Adding building breakables to esf 1.3 map

[Tenzo]

that's not good indeed.
well it still is something nice to be added i guess!

 

[Grega]

that's not good indeed.
well it still is something nice to be added i guess!

It never was added and it cant be used on models. It needs mapped buildings.

The whole "building destruction" is just a test i did about 2 years ago ^^

 

[Snowm@n]

Breakable map parts are hard to make as hell. In this engine it will never be perfect. Even in budokai tenkaichi 3 it istn´t perfect enough.

 

[J-Dude]

In any game, breakable objects are tough enough. Only in extremely recent games like "The Force Unleashed" have they even been brought to a level higher in complexity than objects like tables that split into a few premodelled pieces when damaged enough. And even THAT takes considerable effort.

Even in 3D animation it's usually a simple illusion done with particles, and it's hard to pull off correctly because it's usually only on random faces that an object will break into chunks.

Now, you're talking about a BUILDING...That's different **** altogether. A building isn't a piece of wood that's solid and can break into a few jagged pieces and be done. If you want it to look realistic, you have to account for what's INSIDE the walls, what's inside the building, supports, drywall, what have you.

Making a realistic destruction in this instance is a project in itself. There are 3D plugins like ThinkingParticles and BlastCode (which looks kickass, but is for Maya only ;_; ) which have features/are designed to handle this sort of thing, but that stuff is extremely expensive.

Now, single-player, you can get a good deal of destruction out of say...the Source engine. In Garry's Mod, there are a few maps built around 100% destructible structure, like, a destructible house, drydock, Roman temple...

The first two of those no longer work because of something that hapenned between the last major update to GMod...But the house, for instance, was built up of custom models of drywall and plywood carefully arranged. It lagged like crazy when massive destruction was going on, and would kill any multiplay server, but essentially it could be chipped away piece by piece until it all collapsed into a very realistic looking wreck. It wasn't perfect mind you. Nearly all the custom objects had no proper gib and would just disappear when destroyed, or the house would stay standing at moments where structural fatigue would have no effect, because some of the supports where built to float apart from gravity.

Drydock was better, but only so much. Still no real gibbing, though all the breakable ropes in the ceiling helped make it look cool when it collapsed. Unfortunately it was a bit too big to completely collapse under any one thing lesser than a damned nuke.

Now, Temple was done very well. It was big, but not too big, used stone walls and realistic segments of Roman-esque pillars. It was simple, but looked realistic in construction. It didn't gib into models, but it did gib into sizeable concrete chunks that looked chaotic enough in a full blown demolition. This one was easily the most realistic in terms of how and when it would collapse. The inner walls could all be destroyed without affecting the pillars, if you were very careful, but normally this wasn't the case. take down two corners, and watchit collapse on itself. Then, later, take out a support or two and watch the back wall you left standing stretch and give out under it's own weight and fall into the mess. Adding an antlion guard and tricking it into ramming supports in this map is just plain fun.

But, I digress. Now, recently in HL2 Episode 2, the Source engine was equipped with a cinematic destruction feature, where a complex object like a bridge, wooden house or steel radio tower would be simulated in a destruction sequence, which would then be saved as cached vertex data, and easily called upon without lag in-game. Now, this destructible isn't really player manipulated, unless you count the triggers that cause them. They're pre-simulated and will always result in the same exact sequence, whatever the player does, so they're not really physics objects...just very very complex animated models.


In short, destructibles are extremely hard, an artform of their own, and expecting a relic like GldSource to handle it realistically is not so much a tall order as a request to part the Red Sea.

 

[Snowm@n]

How about destructible montains or big rocks? Could a make a basic melee to my enemy, and when he hits a rock, it would break apart...???

 

[Grega]

You are expecting to much out of this engine.

The team would literally have to write up a ragdoll system for that.

 

[Spunky]

Didn't you played esf_moderncity map?? Theres big parts of the building where they explode.

Now stop and think about why nobody plays that map anymore.

 

[Snowm@n]

OK, so destructible parts are impossible. But is it possile to add just a little bit tiny dust of when someone slaps to the ground or wall? those small black craters are just not enough....:S

 

[VideoJinx]

Well.. I'm all for having destructables if it can be done..

Here is how I could see alittle bit of destruction being added in..

If a person gets thrown into a building..

dust + particles could spawn in from the point of impact.. and fade out..

and maybe buildings could have several "SKIN" layers of damage for each side of the building.

So being hit into the front side of the building would causse the front "skin" of the building, to change into a more damaged look.. while not effecting the other sides.

If one side of a building takes too much damage.. the entire building could come crashing down.. similar to what was see in Grega's video.

 

[Grega]

Well.. I'm all for having destructables if it can be done..

Here is how I could see alittle bit of destruction being added in..

