Handling Wreckage - The SUPER POLL

Alrighty, I know we already have a thread on handling wreckage, but I thought I'd organize things better for the devs, and give everyone more options just to see what you all truly want. There seems to be a huge division amongst the community as to how everyone wants wreckage to be handled, so I made a more detailed poll. Hope this covers everything!

EDIT: Just to be clear, this poll covers unit wreckage, not structure wreckage. Feel free to discuss structure wreckage in the comments though

I will say that I do want to try and push physics a bit more so some of this is at least possible. Again this will be an area of experimentation with some different ideas. Definitely want to hear the feedback though.

Glad to hear it, hopefully we can get some more discussion going All I did really was take some of the ideas that were in the wreckage thread and organize them into a poll, so if you want to look at more ideas for now the first thread was over here.

Then lets give you some feedback:

Ich chose Other.

Because my understanding of go through is more like stomping through. Like destroying the wreckage by simply walking over it (like a tank driving over a car).
... But just walking through is fine, too.

So my decision is like a mix of Arbitrary Physics and just Arbitrary. (Yepp I just made it more complicated )

Why is there so much talk about Wreckages?

My solution:

The commander can reclaim it.

And units moving trought it will just smash it to pieces instead of stopping the units. Done! :geek:

Well, its could be a tactical component in gameplay, so its quiet important to find a good solution. And as you can see there are many ways to solve this. We two mentionend even one more way (destroying the wreckage) that isn't on the poll list.

It's just as important as the strength of AA. I think that are the top two topics atm.

If you hadn't noticed, there's a lot of talk about _everything_.

Better talk a lot before its too late.

I voted other, but that's because I support wreckage blocking all movement on one very big condition. Wreckage should be relatively fragile. In TA it often felt like a dead tank was a more significant barrier to movement than a live one (whether this was the case or not I can't remember). Crashing through wreckage should slow units down significantly, as they grind it beneath their tracks/feet, but it shouldn't be totally impassible, and it should be feasible to reduce wreckage with bombardment.

Issue I have with the forum is that everyone is like ''ADD PHYSICS AND EFFECTS AND SIMULATIONS AND EVEN MORE!!!''

But this is a RTS and should still be like that. To much stuff can break a game and burry it in the ground :geek:

Just my idea :lol: of course we are here to give idea's I know

Although the game is heavily physics based, as was SupCom, there is a limit. Our PC's can only handle so much. It would be neat to see physics based wreckage, but it has to be taken into consideration that lots of physics based wreckage on the battlefield would be very taxing on our systems.

I'd like to see at least 2 kinds of wreckage. When units die they should leave a wrecked shell that visually looks similar to the unit. This should be at least semi-blocking. It should block units of the same or smaller sizes. Larger units should be able to move over (at the cost of speed) the wrecked shell crushing it to rubble. Rubble should show up either when a unit is killed by an exceptionally powerful weapon, or the wrecked shell is crushed (or takes damage from weapon fire). All units should be able to move through rubble at the cost of speed, though not nearly as much as a unit moving through wrecked shells.

As much as I would love to see physics on wrechage, I am also deeply concerned about the strain that would place on computers. I really think the best option would be for wreckage of small units to be ignored completely but have the wreckage for larger units act as impassible terrain.

Here's how I think it should work:

• -All wrecks are passable, but apply a mobility penalty
  -Unit wrecks apply a smaller penalty than structure wrecks
  -Vehicles receive a much larger penalty than walkers
  -Wrecks have two stages, solid, and crushed (just like TA)
  -Damage would convert solid debris to crushed (again, like TA)
  -Specialized unit role for clearing unit debris, would crush unit debris it touches
  -If included, massive units would crush all debris (thereby clearing a path through any base for units to follow)
  -Structure debris could be crushed through damage, or the massive units referenced above

Another idea is to give each unit a 'weight', and each wreck a 'weight resistance'. If the unit weight > resistance, then the wreck is crushed. This still fits with the listed ideas. The specialized role could just have a very large weight.

This should simplify pathfinding (improving performance) since units don't need to avoid the wrecks, while still making wrecks a tactical component of the game.

EDIT: Ah, I suppose credit to:

Seemed I missed this post in my initial read through.

I'd add this to the poll, but it requires a bit too much explanation It would be a pretty good system, but it would also be a bit complex. A lot of times these things look good on paper, but when you start adding and adding and adding, you get to a point where you have to step back and ask yourself, "What can I now take a way that'll make this game less jumbled - more streamlined and elegant?". Just a thought though

It's going to look messy at best having units move through wreckage. You can't make them visually go over them, as the wrecks will be more or less as big as the original unit. And if you introduce this mix of can/can't go through, where does that leave weapons fire? Does that also magically go through, or does it hit? If it hits, your units will kill themselves if they shoot while moving through. If they don't hit, that's just wierd - weapons can go through but a unit can't?

I'd like to see it kept as-is from TA, but i'd be fine having it altered so hovercraft can go over wrecks that aren't too tall, and to make wreckages [much] more fragile so they turn to heaps quicker.

Did you play SupCom? It didn't look messy really. Units moved through wreckage and it never bothered me. I didn't start thinking about it until people brought it up here

At the end of the day, I am fine with anything Uber comes up with . If they make it so that wreckage blocks completely and they determine, that it doesn't have a negative impact on gameplay, then I'll be fine with it too.

Having passable by some units but not others is a recipe for disaster - this would encourage use of the “passing” units in nearly every case, to the exclusion of all the other units.

This applies less in the case of bulldozer units, as presumably they'd be too slow and heavy to use instead of a mixed army. But from a practical point of view it could get very silly: is there a limit to how many wrecks can be pushed at once? If so then the battlefield will get clogged up nearly as quickly (except with no gaps between the wrecks), but if there's no limit what's to stop a commander getting crushed to death by a 2km-long line of wrecks?

I get the feeling we're putting far too much thought into this...