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Reference different states for destructible environments.
Karl has made earlier statements about how this game differs from all the previous MW titles. And any destruction effects that now are all required to check with the server first. You'll notice that purely visual effects that don't impact the game play appear to be a rather easy insert to the maps. (code altered to allow this and the new art assets.)
Q1: Without going into too much depth could you expand on some of the issues concerning objects in the MWO environment being destructible, and where PGI is in relation to having some level of this brought into the various maps.
From Karl: (in May)
There are several complications here.
- From the engineering side, it depends heavily on the amount of interactivity that dynamic terrain is expected to bring to the game. If you could shoot out bridges that other players were standing on for instance, that results in very difficult to resolve latency issues with the game simulation.
- It also results in very high rewind costs, as the set of rewindable entities has now grown to include these destructible objects.
- If the destruction is purely visual, then the engineering concerns are much smaller.
On the level design side, interactive destructible environments mean that sight lines and movement paths can change.
- The map designers would have to be very conscious of those dynamic differences, and ensure that no combination of destroyed assets results in negative gameplay mechanics.
- Purely visual destruction also mitigates these risks.
For the artists, they would need to build all of the destructible assets to be put in-game.
- I've been told that this is a monumental amount of work.
Q2: It is understandable that destroying big stuff can incur a major cost due to the strict server authorization keeping us largely cheat-free. But when a simple tree or car survives mech firepower or being stepped on, that breaks immersion in a huge way. All the sense of scale and mass is suddenly not there.
From Karl: (in May)
Ahh, I thought you were talking about crumbling buildings and such.
- For visual collision work, such as trees and other small rigid bodies; there is a bunch of work I need to do first before the artists can add these sorts of assets to the maps.
- It's not as simple as the artists simply dropping rigid body assets into the map, due to all the networking changes we've had to make to the engine. I've been proceeding with this work on the side, as time permits, but it's not at the point where I can hand this off to the artists quite yet.
Now with all that there is still this next map to be released, 'Jungle' and it wouldn't be right to have that type of environment and not have some of the items within it destructible. Additionally the upcoming new mode of play 'Attack/Defend' should also have elements that are breakable or can be destroyed and actually show this within the game.
9erRed
Edited by 9erRed, 07 July 2014 - 01:28 PM.
