Geometry deformation/destrucability

[Trent]

Hey,
Introduction first: I've been playing around with the CS engine for a couple of months in my rather limited spare time. Although I have some knowledge of coding and gamedesign, I do lack experience and decided to gain some by creating a project using CS.

Now onto the question. I was wondering how well CS would lend it's self to world destructability as used in "Red Faction" or something similar. The Dynamic Worlds page in the manual mentions about using portals to achieve this effect, but i'm quite unsure as to how well that would work, even how it would work. I was wondering if any one had any thoughts or experience with this?

Please note that this is more out of curriosity than the actual want to implement it into my project at this time as it would not really fit into the gameplay, but I am interested in attempting it in a future project.

Cheers,
Trent

[jorrit]

Hey,
Introduction first: I've been playing around with the CS engine for a couple of months in my rather limited spare time. Although I have some knowledge of coding and gamedesign, I do lack experience and decided to gain some by creating a project using CS.

Now onto the question. I was wondering how well CS would lend it's self to world destructability as used in "Red Faction" or something similar. The Dynamic Worlds page in the manual mentions about using portals to achieve this effect, but i'm quite unsure as to how well that would work, even how it would work. I was wondering if any one had any thoughts or experience with this?

Please note that this is more out of curriosity than the actual want to implement it into my project at this time as it would not really fit into the gameplay, but I am interested in attempting it in a future project.

Cheers,
Trent

It is possible in CS to create/delete/modify objects at runtime. That will work fine. However there is one issue and that is static lighting. i.e. lightmaps and other precalculated lighting will not be easy to recalculate if the geometry changes. If you don't use static lighting (instead you only use gouraud or stencil shadows) then there is no problem.

Using portals can be done to create holes in objects like a landscape.

Greetings,

[orogor]

As far as i know red faction only have a predefined list ofojects you can destroy with corresponding premade broken parts and stuff, so technologicaly there s nothing impossible there for CS.

[Trent]

As far as I know red faction had real time geometry deformation, not a load of pre-made blocks slapped together to make a "destroyable wall" or the like. Atleast when I played with the level editor I never had to make any pre-defined broken parts to have full destructability. Not to mention you could dig places in that game where you weren't meant to go. It seemed extremely "on-the-fly" to me.