Crumbling Brick Walls

I am not a game designer, so I have no idea how hard it would be to do this. When you crash into a wall with a pickup truck, you would bash a hole right through (if it was a normal brick wall), while sustaining major damage at the same time. This will make the game feel more realistic, and you could have fun destroying walls at the same time!

Would it be possible to implement this feature?

 

Not without delaying the game's release 90 years...

 

It doesn't seem impossible, but it would probably be time consuming. It seems like more trouble than it's worth. Plus, damaging buildings and cars simultaneously would probably murder the fps, especially on slower computers.

 

I should think it would be possible to do what most games do in this case and have a brick wall 'section' with multiple stages in its mesh/coding so, if you hit a wall it would seemingly break apart with a few particle emitted physical bricks for a momentary period? Dependent on how hard or how many times it is hit into it would decrease in its quality. I actually believe the Cry Engine already implements this with its nodes and noodles schematic, as the walls break apart in a similar fashion when taking more and more hit damage, from weapons in the sandbox editor and game.

 

This is not a bad idea.
But I think the Devs should think about this after they release the game, as an update, so we get the game sooner

But yes, it is time-consuming, & no I don't think it will be a FPS killer, it won't need that many nodes & beams, or meshes.
The wall could be a medium sized, low poly box that could be 'stack-able' to create any size wall.
Then, if somehow the wall section could be automatically deleted after some 5 seconds of collision.

 

Yes, I sort of meant for the crumbling walls feature to be done after the game is released. The wall can be rigid, so that will hopefully not lower the fps so much.

 

Cry engine already has a built in physics engine why not use it to make a wall rather than n/b which is really unsuitable??

 

I have never used cry engine, so I wouldn't know.

 

It's a physic simulator. If it works on car, why wouldn't it work on walls. Shouldn't be so hard. They just have to program the consistency of the bricks and cement. And then tie it together. Then they have the same(I think) construction as a car, except it's a wall. If I have understood the construction of the BeamNG game engine right.

 

I agree. And I am not talking about knocking down entire buildings, just smashing holes through them.

 

Go build a wall in RoR and you will understand why it wont work very well. The engine is built to simulate bending metals, not crumbling brick.

 

I remember an interview with the dev team from Red Faction Guerrilla. It was a kind of preview but I remember something that looked strikingly similar to node/beam making up the building's physics. Maybe its possible with a heavily modified node/beam system.

 

Its irrelevant how big a hole you want to punch in it. If you want to be able to put a hole in it, even a tiny little hole, you still have to have the whole building made of individual bricks. There is not enough processing power to spare for that.

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actually it could be made, but it would take too much processing power to implement. The way I'd do it, to make a brick that has one node, and put a mesh around it that represents the brick, and interconnect the bricks to one object that represent an entire building with very stiff but easily breakable beams, imho it would make a very realistic brick wall. The only question is how much processing power would be needed just for one tiny shed.

 

You do not have to make individual bricks, just sections of a wall. It does not need some fancy voronoi shattering. (yes, voronoi is a word, look up phymec on youtube)

 

I never said it COULDN'T be made. I just said it likely wouldnt work very well. It could work, as with just about anything with these physics, but without a system built for it it really wouldnt be worth the performance impact and the effect probably wouldnt be as good as you imagine it would be... The amount of individual meshes alone you would need just for a single wall alone would likely cause issues.

But hey, this game will be released one day, and id love to see you try to make a realistic breakable wall. Even if it runs terrible, it would be pretty cool to mess with for a bit if it works as well as youre imagining it will.

 

In all honesty why would this need to be done in this engine? All you would have to do would be to make many rigid physics objects and stack them together, possibly putting a constraint between the bricks that will break after a lot of force...

 

CryEngine has a few features which allow breakaway walls, doors, windows, etc. by default.

They take a bit of effort to set up, and they'll break in the same way each time, but it is quite doable.

 

Modifying the node/beam system to look like this

[MEDIA=youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQ6XM7NfGr8[/MEDIA]

Might work out. Notice at around 30 seconds they knock down a bridge that has something very similar looking to node/beam skeletons. If they come up with a brittle version of node/beam and couple it with mesh fracturing it could do it.

god damn it, I forgot how to embed YouTube videos.

 

Since BeamNG is now operating under the 'Torque3D' engine it is possible straight off the bat, as long as you take the time to work it into your title. The engine has a built in support for object damage but I do not know how fluid it is as I haven't done research into it. I just know the engine supports it, and it wouldn't be too terribly demanding on a computer, depends on how the team does it.

 

In Battlefield 3's Frostbite 2 engine, there are destructible environments everywhere, and it doesn't really decrease fps that much. That said, it's not probably going to be the same at all, and It would still be hard. I know nothing about coding, so if I'm wrong, then feel free to correct me.