Advanced damage/dynamics systems
polycounter lvl 13
I'm doing a paper on advanced damage systems and I'm trying to get a grasp on what's been done and what's being done. Mainly looking into how feasible it would be to incorporate large scale Apex destruction and damage systems on environments.
Has anyone experimented or worked with this kind of thing? I'd love to chat about it. I'm meaning things similar to the newer Red Faction games and Battlefields Destruction 2.0. Though the limitations of theses (especially Red Faction) tends to lie with the fact that there isn't much linking between the destruction of objects, eg. destroying a power station doesn't cut out power etc. Though that's on a slightly bigger scale than I'm looking at though. Maybe think of it like the electronics in a car, cut a wire and you'll lose power to your windows or something. :P
Also any games/mods you may know of that have interesting damage systems for vehicles/environments, I would love to hear. I only have so much time to look for these things. :P
Anything at all would be appreciated.
Has anyone experimented or worked with this kind of thing? I'd love to chat about it. I'm meaning things similar to the newer Red Faction games and Battlefields Destruction 2.0. Though the limitations of theses (especially Red Faction) tends to lie with the fact that there isn't much linking between the destruction of objects, eg. destroying a power station doesn't cut out power etc. Though that's on a slightly bigger scale than I'm looking at though. Maybe think of it like the electronics in a car, cut a wire and you'll lose power to your windows or something. :P
Also any games/mods you may know of that have interesting damage systems for vehicles/environments, I would love to hear. I only have so much time to look for these things. :P
Anything at all would be appreciated.
Replies
It's really just a philosophical distinction and not a technical one, but it made better sense for gameplay. Otherwise players could have just cut the power line leading out of the power station instead of fighting through the elaborate mission and blowing it up from the inside. And that'd be a bit of a waste of a destruction system.
Our programmers and tech artists did a couple GDC presentations of the destruction tech, which you should be able to find on the GDC site.
The whole stress/fracture system that GeoMod 2.0 used is rather complex, and you'd do yourself a favor checking out the GDC presentations. AFAIK Battlefield's destruction (at least in bad company 1) is just a shit-ton of corpse meshes/destructible static meshes, which is actually dirt simple (it just takes a lot of art).
For the car system you describe, again, that's really easy to script - the thing is, most games do not want or use a "simulation" of the game world - if having brake lines you can sabotage on cars is a useful game mechanic, scripting it is easy. Most games would not benefit from such a thing, however.
It's not just about modeling the real world, it's about making game mechanics. If it does not get significant screentime, it's not worth doing in a game - if you come up with some complex simulation for pouring sugar into a car's gas tank, but driving isn't a big part of your game, why bother?
Regarding the car/power station example, I understand the need for the mechanic to be actually worth while because as you said, it may, as you said, not even be seen. Which is something I will need to look into for my project.
The general focus of the project started on the idea of line between when a large version (in my case a vehicle) becomes an environment, somewhat based on the old space levels in Star Wars: Battlefront 2 and a few other space shooters. It's great being able to fly around and shoot the huge motherships/battlecruisers/whatever, but sometimes it feels like you're shooting at a wall and watching a health bar drop. Battlefront pushed that envelope a little further by letting you land on the ships and take out key systems from the inside.
I want to push this much further designing and using a better damage system and making the experience more varied and in depth. But as I said in my first post, I don't know everything that's been done so there may be some far better examples out there.
Again, some great stuff from there from you guys, I'll definitely have a look into the GDC vault for those presentations.