If a person gets thrown into a building..

dust + particles could spawn in from the point of impact.. and fade out..

and maybe buildings could have several "SKIN" layers of damage for each side of the building.

So being hit into the front side of the building would causse the front "skin" of the building, to change into a more damaged look.. while not effecting the other sides.

If one side of a building takes too much damage.. the entire building could come crashing down.. similar to what was see in Grega's video.

Possible. But lets see now. Building has 6 open sides * 4 for the covering entities that are the outer sides + 4 initial builning entities + sprites + sound entities = round 33 entities per building out of which 25 of them are breakables.

And breakables are all laggeh ^^

I think the game could take 2 or 3 buildings before people start to complain about the lag.

 

[VideoJinx]

Iono.. but i've played some custom maps with a few destructables... and they didn't lag so I believe it's possible.. if you have some..


1 map i can remember was ape_city and it was huge

 

[Grega]

Ape city does not have THAT many destructables.

It has about 30 to 40 at max. Where 2 of these buildings have over 40 allready.

Do you really want to to do the whole math?

 

[J-Dude]

What I don't understand is why things like this are such a lag problem nowadays. I mean, I understand back when GldSource was a top gaming engine and PCs were barely able to handle them...and everyone used dial-up...

But Jesus, I see people do stuff on GMod multiplayer without lag, like welding 25 exploding barrels together, shooting one, and then watching them all explode in sequence like a Chinese firecracker. This, with no lag, while 7 other people are doing their OWN thing, building contraptions and such.

What I don't get, is why stuff like this can be lag-free, but the dinosaur GldSource, which I can run on my computer with the processing effort it takes to run Microsoft Powerpoint, somehow lags multiplayer with simple things like building destructions involving...oh...10-25 polygons...

:\

I mean, the average PC nowadays uses DSL, a gigabyte minimum of RAM, a dual core processor of SOME sort, and likely a 256 mb graphics card. So why then, is something like this, so simple and so old, STILL requiring limitations? I mean, I'd have thought you could run a server with 30 ESF players on it and take it in stride.

Am I missing something? I'm thinking I must be.

 

[Grega]

Its the way the engine works.

It was never really designed to have such an amount of entities in it. And stuff like water and breakables are the worst kind since it renders pass them to. Not to mention this engine was designed with indoors in mind. A mod like ESF that has big outdoor areas is a contradiction to the engine design itself.

And its not the polygons of the objects that lag. Its the entities themselves. HL2 on the other hand has support far better for these things.

Same thing here. You can play games with 4000 polygon models with allmost no lag at all. Yet ESF will start to lag if you get those models ingame simply because the engine itself has problems handling such "high" poly models.

 

[Tenzo]

well, i guess that we'll have to get over it and hope for some dust and other visual stuff!
(if it doesn't lag)

 

[The Deco]

Possible. But lets see now. Building has 6 open sides * 4 for the covering entities that are the outer sides + 4 initial builning entities + sprites + sound entities = round 33 entities per building out of which 25 of them are breakables.

And breakables are all laggeh ^^

I think the game could take 2 or 3 buildings before people start to complain about the lag.

I didn't understand lol, and im not expecting to something realistic, I don't want to see couches inside and stuff like that.

I'm just asking to do it like the map I showed BUT they break not only from beams but although from getting thrown\knocked to the building, and add a little more damage than usual wall hit. Isn't that possible? cause the only thing you need to add is the thrown\knocked destruction and damage. its still impossible?

 

[Grega]

Actually you just need to add the damage for throw.

The building HP will still eventuall reach 0.

 

[DJ-Ready]

wow great .. I just wrote a super long reply and when I was about to send it firefox crashed ... so here a short version -.-

Its possible to let func_breakables receive damage when you get knocked into them, its a little coding thing and it shouldn't be too hard to put in.

To make a good map with a decent destruction pattern you'd have to use A LOT of breakables.
Problem with that is that you have to create every tiny bit with map brushes
and the more entities you have the more traffic is sent to the client and thus it can cause heavy lag if you use a lot.
Besides this problem, the epoly would skyrocket so its pretty much unplayable

its just not going to happen. Live with it.

 

[The Deco]

wow great .. I just wrote a super long reply and when I was about to send it firefox crashed ... so here a short version -.-

Its possible to let func_breakables receive damage when you get knocked into them, its a little coding thing and it shouldn't be too hard to put in.

To make a good map with a decent destruction pattern you'd have to use A LOT of breakables.
Problem with that is that you have to create every tiny bit with map brushes
and the more entities you have the more traffic is sent to the client and thus it can cause heavy lag if you use a lot.
Besides this problem, the epoly would skyrocket so its pretty much unplayable

its just not going to happen. Live with it.

Does esf_moderncity lag when you break the breakables?

 

[DJ-Ready]

I was talking about good maps.