Physics

[Appclypse]

I am curious about whether this game has good enough physics for us to be able to blow holes in concrete buildlings, i saw in the DX10 vidoe that he blow a truck up under a Petrol Station and the roof was blown in half. It looked really gd.

I wanted to know if anyone knows if you can do this on all concrete buildings? Or is it like BF2 where only certain objects can be destroyed. Its great either way but it would be cool.

[AT39]

I am fairly certain that most objects/buildings can be stroyed/damaged beyond just cosmetic bullet decals.

[Appclypse]

Kl because i would love to be able to fly over concrete buidlings and blow them to hell in my helicopter Gun ship.

That could create some very merable experiences

[crimsonandgold]

yea that would be very cool

[Appclypse]

But i'm suppose im not going to believe that until i hear it or see it in an interview from one of the developers, they are constantly saying "virtually everything in the game is distructable" but they never mention what isn't.

[DarQraven]

I think the main reason why fully destructable environments have never really been done is simple. It's not because the tech isn't able to handle it, or that the programmers can't pull it off.
It's because it wouldn't really work.

Imagine Crysis' 10-hour matches, and add completely destructable surroundings to the equation.
About 1 hour into the match, you'd be fighting in a big pile of smoking rubble, and there wouldn't really be anything left to capture or defend.
You could already see it in Red Faction's limited destructable terrain. Some people would just grab remote charges or a rocket launcher, and excavate a huge tunnel out of the map. Plus, it would pretty much destroy the map dynamics. For any CS players out there, imagine de_dust if you could just dig your way under the level right into the bombsites? Or blow away the double doors? Hell, blow away the entire enemy base?

BF2: How are you going to capture TV tower if somebody already took the whole tower down with his jet?

Main problems:
- Not particularly useful, except for looking cool and ruining map dynamics.
- As stated above, people would devise routines that would enable them to skip parts of the map easily, or create invincible camping/baser@pe opportunities. The enemy would be completely unpredictable.
- For it to look realistic, the physics engine would take a HUGE toll on system resources, unless some new 'fracture map' tech is created. And it's a long way 'till we arrive at that point.
- Besides destroying a map's playability and dynamic, it would also literally destroy the map. Every tank shell you miss might fly into a key strategic point and destroy it by accident, making the rest of the match suck. In matches where firepower and sufficient time is avaible, there would be nothing but a big smoking pile of rubble left after some time.

Just my views..

[Appclypse]

Hmm
DarQraven you made some good points but I am going to assume the developers are clever enough to create points which are indistructable if they are particularly important to the mission or map.

I think there are ways to counter the "TOTAL DESTRUCTION" problem, not with the buildings, but i believe that they could regenerate the trees as you wouldn't see them as individual things. You can regnerate the trees but only if the maps were big enough so that you don't essentially destroy the entire map. This i know before you say anything it is problimatic, for example create an air craft with the Singularity Cannon on the bottom would do alot of damage to, well, everything. And would be very hard to regnerate with out anyone noticing.

However I still think that destructibilty adds a huge fun and cinematic element to the game, and i would LOVE to see it in desite its down sides.

As i said before i believe that the developers are clever enough to find ways to get around this. And the maps lasting 10 hours, clearly indicates that the maps would ahve to be huge. They would need to be for you to have enough space to move around and not get bored with what is going on.

[DarQraven]

I agree with you it would be really cool if you could actually destroy anything.
However, I think we picked up this "I WANT TO BLOW STUFF UP" mentality from action movies. Action movies are scripted, and blowing up some building is not really a problem, since it's in the script that the building would not be in the movie after that. Also, there's only really 1 main character, or a couple of them. Not 32 main characters, all blowing stuff up.

If you look at map design, what sets apart a good map from a bad one is pacing, layout, and dynamic. Dynamic being: how far weapons are apart, whether it's more of a sniping map or a CQC shotgun-style map, what routes people tend to take, etc.
These factors are mainly governed by where the objectives are, how you can go from point A to B and how fast, and where the walls, mountains and obstacles force a player to go.
By making the map destructible, you essentially turn the map into one big square plane. Everyone can go everywhere they like. And designers will have to change their designing process in such a way that they cannot use walls or boundaries as guidelines for map flow.
They'd have to think up and test every single thing you can do in the map.

