Now I know what all you are thinking. "Theres already breaking walls though!" But it's not what I mean. What I mean is that I find it kinda funny that tanks shoot these walls a lot, and basically until their health goes down to 0, they remain intact, then they just fall apart. I would like to see walls deteriorate when they're being damaged, so at like 75% health, a top peice crumbles, then at 50 a large half would go, forcing you to prone or crouch for cover, 25% would make it useless for anything except blocking vehicles, at 0% the rest explodes. And this could be used with tanks also, showing damage instead of just smoke at 50%, or as I've heard, you're planning to make the buildings cumble too. This could be implemented as well. If you were planning on doing this, woops. If not, think about it. I dont like searching up 20 threads for one idea at 7 AM.
The reason why it doesn't crumble that way is cause the game has to readjust the hitboxes everytime it crumbles. And I don't htink it's possible with this engine.
The best way to do it would be to either have several segments composing one wall, and have random ones be blown off when the wall is damaged, but that requires more polygons, more hitboxes, and generally lower performance, or have several wall models at various degrees of destruction, and switch between them as health is lost, which would be more efficient, but less impressive. It depends what you want.
The main problem with your suggestion is the fact that once a wall is damaged, it has to send the data about its still-intact parts to everyone, because if you let this be calculated clientside, it could well be that some people had some extra chunks blown off and can see you, while your client is telling you that you are actually still behind cover.
Well actually you could simply use a seed at the start of the match so that the same random numbers are calculated on all clients. Or just have a preset pattern of destruction for each wall segment.
It could just be a health dependant variable; and everything else is calculated client side. But then again; even if it is just loading new models each time a chunk blows off; the physics collision would have to be updated as well, that is probably where most of the problems are going to happen. Walls would have to be cached when the level loads, or lower end PC's will sudder a "Freeze" each time a wall is blown up, similar to that of when on a new round the first veichle is built; there is a small freeze, where the game fetches the textures and such from the hard drive... It would be cool yes, and make the mod alot more dynamic...
No i wasnt spamming i was saying crYsis cus the physics allows u to destroy anything part by part like in red faction but better
Actually the houses are simply put together out of predefined props. You could do the same thing in empires, it would just lag, which is why the multiplayer maps don't have it in crysis.
Just give it a few textures that change when the prop is damaged enough. And really, who shoots walls to death?
In reply to the OP's side note about vehicles showing damage, I raised that question some time ago and Krenzo replied. The reply was to the effect of "Shut up and use armor detection."
As an alternative to this, I'd like it if walls just chipped and cracked. I'm no coder, so I don't pretend to know how it could be implemented. No gameplay changes as the wall takes damage, but visually the wall would look "worn". Especially helpful for the unfortunate rifleman taking cover behind a wall that he *thinks* is safe :p.
