Engine: Physics

What about them? Example,if you destroy a building,will it collapse i.e Red Faction Guerilla and Battlefield Bad Company 2? Or will it disappear in a explosion? Or does it break in several pieces i.e Spore?

And dead bodies from creatures. I expect alot of them,especially in Org. mode where you are really close to them. Will they ALWAYS be in the same dead position? Will it have some random ''poses''? Or does it have ragdoll?

Discuss.

zotobom wrote:

What about them? Example,if you destroy a building,will it collapse i.e Red Faction Guerilla and Battlefield Bad Company 2? Or will it disappear in a explosion? Or does it break in several pieces i.e Spore?

And dead bodies from creatures. I expect alot of them,especially in Org. mode where you are really close to them. Will they ALWAYS be in the same dead position? Will it have some random ''poses''? Or does it have ragdoll?

Discuss.

For the bodies we all hope ragdoll. For TOs, i think we can have simple damage calculation that seems realistic, like ripping panels of materials off to represent damage. Obviously this is completely reliant on how the TO was built. Also, Scio had some bits of wisdom on Strategy Mode TO damage. Something about having systems break down, like mobility, structural, electronic, etc, but that's only partially relevant.

A friend of mine had a lovely suggestion about damage/death animations for TOs.

Basically, most TOs will be contructed of base elements with attachment points. First, we prebake animations just in case. Now, the interesting bits. a certain amount of force will break the attachment points, obviously. The amount of force required to break these should always be less then the amount required to break the base materials. broken base materials might be tricky to figure out, as they could conceivably be quite large and we'd need to figure out a way to visualize the breaking. Anyway, the TO would fall apart in a rag-doll-ish style as these were destroyed.

Now, depending upon computing capabilities, they game could revert to pre-baked if a TO has X number of attachment points on it. Also, depending on the amount of stuff going on on the screen, this number could be temporarily reduced (For all pristeen TOs anyway) to prevent lag.

You mean joints, breaked when a force or torsion limit is reached? Interesting idea, I don't know how it would cope with the Tech editor though.

Commander Keen wrote:

You mean joints, breaked when a force or torsion limit is reached? Interesting idea, I don't know how it would cope with the Tech editor though.

That seems workable, going through attachments between fps.

I've already seen breakable joints working well in engines (and physic libraries like ODE or Bullet), but all those applications are using premade models. How will it work with our TE, without creating bazillions of joints, I don't know.