Let me explain what I mean by this rather provocative title. (If you don't know what Minecraft is, look it up, there are many, many resources.) Basically, my question revolves around a couple of points: 1. We know terrain will be destructible to some extent. 2. We know that the terrain engine will support overhang (i.e. not just height maps). The scenario is that my opponent is on a high plateau with some heavy cost buildings and serious defenses on it. I have some heavy land destructive capable weapons (Heavy Artillery/Missiles/etc) and I begin attacking the sheer cliff face below his base.... Would I be able to gouge out land below my opponent and his base still be safe on a completely unrealistic sliver, i.e. like the silly way Minecraft can have buildings and objects suspended in mid air?
At this point we don't know the extent of weapons that will have terraforming properties, so far the only one that seems certain is KEWs, and they seem to function on such a scale that the chances of running into your scenario are unlikely. Neutrino has commented in a prior Livestream(can't remember which) that while Terraforming aspects are present, he doesn't consider it to be a core aspect of the game so we shouldn't expect to see a lot of it happening. Mike
I don't have the link available, but the creation of craters has been linked to Artillery fire. The question becomes, to what extent will there be artificial restrictions on terrain damaging mechanics to prevent scenarios like the one I suggested, or even someone repeatedly firing nukes at the same spot to drill a hole as deep as they can. If such activities are allowed through just by nature of the game mechanics, I was wondering if they had considered issues like structure weight and resultant sinking or damage. Even ignoring the hole in the side of a cliff scenario, what happens when you have a building that ends up on the side of a crater due to an impact? Do any entities simply get destroyed if they would be partially overlapping the crater edge? This could produce some weird building killing mechanics by causing a small crater near a building using a shell that would not kill it outright if a direct hit was scored. The main thing I am curious about is what kinds of discussions are happening among the developers in relation to this. I would seriously doubt that the scenario I brought up would not have come up at Uber.
You'll have to find that link to convince me, because I don't remember any such comment. If anything, all you're points are good points as to why terraforming properties should be focused more on that massive scale where it's easier to avoid such occurrences. Mike
I am thinking now that the comment may have been during a live stream with regard to artillery fire specifically. Following the links that you provided on your "Confirmed Features List 2.0" topic under Gameplay Features>[CONFIRMED] Terrain deformation, burning trees, you will find references to craters causing land deformation. Irregardless of the cause (artillery fire, commander death, nuke detonation, conventional missle impact, small meteor impact, etc.), the deformation of terrain has been confirmed. The repercussions of which are what interests me.
Many things need to not resemble Minecraft as much as they already do :/ *grumbles* ... Plague of voxel building, go nowhere, sandbox drivel ... *grumbles*
I never said there wouldn't be terraforming, I said that it won't happen as you see it happening(as often and/or on such a small scale), that it's more likely to focus on the larger scale as shown in the most recent Livestream(Mar 22nd I think?) during the section dealing with the Planet Generator and that this is a good way to avoid many of the issues you raise with terraforming. Mike
My reference to Minecraft was only in relation to the scenario I posed where buildings and objects would overhang or be suspended unrealistically. I didn't indicated that I wanted it to resemble Minecraft in that way. On the contrary, I hope that the scenario I described won't be possible. I hadn't seen any discussion that addressed this particular concern, so I brought it up.
Based on what Mavor has said about how the terrain rendering is handled I really doubt it will check if gravity should force an overhang to the ground, but it's also unlikely that you'll see that sort of thing much anyway as the impacts will probably remove whatever is above it a lot of the time. I also doubt terrain will be deformable by standard weapons for this reason, so I only expect to see large craters too big too tunnel with, smaller impacts will probably just be handled as decals. But I guess we'll have to wait for official word before we can be certain.
I don't believe the game will feature over hangs. It would just be far to much of a pain for the controls. I have never seen anything like that in a RTS for good reason, and would consider that a significant feature that would have been promoted and described at this point if it was included, so I would fully agree with Mike on this.
I think I remember Neutrino saying that if the system detects a chunk of land hanging in mid air, that chunk is simply removed from the map. I would guess that any units and buildings trapped on it are similarly removed/destroyed. But I don't have any links to back it up and I don't really feel like looking for them :?
Well, they deliberately went out of their way to both make the rendering engine work with it (requiring a lot work compared to heightmap based approaches), and the pathfinding (requiring a complex "portal" system of pathfinding sectors), so I'd imagine it has a place.
