I was thinking about how it would be to make destroyable terrain, I mean it couldn't be that hard, right? It could be laggy but their could be only some things breakable or something. There is a feature in Ue4 for concrete and stuff breaking and it is free of lag, so it can't be hard, right? Also can't signs be like cars and have a breakable post or something? Sorry if there is a thread on this, but I looked it up and last post was back in 2013
Nope, i've worked with a couple different ones, but I have never looked deeply into it, but I mean, it must be somewhat easy, just make the map a giant jbeam, right?
oof. Simply put, nope. lets take the smallest map. 1024x1024 you want to make the whole make a node/beam structure? lets at least have 1 meter of precision with the deformable map. (having "voxels" of 1m ish that deforms) 1024x1024=1048576 That would be the # of required nodes to fill a small map of 1024*1024 Have you tried the crash hard big rig? it has 3200 something depending on the configs nodes. And that thing brings everyones computers to its knees. Firstly the devs would need to be able to split the vehicles calculation thru multiple cores/threads as right now its 1 vehicle per core. And even with that, i highly doubt we could run 1 million nodes. simultaneously. You really have no concept of how difficult making this happen for a physics game is. We are literally re-creating physics in this game, and you think its easy? lol If it was we would already be having spin tires level of mud physics. So yeah no, not gonna happen. Altho, prop making is a thing and im always looking for stuff to make, so stay put, maybe we are gonna see some destructible environment stuff someday. i plan on looking into that stuff. just not deformable terrain
haha, I didn't mean it like that. I think you're talking about like dirt moving away when driven through, but I see why, I didn't mean that jbeam thing seriously. If you ever tried out Forza Horizon, the walls and etc break when hit by a car, is it possible to make that realistic? If even that is too expensive on performance, what if only the stuff near the player/vehicle loads, so other stuff won't be stealing the fps. EDIT: I love that profile picture of master chief blanket edition. hopefully master chief brings his blanket into halo infinite
First, thanks! Second, if this is the desired outcome you want, and you want this to be a thing throughout the entire map: I can't imagine that would be good on performance, even with the stuff loading in as you go, and resetting when you leave. I would imagine that if this was possible, they would have already done this. but then again, its beamng employees we're talking about here lol jk jk staff plz don't hurt me
The reason why games such as Forza Horizon can make stuff like this work so flawlessly is that they use rigid body physics. Rigid body physics are easier to calculate, and are pretty stable even at a fairly small number of physics updates per second. Soft body physics, such as those that BeamNG uses, are more demanding and more particular about update frequency, so most conventional workarounds (such as spawning objects only when you need them, or not running calculations when the object is stationary/far away) aren't viable.
i dont wanna hype anyone yet. But its something i wanna try doing. but id need to make some tests first to see if its doable in the first place. just making every sign in the map destructible would be a job of its own, im gonna do some quick and dirty calculations to get a rough idea of what we are talking about here. I counted 20 nodes for the official road sign jbeam. and im gonna say theres roughly about 50ish signs in total in utah, which makes for 1000 nodes in total. On the plus side, each signs are calculated with each their own core, so everything is somewhat equally distributed. you arent limited with lots of nodes in 1 vehicle since its all different "vehicles" props. I want to put it to the test but i have yet to learn how to save vehicle placement in a map and ive got to remove all signs as well first. Its kind of a long process to do. It just so happens that we are talking about making a map fully destructible and ive recently made a copy of the map utah in my mods folder to try to learn how the map works to eventually try testing some destructible environment. Im a big fan of flatout/wreckfest, and honestly, this game severely lacks destructible environment. i wanna help with that but it takes time. and we are also limited by the game engine itself too. so we cant push the boundaries too far either. (wishing i could make italy have every building destructible like in red faction guerilla)
I see what you mean here, we'd need multiple supercomputers to run that, thanks for the explanation. That's cool, I wish you luck and somehow feel like you're gonna be put on the dev team (I feel like a mod dev got put on the team before but maybe that's another game) Also, 20 nodes on a sign? Wow that seems like the ultimate sign!
I doubt id be a dev lol. i lack a lot of required experience, altho we are learning everyday, who knows what the future might bring. I wish to make dev quality stuff one day, but i still have lots of to learn. Also, for those signs. If you look for them in the vehicle spawner. You can spawn them already by yourselfs, along with a lot of cool other props the devs made. And when i said i was doing "rough and dirty calculations.." its because this sign actually has 27 nodes now that i look at it So 1350 nodes for 50 signs instead of 1000 nodes. and thats ignoring the signs ill have to make myself since they are bigger and different. Its something i need to find out, its one of the things thats been itching me since the release of this game. Could it be possible to fill a map with destructible props and still being playable? I NEED ANSWERS!!! I do have other mods to work on, i keep finding new interesting things to work on and i never finish them, as i always find something also as interesting to work on. its a never ending cycle of creation and its extremely time consuming. But ive been playing beamng since its release in 2013 because im an addict of destruction. i need to make this happen. If someone else doesnt wanna do it, well someone DOES need to do it. Ive already copied utah as a whole in a different independent folder. and it still links to its original asset location so the folder is barely 100mb instead of 1.16gb (altho it will grow in size when i make the props) and it mostly all works without anything missing. but i havent checked again since the 0.20 update and ill need to update it for the floating rocks n such fixes that the devs introduced in 0.20
I'm a little curious if the BeamNG engine can also do rigid body physics. I get they want to have a great realistic physics sandbox, but having the ability to use the lightweight calculations for otherwise static objects would be a nice tweak. Game development is a balance of what's practical and what can be faked. It's mostly smoke and mirrors, otherwise it'd never run at any acceptable FPS. Compare this to a physics simulation which is all about being accurate. I'd really like to see them lean a little into the game aspect of development versus staying a physics simulation. And by game aspect, I mean not being opposed to using tricks of the trade. An example is car scrapes/scratches, which are decently done in many games via a texture / decal system. I think it'd be worthwhile to build out the engine functionality to allow for these showman techniques.
