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Personal thoughts on terrain


Lurkily

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I wonder how computationally expensive it would be to apply physics to all terrain?  The entire planet.  Calculate the center-of-mass of all terrain, just as you do with drones.  Any modification to terrain updates that measurement.  (This wouldn't have to be updated frame by frame, once every few seconds would do.)  Apply physics to cut-free pieces of terrain.  If at all possible, calculate where stress on the terrain would be greatest.  Overhangs and thin protrusions should ovbviously be weak, and it would be interesting to see the planet collapse as you dig, introduce a new danger to digging straight to the core.  Different types of soil could have different thresholds at which they break free and fall.  Once a cut-loose piece of terrain comes to rest, you can fuse it back to adjacent terrain, to limit the amount of physics calculations.

 

This opens the gate to various things, such as explosions throwing chunks of debris, instead of just excising a sphere of mass.  Impacts could crumble rock formations, cause landslides.  As you damage a planet, debris and landslides would tend to fill in the holes you dig,, and tunnels might face the danger of collapse; you'd run the risk of your drone being buried.

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I think that would be fun! I know they have multiple plans to expand the game (I'm slowly combing through the forums - soaking up what I can), but don't know what specifically.

 

I could see landslides being especially useful obstacle for smaller, more weak drones like the stretch goal for land rovers they got in the KickStarter campaign.

 

Something that comes to mind for easy calculations (as I assume they already know which edges that are on the outside of a planet's mesh since the guns have to be able to hit something and deforms it) - they might be able to easily tell once a shape is separated from the main mass and make it start being affected by gravity, but then there is hit box detection/collision for that object against others.

Right now visually they compensated for freestanding objects with the "BG" where deleted mass reveals a dark BG behind it - which alludes to a 3rd dimension we can't access holding onto the pieces (though still doesn't account for procedurally generated floating pieces)

 

At least some more physics/objects in general in addition to your own ideas:

  • asteroid belts orbiting a planet
  • moons
  • falling stars (meteors) - could be part of the stretch goal and work into this idea

 

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Orbits are sketchy.  If you have orbits, players are going to want to alter orbits sometimes, drop rocks on enemy structures.  It introduces gameplay elements that may be worth it - but you'll want to make a plan for everything that might be done with it before you start, just so you know whether or not it's worth beginning.

 

Honestly, you'd have to increase scale a lot before I can see orbiting bodies being terribly interesting.

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