That would make mapdesign a hell.

[Appclypse]

But giving players the option to do what they want is great, its what this game is all about, customisation. If blowing stuff up adds to taht im all for it, obviously like i said above there needs to be restrictions on mission critical objects but otherwise why not, as long as the maps are large enough it should never be a problem.

I still think that trees being destroyed is easily worked around, they can be replaced, buildings are different like i said. But i am sure there are ways around this. Maybe they could give players the option to rebuild parts of their own base taht has been destroyed.

I know that deffinatly isn't in the game but it would be a cool feature. I'm getting off topic now arn't I LOL :).

[Steakslim]

I think one way to make destructible environments work is to make the environment itself massive. Imagine say, in BF2142, if Fall of Berlin was completely destructible, and 4x the size it is now (an actual city almost). How much given the physics and damage resistance set for the buildings and other constructions depending on the supposed components a futuristic uber story building would be made of, do you think a walker and an APC, and maybe even some tanks, can attempt to destroy before it all becomes futile. Not only that, if people managed to topple some buildings into a wall of rubble with the rdx packs. The whole aspect of 'making' your own strategic terrain would be great. I think after people got passed the "blow **** up as I see it" factor and actually played the game the way it is supposed to be (save for the obvious stat padding that will always occur), Berlin would still be ****ty place to be in, but it wouldn't look like Hiroshima every round you play in it.

Like Appclypse said, it's about customization. As I put it earlier, you could customize the area to your benefit, forming natural barriers, trenches, choke points. Also use the materials to your advantage in say...a map that would take place with older buildings of older materials? Can you say fire bombing? With destructible environments you may have to abandon some of the older ways of multiplayer gaming to adjust to the twist and turns that would be caused by a constantly changing surroundings while in mid-game.

[[C*]Indest]

I agree,

Having a map turn totally flat would be useless - even if we incrased the size, think about the load times etc.

I think certain objects should be destroyable to an extent; ie make a grove in a wall so you could hide in it etc. There should be a certain threshold where after that it doesnt take damage.

The idea is good, but like always, ppl ruin good ideas and this feature alone would i guess make it irritating to play. Think about the cartillary bug in BF2and how it got exploited.

Maybe it could be an option for Single Player.

[Steakslim]

Well as I figure, as far as computers are going at this time, load times for larger maps won't be a problem in the next few years, and in that time, god knows how far the technology will go in games thus far. It's bad when in your lifetime so far you can go from the old Atari games and 8 bit Mario, along with DOS based games to Crysis.

I think that perhaps the best implementation for fully destructible environments would probably be in a MMO game, whether it be RP or FPS. Say, you take the idea of perhaps Oblivion, make the world map much larger (this is an MMO after all, it has to fit a lot of people). Factions can form armies, sack cities, those cities can rebuilt, hell it would be awesome if said factions can just up and construct their own cities (it'd be interesting if there were official game admins you'd have to set up a contract to design and make a city and personal army, a modder's dream perhaps?), build roads and all, like a large scale RTS (there's nothing wrong with crossing genres). With a flexible environment, again, the game itself will have to be flexible as well, but it'll have to take one hell of a crew to make it all work out, But I'm just fantasizing now, so I'll stop. Anywho...

http://img517.imageshack.us/img517/5509/harrycarayny2.jpg

YOUR THOUGHTS?

[Appclypse]

His an idea, make it an option for the server to decide on, if they can turn it off then people will be happy as they ahve choice. As i said and Steakslim reitterated is that maybe you could gie players options to modify or rebuild there base, this would certainly add to the old BF2 Commander Feature

IT has problems but they can be ironed out, loading times shouldn't be a problem as if you have a good enough computer to even run this then i shouldn't ahve thought it owuld make a differend ;).

[Appclypse]

i Recently read about this new feature where they render everything in real time, so that when something breaks it is rendered instead of making it break into two (or more) prerendered objects.

