Fully destructible buildings

V

vertetski

Guest
This is from the Computer And videogames preview:

Well if you don't give a toss about subtext (and frankly, neither do we), then you'll be pleased to know that every building is fully destructible, meaning shards of rock and stone will be scything through the air while you engage the enemy in bloody firefights as you and the rest of mankind attempt to take back City 17, street by street. Happy now?

This is News to me, and I follow HL2 closely, since I haven't seen any reaction on this I might missed it somewhere, so can anyone tell me something more about it? Is it destructible à la Red Faction or different?
 
Well, I dunno, but the technology for fully destructable terrain or even just buildings has been around for a while now. SOldiers: Heroes of WWII does it very nicely, and the engine is less sophisticated than HL2.
 
The buildings won't be fully destructible, but there will be certain "hot spots" like we saw in the striders video.

Doesn't bother me at all.


First post of my summer break!! :D
 
That would be cool if they somehow managed to add that in since the leak but I highly doubt it. Stuff like wood and fences are fully destructable, but not concrete and buildings...
 
this topic has been looked at before in my thread and more.

I think all building WILL be. I mean valve wouldn't just say "they are all fully destructable" and then they are not.
 
commando said:
this topic has been looked at before in my thread and more.

I think all building WILL be. I mean valve wouldn't just say "they are all fully destructable" and then they are not.
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Valve did NOT say that, whoever wrote the article misunderstood something somewhere.

But anything wood you see you will be able to break. Err. Well nm, Buildings and ground won't be destructable, except for specifically set ones like I said in my first post here.
 
Do you know how much that would mess up the game if things were fully destuctable? They would never do that. I doubt they even could anyway. Would probably freeze your comp the instant you fired an RPG at something.
 
regardless of whether buildings are destructable or not.. i dunno.. i wouldn't want that.. :|

the "hot spots" idea is cool tho.. i can live with that.. i just hope this is not true.
 
If all buildings are fully destructable, then it removes all limitations to the player in the game. Fully implementing something like this is a very bad design decision, because there's nothing that governs how far a player can go before reaching some sort of barrier to stop them. in order for it to work, maps would have to go on and on and on and on ad infinitum, which we all know is impossible.
 
nothin is impossible Kage.

but only a bad mapper would see that as a block u could just have abuilding only destructable by extreme force. i doubt a assault rifle grenade would even dent a concrete building anyway were talking striders here. strider destructable.
 
Take everything that CVG says with a truckload of salt... and then some.
 
Meh, it can't be done.

What's beyond the buildings at the borders of the map? Maps are an enclosed area - there will always be impassible (and therefore non-destroyable) barriers, whether they're buildings, walls, fences, or piles of rotting sheep carcasses.
 
Andy018 said:
nothin is impossible Kage.
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It is impossible to not set restrictions. Hardware has limitations, and these limitations would prevent someone from not setting the player restrictions. It is impossible to do so. Maybe if we ger some sort of hardware that can handle anything that's thrown at it, then it wouldn't be impossible then. But the chances of having something like that are incredibly slim, if not nothing.
 
The only way you could ever do it fully is to have a fully generated environment with no restrictions. And there's no way that's going to happen anytime soon.
 
vegeta897 said:
Valve did NOT say that, whoever wrote the article misunderstood something somewhere.

But anything wood you see you will be able to break. Err. Well nm, Buildings and ground won't be destructable, except for specifically set ones like I said in my first post here.
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Actually, Valve has stated that the ground WILL be destructable, i.e. you fire a rocket at it and a crater appears.
 
Satan said:
Actually, Valve has stated that the ground WILL be destructable, i.e. you fire a rocket at it and a crater appears.
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Please give us a link if you would. I'm sure you could do something like this but I don't ever remember them saying it would be included.
 
There's a game that claims to do it and not just in the redfaction sense but actually does it. e.g you shoot a tower at the base with an RPG, bit's fly off the base, the tower becomes unstable and collapses. Doom 3 uses a similiar kind of tech on glass (or so they say) if you shoot it, it shatters in a convincing manner. Obvoulsly ID have made no attempt to adapt the system for other materials.

It's a shame I can't remember the games name (or the engines for that matter) but it's 1 or 2 years away. Graphically it will look outdated compared to UE3 but such a physics system will put everything else to shame.

EDIT: Valve have said the ground is deformable but I don't think they have said that HL2 will use it where explosions are concerned. In last years E3 video it showed ground being deformed.
 
