Effects of "smaller explosions" on the landscape

Hey there...

after reading Mavor's blogpost about Terrain Geometry i came up with a question. Actually i wanna describe it with pictures... I want to apologize beforehand for the quality, im not good at Arts...

From the blogpost i extract, that explosion can execute subtract Orders on the Planets Terrain, like subtract a sphere.
In one sentence... what happens if a hill gets its lower part blown away? Will it collaps or fly in the air?

The only talk about something like this has been focused more on larger weapons, like Nucks and Asteroids, I doubt we'll see the rank and file have much if any effect on terrain.

Mike

True, but it's an important question. Someone will mod grunts with mining lasorz, and this problem will show up.

It falls over and makes a minor kinetic impact like a tiny asteroid hitting the planet?

It's not theoretically THAT far apart.

But that's not Uber's problem, that's the modder's problem.

Mike

Interesting question.
What happens to falling terrain, if it is even possible to generate.

From what I have read, the terrain updating is done server side,
I guess it is possible to add a check of what vertices are still connected and either removing the floating piece or add a rigid body to it.
However since this is done server side, I do not know how instant this would be, maybe Uber wants to limit this to asteroids, nukes and deathstar beams so they can calculate its effect beforehand, whereas if you have a fast firing mining laser, the server may not be able to keep up.

If you've seen the "Desert Biome" you'll see a spire of rock. if two opposing armies are firing and cirkling, it could produce what OP showed us. I can see no reason it's 'restricted' to modders, and therefore, you're wrong

Mike

Your images make me want to play worms for some reason.

I would hope it fall down in a huge cloud of dust, or atleast collapse in a set-up dramatic way

That would be true if regular units were capable of deforming the terrain, but as has been said earlier in this thread, based on whats been posted, it doesn't look unit regular units will have those properties.

Mike

None the less, this is an important point if the planet editing tools (discussed in mavor's blog) allow for rather large hills, and a nuke goes off at the base, what if the crater leaves a bit of land floating somewhere? Does it fall down and disappear behind some particle effects or does it minecraft?
Or if the floating bit is almost as big as what's left of the planet, does it start orbiting? XD

Floating bits don't show up in the result. That could be changed btw but they seem counter productive in most cases.

So you wont make smaller units have impact on the terrain?

So it just disappears? or the whole structure collapses?

That's your own post. Why did you use passive voice instead of saying "as I said"? When you say "it has been said" the implication is that it was something the devs said. And why did you link to that post instead of to a dev post talking about the subject of terrain deformation?

Because he clearly didn't read the thread and there isn't much of an excuse for such a short thread.

Mike

But he clearly did read your post, since he was responding to you in the first place in saying he felt it won't be restricted to modders.

I also feel it won't be restricted to modders, and it's certainly not good for the modding community if they have to rewrite the physics simulation to create terrain-deforming weapons. As stated in the Jan 8th livestream the modder community is a high priority, so supporting that kind of functionality is well worth the devs time even if there are no units like that in vanilla.

I re-directed him back to it because he obviously hadn't read it, as he was assuming that all units/weapons had the capability to perform terrain deformations, except as I had originally pointed out, terrain deformation isn't a feature of all weapons, at this point it is unclear how and where(or even IF) it will be a feature of any weapon at all, if I recall correctly it was in the Jan Livestream where Neutrino talked about terrain deformation, and he said that while it might be present on larger weapons like nucks and asteroids, it was at the time not planned to be a main feature of the game(in the way that many/all weapons have it as a feature or that there are specific tools that harness it).

No, if there are no units that make use of something, it's full inclusion regardless of that is a waste. Uber is selling a Game here, not a modding engine. In time, if demand is high enough it is possible it can be picked up and completed/added in post-release, but right now when Uber is working with a limited budget, they need to focus on things that are actually going to go into the game aspect.

Mike

Or you could pick from several of the pre existing explosion (subtract mesh) brushes? Maybe even change the size, or use a couple of them at once.

it would be boring that a 3 hour long fight on a warfront wouldnt show any sign on the planet surface. that doesnt make sense. I think it should show that "this place has been like hell". With the engine it should be plausible to make any unit do some level of deformation. But i'm probably wrong.