This sujests to me that you would be able to break concrete i could be wrong but that looks promising to me.

Another thing i would be curious to find out is is there bullet penertration, i love that feature and havn't heard anything about it. It seems like a preety obvious thing to put in. But you never know they migh ahve forgoten.

[CrysisPwnz]

Since I dont want to make a new topic just for this, and this is coincidently titled "Physics" will Crysis present "DMM" style phyics like the upcoming Indiana Jones and the Forced Unleashed games? I understand the engine itself is a property of LA and Pixelux but will Crysis' physics resemble its "dynamic molecular matter?" Will physics react according to the density of an object and break "realistically" (as far as video games go). Since HL2 and even the later FEAR games its been quite obvious that the games featured no such thing, but nowadays game developers have been getting tricky, and its getting more difficult to tell whether its authentic physics or preset break animations a la the famous wooden board blocking the pathway. Which was inadvertently replaced with just more varied break animations, but still not authentic and real physics. Crysis is one of those games where its hard to tell, at first I thought "Thats not realistic at all," When I saw the tank going through the building, the pieces just flew in any which way, or so it seemed to me, I understand the tank shot the wall but still, pieces should have flown forwards and crumbled under the treads and not rain bricks in every direction. Then I ate my words after the nuclear explosion scene. But I still cant make up my mind. So im hoping someone here knows, or atleast tell me a bunch of really big words to make me think it does, either way it wont necessarily deterr me from Crysis, but get my hopes up for Indiana Jones and TFU even more :) Crysis could use DMM for realistic metal breaking, especially in area's like in the demo where you can punch through thin steel sheets that make up the housing.

How this relates to the posts above: I think the industry should take it one step at a time. And since technology like DMM and Euphoria are already around, they can bump fully destructible environments later down in the list :)

[DarQraven]

Okay, so somebody else has watched the DMM demo;)
As far as physics go, I think the end result will be the same in Crysis and Indiana Jones, or at least very close. The reason DMM looks so cool in the demo is that they show it from a developer point of view. Instantly changing some frozen Han Solo model from Carbonite to Jelly looks very cool, but is never going to be in a game. So for instance, Crytek decided they needed a frozen Han Solo Carbonite model in their game ;)
They would just tweak that specific model to act like carbonite, instead of making it able to insta-morph into jelly, or wood, or water, or peanut butter or whatever ... which would not happen ingame.
DMM DOES make it very easy for developers to tweak their physics, however.

And another example, I believe they also showed rope physics in the DMM demo, with that guy walking over the rope bridge. Conveniently, the Crytek demo also had a guy walking over a rope bridge.
In both cases, the animations looked realistic enough to me.
Of course DMM was way more advanced, it also featured that other system where the character had procedural 'hang-on-for-dear-life' animations, but if Crytek wanted that to happen, they could script that certain scene.
It's not like your going to be blowing guys off rope bridges a lot in Crysis.

Overall, both look good. The only thing they need to fix (I agree with you on this), is the tank-through-shed scene. While I understand why the wood was flying everywhere (result of wood getting stuck between the tank and solid geometry, forces on wood become unrealistically high.), it does not look good.
Wood is supposed to crumble and splinter, not fly off at high speeds.
But that's really a problem with real-time physics.
Even an advanced physics system like the one currently in 3ds max 9 cannot handle objects getting stuck. It's just the way physics are calculated by computers that make for these 'errors'.

[Whiteplague]

theres a whole lot of words that i can barely comprehend (most of which are computer terms) but hell, if you can blow holes in buildings sweet, if u can destroy everything GREAT! but if theyre going to make the ground destructable, it should only be able to be blow up to like 10 feet down or so, also i agree that things should only be destructable to a certain extent before they just stop breaking, and really... the devs are not so stupid to allow strategic objects or even the entire map to be destroyed, it just doesnt make sense to be able to turn the map into one large squareand yes wood does break and shatter but you know, we dont need that level of relism it still looks very nice.as far as im concerned, 100% fully destructible maps/objects probably wont ever happen simply becase of what DarQ suggested

however i just went to youtube and edumacated myself on what DMM was