Satan beat me to it. Gabe said it right there that terrain was destructable/deformable. We saw it in the damn e3 2k3 vid just before the physics room. Also, while it may not be in hl2 (i believe alot more than we expect can be destructable, however CVG is exaggerating a little), any mod can easily make a fully destructable map. Even if it leads you to have those invisible wall boundries, a fully destructable enviornent is very much possible, Gabe said it himself. However im sure plenty of you idiots will love to argue me on this one.
 
I think a few of us should email rick and gabe with that statement from CVG to find out if its a lie or not.

sry for the double post but this is kinda important
 
guinny said:
Satan beat me to it. Gabe said it right there that terrain was destructable/deformable. We saw it in the damn e3 2k3 vid just before the physics room. Also, while it may not be in hl2 (i believe alot more than we expect can be destructable, however CVG is exaggerating a little), any mod can easily make a fully destructable map. Even if it leads you to have those invisible wall boundries, a fully destructable enviornent is very much possible, Gabe said it himself. However im sure plenty of you idiots will love to argue me on this one.
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I'll be an idiot and argue with you. :p

I just don't think it would be possible at all no matter what claims they have made. I think a destructable building would kill your comp as I don't believe today's systems could handle that many physics calculations.
 
Andy018 said:
nothin is impossible Kage.

but only a bad mapper would see that as a block u could just have abuilding only destructable by extreme force. i doubt a assault rifle grenade would even dent a concrete building anyway were talking striders here. strider destructable.
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why bother making it destructable then?

the guy who was quoted in the 1st post is very very mistaken.
 
guinny said:
Satan beat me to it. Gabe said it right there that terrain was destructable/deformable. We saw it in the damn e3 2k3 vid just before the physics room. Also, while it may not be in hl2 (i believe alot more than we expect can be destructable, however CVG is exaggerating a little), any mod can easily make a fully destructable map. Even if it leads you to have those invisible wall boundries, a fully destructable enviornent is very much possible, Gabe said it himself. However im sure plenty of you idiots will love to argue me on this one.
Click to expand...
The terrain in the e3 2k3 vid is not what we are talking about. That is different then actually adding or taking away polygons. And it was scripted.

We have seen explosions on the ground in the 2k4 vid, and the ground did not deform. And don't say, "they just haven't put it in yet" becuase they are in beta and are adding no more. Especially if its something as big as this.

I think Gabe ment that it is POSSIBLE (in a mod) to do this.
 
"If you shot a rocket at the ground would the ground deform as a result of the explosion?"

Gabe Newell: "Yes."
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You're interpreting this all wrong. You can code games to use pre-made 'craters'. In other words the angle of the rocket or the grenade or whatever won't change the size of the crater, you won't be able to dig a hole to china, etc.
 
Guy sI think it will be like a "3d decal" sorta thing, shoot a rpg at the ground and it leaves a crater, but this crater is always the same and if you shoot the same spot again it will not get deeper, it would stay the same.

From the videos you can see wood houses are destructable, this is not too hard to do, but I think they will use the 3d decal thing I was talking about on cement or solid structures.
 
Whatup1049 said:
Guy sI think it will be like a "3d decal" sorta thing, shoot a rpg at the ground and it leaves a crater, but this crater is always the same and if you shoot the same spot again it will not get deeper, it would stay the same.

From the videos you can see wood houses are destructable, this is not too hard to do, but I think they will use the 3d decal thing I was talking about on cement or solid structures.
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No way.

And what houses did you see that were destructible? Valve will have the usual decal, not 3d, that would be inconsistent realism, which is bad.
 
There's a huge difference between deformable heightmapped surfaces and fully destructible terrain\buildings. Source is capable of having surfaces in a map that deform\dent when hit by an explosion, and this dent can most likely be as deep or as shallow, as large or small as you want it, but it is never destroyed. The surface merely raises\falls (dents in\out) according to an alterable heightmap type system. It's nothing like red faction's "Geo-Mod" tech, in which actual geometry would be removed. Wherever large pieces of buildings are destructible in HL2, they have been created specifically to break at certain points, which a strider (or other large enemy) may fire at when the AI sees it to be approptiate.

Fully destructible buildings? No. Occasionally destructible buildings? Much more accurate.
 
Its perfectly possible, but it might take alot of damage to do so. Buildings/walls are alot more solid then people think... games like red faction were stupid with jelly like walls.
 
Have any of you played the arcade game "Crisis Zone"? It came out in between Time Crisis 2 and 3 and you had an SMG instead of a handgun.

