I assume that some of you have heard of Red Faction: Guerrilla, the sequel out by Volition. I note their use of Geo-Mod, which makes the game more realistic and a lot more fun. (Come on, what isn’t fun about driving a truck through a portable and having it actually tear to shreds?
Seems like everyone is going for fully destructible environments nowadays. Volition has Geo-Mod, LucasArts has access to DMM Engine (created by Pixelux), CryTech has CryEngine 2, and EA has the Frostbite Engine (created by DICE). What about us?
It seems to me that access to the DMM plugin (such as can be obtained for Maya) would greatly enhance the possibilities of Unity. Even a simple system for handling object destruction build in would be a nice leg up.
According to their site, DMM has been integrated with Ogre and Irrlicht, both of which are no where near the quality of Unity.
So I guess I’m asking, could DMM be integrated into Unity, like it has with Ogre and Irrlicht? Would it cost us developers t have it as an extra, or could the cost be absorbed by the price of the Unity Engine?
(As an afterthought, I just want to see what you all think about fully destructible/deformable environments.)
At first glance it appears DRM is not calculating mesh deformation dynamically but increasing the density of the mesh poly’s at author-time. Essentially pre-fabing your object’s destruction with the majority of the technology revolving around that along with heavily parameterized joints.
This is something you can do now with unity, there’s even a few examples of it, but takes a lot of artist-hours to get it looking good.
The best looking of their demos was the rope on the spool, imo.
Just something I have to point out, “[…]Ogre and Irrlicht, both of which are no where near the quality of Unity.[…]” is quite inaccurate. Both of these libraries are completely different to unity. What you are saying is equivalent to “OpenGL is no where near the quality of unity” because that is essentially what these are. Just be nice when talking about the OSS community please Have some respect. Can’t hurt.
Oh, and the render quality of OGRE is far greater than that of unity. Although I’ll agree that Irrlicht is pathetic when it comes to that.
OGRE though also is significantly more complex to use (though thats normal, the more flexibility you have and the more freedom the harder it is to unleash the power) and its still lacking a good editor though ogitor isn’t all that bad
Geomod was in Red Faction (the first game) and it looks like they calculated the second game differently than how they did the first game. In the first game, you could use a driller and dig holes in the cave walls.
On the Torchlight thing: hell yea, torchlight worked on an eeepc701 (the worst netbook imaginable).
Havok vs. PhysX: I would rather bullet to both. Thing is that Havok costs money for any platform other than a Windows PC which is a problem for devs. I do like PhysX but I think its reliance on your possession of an NVIDIA GPU for any of the advanced features is a bit annoying. Bullet on the other hand, is free in all ways, uses GPU acceleration via OpenCL instead of CUDA (so works with all GPUs) and in my experience, feels more realistic than PhysX.
It would indeed. Have a look at Voxel terrains (hard to find info, I know. Send me a PM if you want some links) for such things. Voxels are the future!
Anyways, back on topic. Destructible environments are awesome! Look at minecraft! It’s made millions with it’s destructible terrains. Crysis was awesome fun, as was Red Faction (although the lack in multiplayer was annoying) and Red Faction 2, with it’s destructible buildings was amazing!
I don’t remember voting on this poll, but it says I did?
Anyhow,
Dynamically Destructible Environments are worth it if your game needs it. Not all games need it. Are they fun? Yes, but only when used properly. If it does not accent gameplay or help with the games overall purpose then it is not necessary. Some games would lose value by adding destructible environments. Games such as Legend of Zelda and Resident Evil are prime examples where their gameplay would be ruined by the addition of DDE. Would dungeons be more fun in LOZ if you could blow holes through all the rooms instead of finding keys? Would RE be scary if you could blast your way through buildings instead of being forced down that dark ominous hallway? I think the answer is no.
This is not to say I am against more games integrated such systems as it is fun to destroy things. I even plan to have basic destructibility in my current game project with the old HL2 model switching method. That will work well enough for me.
I am a little dismayed with current destruction tech. All modern games seem to ignore destructible terrain(as in the earth itself, not crates and barrels and walls).
If you haven’t yet check out what was done before and has strangely not been done much since: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3h6K5lAzukU Vigilante 8 - Video showcases all aspects of the game. At 4:09 it showcases the deformable terrain with the skyhammer mortar attack. This game also has the “Jefferson” car with a bass attack where a subwoofer creates ripples in the terrain when its used from its sound waves.
Personally Vigilante 8 is one of my favorite games and the fact that its a car combat game where literally EVERYTHING can be destroyed makes it so enjoyable.
So if this was possible way back when, why haven’t more games gone this route? I mean, if a Nintendo 64 with 97MHz of processing power can do it, why aren’t we seeing more of this today? Actually you could have up to 4 players on the N64 run around in a multiplayer match with that kind of destruction. 4 viewports of rendering plus all that destruction on 97 MHz?! It blows my mind.
I think I read a while back you can do this to a degree in Unity? I think its possible to write something to grab and modify vertices on the terrain for basic Vigilante 8 style deformations. But I could be wrong.
Red Faction 1 very much underutilized this, imho. Should have made better use of the driller than what they did. It was rather fun planting the explosives and breaking through cave walls (and also on the guards and watching them run and scream in panic). RF1 was the first time I had seen geomod used.
I had a dream the other night about a future version of Unity, in a 3D world where everything was made of small pieces and you could launch some kind of explosive at anything and you’d see countless pieces flying off, and all objects were solid not just polygon shells, so you’d strip away layers and get deeper, yet each little piece was highly detailed, and you could launch the explosive into a mound of dirt and it would realistically erupt with millions of particles and it would all be physics driven and totally smooth framerate the whole time, it was really cool.
Have some respect. Can’t hurt.