More life in maps

It would be great if the maps had more life in the form of:

road signs
physics objects (barrels etc)
breakable vegetation
parked vehicles
traffic on the roads

basically more stuff that makes the world seem alive, with the added bonus of more stuff to hit

 

I can understand parked cars. But not moving cars (at the moment)
Because the physics calculations on just 1 car is VERY demanding =)

 

Even parked cars would be a lot for most pc's what you can do is go to the editor and spawn cars on the map then save as and then you have parked cars any map. very demanding tho

 

That would take a lot of PC's power. at the other hand would be great.

 

Yeah..

People are asking physics for world, traffic and at the same time making threads about low fps..

Okey, not maybe same people.

 

I suppose it may need a lot of processing power but hopefully the game will be better optimised over time. I could only spawn 6 cars in the car park on the dry rock map before the game became a little choppy on default settings. If he game engine is to be used for racing, demolition derbies etc. this is going to need to be sorted.

 

Well maybe for parked cars it could be a bit different, making the object solid, so the cpu does not have to calculate all those static cars. and unfreezing the object that gets a force greater than x from any direction and than unfreezes the that particular object. maybe thats a solution but i dont really know how the engine works to that level.

 

Perhaps a system where parked and traffic cars only spawn when the player can see them, so only 3-4 are ever on screen at once. Like how games such as gta handle it.

 

Idea ! how about some low-poly dummie cars ?

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Idea ! how about some low-poly dummie cars ?

 

I think it'd be a nice option for those of us with the hardware to run it.

For now using the world editor is a valid work around, but I'd really like to see computer-controller traffic (even if it was just a half-dozen cars that follow a set path). I feel it's a better use of the physics in the game compared to a bunch of static objects.

In the same vein, I suppose, I'd love to see the trees get physical behaviours as well. To keep it streamlined, leave them as they are now in the data structure, and when a collision occurs, pop them from the list, tree, quad-tree, etc. and replace it with a physics object at the point of impact. This of course would require the ability to either build a new physics object in a single time-step (which may or may not be possible), or to disable physics on individual objects within the world.

Of course, that then allows for real traffic; have cars be on rails until they reach a given distance from the player entity, then enable physics and let nature take its course.

It's fun to daydream.

Edit

Whoops, didn't realize this thread had been necro'd.

In response to DrWoodl, the number of polygons is not the limiting factor, it is the amount of math that has to be done to simulate every piece of the car. While my system can handle many AI drivers chasing me around the map while recording, many others can barely handle the calculations required for a single vehicle, and have no chance of working with any more than that.

Optimizations are nice, but it's extremely unlikely that a system that can only run 1 car now will be able to run even 3 or 4 by the final release.