Destructible environments

[obonicus]

I think it's also a game design decision. You speak of destructibility, I think of Silent Storm, which is a turn-based tactics game, like Jagged Alliance 2/X-Com. There you had really fine-grained destructibility, such as being able to tear through arbitrary walls or ceilings to get at your enemies. But it also got in the way; it wasn't that uncommon to accidentally blow up staircases, or tear huge holes in floors you wanted to get across, or just blow up buildings you had to get objectives from. That sort of thing must be a nightmare to QA.

 

[babcat]

Yep that's why next generation consoles should have at least 8GB of RAM imo.

I agree.

 

[pc999]

In future when we have enough processing power and memory to store the (almost fully) destructible environment, the graphics artists are going to be the bottleneck.

In current games the artists have to model and paint/photograph textures only for the area player can move and see. With current limited movement, all areas hidden behind corners, walls and other obstacles do not need to be created at all. Also areas only visible from far distance (visible from windows, through a fence, over a blocking object, etc) need only to be modeled with very low polygon and texture detail (often needing only a area specific sky box, as human eyes cannot really determine the perspective on far away scenery that well).

Now imagine you could tear down that fence, break a window and jump out of a building or explode rocks in a blocked path. This all would require the whole game world to be modelled and textured in full detail, including countless of new objects that would not be even visible if the game area would be limited. In a in-door game this problem would be even more severe. The player could break all the walls. Inside structures, pipelines, electric wires, filling materials, etc inside every wall in the game area would need to be modeled and textured in high detail. Also all the (previously unreachable) rooms behind those walls would need to be modeled and textured, and nothing really prevents the player exploding the wall of that new room either, revealing another room, revealing another room, etc, and ultimately getting out of the building to the open terrain. Even without the possibility to get out of the building, this could easily over 10x the work needed by graphics artists (and still the developers would need to limit the amount of destruction). The art creation is very expensive in the current generation titles (often more expensive than programming), and it's becoming more and more expensive every year. Fully destructible environment might sound like a simple feature, but considering the effect it causes to the game project schedule and cost it might never be feasible, unless some kind of automatic content creation system is invented that reduces the artist workload dramatically... and we would need to have automatic testers also (as the testing workload to cover all the possible scenarios would become impossible to handle by human resources only).

Every object breakable inside the game area (bounded by walls and other indestructible obstacles) is a much easier task to complete, and should be achieved in many next generation games.

Althought I will not argument the artist extra work (but I am not sure if you are right, and to what extent) I think you are confusing Destructible environments with game design anarchy or inexistence. The reason why you couldnt do those things are the same why you cant go besides some point in open world games, or why (sometimes) you cant jump to places that you should be able, or why (some/most of times) you cant enter in every door and or house, althought doors are supossed to open.

 

[green.pixel]

IMO, at this point, i don't think we need that much destructability as sebbi wrote. I agree with joker.

Again IMO, on of the main issues is to find a sweet spot between perfomance and getting closer to realistic environments, physics, graphics etc., and beyond which we are starting to get diminishing returns. Alos, we need to exploit "limitations" of human perception. Like with raytracing and rasterization. You could get quite beliveable surroundings without much of a perfomance hit.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

A fully destructable game might be fun for a sandbox type game where there is no real story and no real goal.

Assuming one doesn't have unlimited ammo, it wouldn't be uncommon in a fully destructable environment for a player to render an important plot device unreachable. Although I suppose you could unrealistically make it so that the plot device is always out in the open and hope nothing blows it somewhere that is unreachable.

Or how fun would it be to bring a building crashing down onto a plot device (person to be rescued? secret documents in a safe?) and then have to go digging/searching for it.

If they REALLY wanted to be realistic with the destruction you could easily spend the next few months digging through the rubble trying to find it.

I'd still prefer a playable game to a fully destructable realistic game. That said I'm all for destructable objects/terrain and realism where it doesn't impede gameplay or storyline.

In other words, the Illusion of destructability and realism is far more fun than actual full destructability and realism.

Regards,
SB

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Scorched Earth, anyone? Or Death Tank now, on XBLive! Worms used fully destructible environments to good effect. Make the game fit the tech!

 

[Scott_Arm]

I can think of one game where fully destructible environments are appropriate: Rampage. I can still dream about a good Rampage game.

 

[Gitaroo]

anyone remember Crisis Zone?

 

[Mobius1aic]

anyone remember Crisis Zone?

Ooh good one! What Namco arcade system was it on?

 

[Silent_Buddha]

Scorched Earth, anyone? Or Death Tank now, on XBLive! Worms used fully destructible environments to good effect. Make the game fit the tech!

Worms. You know what I'd love to see? a 3D graphics 2D version of the original worms before it all went to shite...

Sorta like the new Street Fighter IV. That would rock my socks off. 2D worms is some of the best gameplay ever... Especially with a bunch of friends. Certainly the best PC Party game ever...

Regards,
SB

 

[Lucid_Dreamer]

There is suppose to be an announcement about Worms in the coming months, AFAIK.

 

[Shoujoboy]

Couldn't it be a memory issue too? If you have a lot of objects potentially moving around in unpredictable ways, you have to constantly keep track of where they are in relation to other movable objects. Or, if you blow a hole in a wall you have to create assets (model/texture) to show what is behind that wall or if you partially destroy a pillar, you've got to model/texture the inside of it as well(?)

Perhaps 512 MB isn't enough for that AND pretty graphics...there would have to be a trade off.

...I'm just guessing. Maybe an expert could chime in.

That would explain why red faction gorrilla isn't the prettiest game.