Destructible Environments

[Waylaid]

I'm signing up to tell you guys this:

Give us players destructible environments. Allow us to shoot through walls, & doors, bring down towers & structures, create temporary cover, blow up buildings, anything to destroy both for our tactical advantage over the enemies and our instant gratifying need to blow stuff up.

Also, destructible environments are rare in the current FPS, and this should be good time for you dev to reign in that element in, since you're just starting out. Hope destructible environments are made possible in the Quake 4 engine you're using.

[LDAsh]

There will definitely be destructible objects and other objects that can be interacted with to create cover and perhaps use to jump on top of to reach other areas, but as for taking down walls and large structures, unless it's scripted into the level to happen at a certain point, I really doubt we'll be trying to do anything like that. It would need to be a "feature" of a map and not something that could happen to every single surface in the game. I'd love to see that too, but for an amateur group like ours to focus on hard stuff like that would be suicide. Thanks for the input though, we'll be sure to try it out.

[Waylaid]

Thanks for your reply.

Speaking of which, is it possible to do destructible environments with the Quake 4 engine?

And would we see them in your future games?

[JCH321]

Although I'm not yet part of the dev team, I'm sure that would be in the future plan - as for the Quake 4 engine itself, no, it's not designed to have destructible environments. The team COULD simulate these and most likely WILL have partially destructible environments, but at this point, do not expect just everything to destroyable - sorry

Maybe someday though!!

[This post is not an official answer!]

[DeeP]

Destructible * in the Q4 engine is accomplished with "replaceing" the object with a destroyed version of that object, triggered by weapons fire or some other activity in game . ie: a monster breaking thru a wall, triggered by the player walking thru a trigger brush. This would be a triggered sequence of events which would be mapped in and not random.
In the case of "red Faction for instance, the damage or openings in the walls were developed by the game rerendering a predesigned hole/damage in that specific area.In some cases, tunnels could actually be blown out of the floor or walls with a rocket launcher which the player could then use to access other parts of the map, (as long as that coded brush stretched that far.}
Random destruction I'm sure would be the next mountain to climb for games in the future, but this involves iether coded brushes to alter depending on the direction of impact/what weapon was used/and how much "punch" it had to do an equal (believeable) amount of damage.
If Q4 COULD do this, this is what it would have to be able to do in the game :
- all brushes (the building blocks for the map) would have to be coded for : instant new texture placement/depth of impact/determine strength of impact/break apart according to direction of projectile/how many fragments to leave after impact/be coded to not allow vis portal disruptions - thus some areas couldn't be damaged/ or new vis portal development would need to be made.
sounds - how many sounds to trigger at once/what sounds?mixing/ random?
Then there's light/ light soarces would need to appear to maintain visibility in new destryed areas complete blackness in a tunnel created by a player would be crazy and pointless - so somehow autodetection of the light levels would need to be in there too.
Q4 maps need to be "leek proof" in regard to the map being seperate from the surrounding void it hangs in.Safeguards would have to be in place for this not to occur in game.
The game would come to a screeching halt in no time having to calculate all of this and more
Sadly, I have to admit... we need an engine like this, but Q4 isn't it by a long shot.
DeeP

[LDAsh]

Truly destructible environments is something id Software is working on for their next generation of engines that translates all geometry into "voxels", which to put it simply is like turning everything into volumes of "crumbs" that can then be destroyed and taken apart in chunks, instead of taken apart in predefined triangles.
In Q4, we can do plenty of destructible objects specifically, but can't possibly make the entire map destructible. This thread certainly gets me thinking about it, though. The least we could do is give as much as possible a "damage skin", ala Quake II.

[DeeP]

I was working on a plan for that! (walls, pillars or whatever built out from hundreds of memory hogging/resoarce sucking breakeables.
LOL I believe our minds have been linked together.
(have you seen Mr.Spock around here lately?)