot of fun because 1. battlefields looked physically chewed up, not just cosmetically soot-stained, and 2. bots gained a significant advantage over vehicles in navigating the rough terrain produced by an intense fight, leading to more dynamic and changing battles, where you might suddenly have an incentive to change your army composition or move to a new battlefield where your vehicles can still maneuver easily. I imagine it might be hard to implement due to CSG geometry being more expensive to modify than heightmaps, so perhaps not something you want to happen every time a weapon hits terrain. If that is indeed a concern, maybe adding displacement maps to terrain geometry would provide a best-of-both-worlds situation?
Neutrino has said in prior Live Streams(Check the Index) that while the engine could do it, they don't see as part of the gameplay they've envisioned. Of course everything is subject to change but the reasoning is solid IMO. Mike
Thanks. However, I don't see where they state that deformation by anything short of an asteroid (or nuke?) isn't consistent with their vision, let alone any reasoning to that effect. Can you be more specific?
Here, Here and Here(sorta). All I did to find those is Use Ctrl+F in Firefox and looked for all instances of hte word 'terrain'. Mike
Those are the ones I watched, but they don't seem entirely consistent with the position you attributed to them. Neutrino commented that he didn't see "little pew-pew shooters" as doing any terrain destruction, but expects it from "something that comes in, that wants to actually make a crater." This could plausibly encompass nukes and fixed artillery, or even naval guns, vehicle artillery, bombs, cruise missiles, and all manner of other heavier weapons.
With standard units? Nah. It's too chaotic to have every peewee melting the world. Wreckage already offers a minor form of terrain deformation, by getting in the way. With heavy weapons like artillery and ubergun? Maybe. With big units like krogoths and nukes? It's very likely. With uber units like asteroids and death stars? Of course!
It should totally be possible to replicate scenes from Iron Sky. Oversized airships should have artilery that can blast away parts of moons.
...I'd be cool with getting rid of those stupid trees or blasting those cliffs the catapults allways try to hug into rubble...
Oh my God I watched that film when I was little. Star Blazers, wasn't it? EDIT: Oh. That was your signature. Oops. Well ignore the quoted text above but the question still stands.
Neutrino replied to this question on reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/planetaryan...uestions_thread_friday_28th_june_2013/cas9af4 So I guess we'll just wait and see! Hopefully some of the experimentation will make it into an alpha release.