Anyway - I'd love to see a game with a destruction system similar to that one. It wasn't fully destructable, but it felt like it was. When you fired at any object it reacted exactly as you would expect. Walls would crumble and bits would fall off, pillars would crack and break Matrix style.

It was done fantastically well, yet it would never suffer from the problems of reaching an outer boundry, because you couldn't destroy the environment to that degree. I've been waiting to see another game like that but it hasn't happened yet.
 
I was sure that the whole purpose of a BSP system makes it an imposibility to have a fully destructable system. Well not so much imposible as pointless because it seemingly negates the point of BSP...
 
I hope it'll be possible to damage buildings, not to demolish them completely, since that would ruin the game, but it would be kinda cool if driving you buggy up a wall, would actually have an effect on the wall :p
 
Well before I started this thread I already emailed gabe about it, still no answer dough...
I find there is a lot of commotion around this feature, you can all guess and talk like you know it but no one really has a clue, so I'll wait for a replie from valve and let u guys know of course... ( If they answer)
 
Here's the straight dope:

The C&VGM guy was confused. What he was seeing was Valve's "particle" system, which can eject models as well as sprites and particles. That means that when a concrete wall gets shot, it can spit out realistic chunks of concrete (you saw a big one in the strider video, when the black gate thing comes crashing down). It doesn't, however, mean that the wall can have real holes blown in it.

As for deformable surfaces, people seem to be confused. What we saw in the tech demo was not a dynamic effect. It was the designer altering the displacement map and collusion hull of a surface. I doubt very much that this effect will happen automatically all around the map, wherever a rocket hits. Source does not even support bumpmapped decals as of yet. Explosions that do not destroy physics objects will leave blast marks, plus spit out chunks. They won't dig a pit into anything unless that area is pre-made to blast apart.

Marksman is correct. The whole point of a .bsp system is to cull unseen geometry. If you make a building destructible, then you are essentially removing it from consideration as far as blocking other geometry goes: the engine will have to draw the entire building, everything in it, and everything BEHIND it, for whenever you can see the building unobstructed. If every structure in the map were like this, then the engine would have to draw the ENTIRE MAP ALL THE TIME. That would be ridiculous and impossible with the level of detail HL2 is shooting for.
 
ok, this question is slightly on topic.
Who here has played Shattered Steel? It's a much older 3d game. It was one of my all time favorite games.
There were few buildings if any, it was all terrain on a decent size map. That terrain was extremely deformable. Shoot long enough with just about any weapon and you could cut through a canyon. ;) Get the nuke and shoot it a few times and you would have huge fiery craters all over. *There was of course a lower limit to how much could be destroyed, kinda leaving a big flat square level if you manage to destroy it all.

Man. I need to get a good dos computer up and running so I can play that game again, it owned.
 
marksmanHL2 has got it exactly right.

HL2 uses a BSP system similar to that of HL (and all the Quake-engined games). Maps are precompiled for, amongst other things, visibility and lighting. If you blow a whacking great hole in a building, allowing you to see the street on the other side, then how is that going to affect the visiblility? The engine has no ability to recalculate it on the fly. Same goes for lighting - the majority of HL2's lighting is static and precompiled. If the same hole allows you to see a lamppost on the other side, will the engine automagically recalculate the lighting? Of course not.

There's a reason why maps take hours to compile - because you can't do all this at runtime.

Summary: Half-Life 2 will not have fully destrucitble environments
 
farcry has deforming!! You shoot at the ground and you have a crater, bigger explosion bigger crater. The deforming aspect is definitely there in hl2. I remember valve saying stuff like barrels won’t deform. You will have to have different versions of the barrel if you want it to look dented.

They also said entire buildings can catch on fire and you would have to evacuate the building. Now since they're saying levels are fully destructible and we see striders taking down huge amounts of concrete and pillars and what not, maybe they are.

I want a mod with a huge nuclear bomb going off in a city and you get to see the fallout, or an earthquake, or both. I guess I would need a super computer for that.
 
Satan said:
Actually, Valve has stated that the ground WILL be destructable, i.e. you fire a rocket at it and a crater appears.
Click to expand...
thats called terrain deformation. nothing thats a big deal. simply displaces a few poly's of the terrain mesh.
 
I think I'm going to write up an article for the community on the biggest HL2 myths and realities, and vet it with Valve before I release it. Anyone want to suggest some topics, like this one?
 
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