Ground deformation [Feature request to BIS]

[LJF 0]

I just thought, has anyone here played Delta Force Black Hawk Down?

It had a cave system, you place a cave section in the ground and it would cut away the layer of ground (or make it transparent and allow you to fall through), it worked great for caves but wouldn't that same method work for craters? That way you could have lowered craters without needing proper "dynamic" terrain.

You could simply have crater objects placed where an explosion was which cut away the ground and provided a new base, this is kind of hard to explain, but I think you get what I mean.

Edited December 11, 2009 by LJF

[kuIoodporny 45]

Peoples no thats, and Bis to i things! Bravo! to you, only one things to be add in future Ace, please adds what Bis just removing, tracks shadow and foot prints. :p and am will be ready to play Arma 2 again.

It's known A2 bug. Tracks would appear if tanks were able to climb ladders ;)

Use CIT for reporting such bugs and lost features.

[walker 0]

Hi all

This is one thing ArmA II is theoretically capable of.

Kind regards walker

[An Fiach 10]

I just thought, has anyone here played Delta Force Black Hawk Down?

It had a cave system, you place a cave section in the ground and it would cut away the layer of ground (or make it transparent and allow you to fall through), it worked great for caves but wouldn't that same method work for craters? That way you could have lowered craters without needing proper "dynamic" terrain.

You could simply have crater objects placed where an explosion was which cut away the ground and provided a new base, this is kind of hard to explain, but I think you get what I mean.

Completely different engine.

[Murklor 10]

Completely different engine.

Its not engine dependant really, but rather extra functions to remove faces ingame. BF1942 could do it (sort of) and its as static yet more primitive than Arma II. I see absolutely nothing that prevent BIS from making the terrain part of the engine able to cut away faces.

But either way messing with any part of the engine is a major procedure.

Personally I'd be more happy with fixing the broken physics engine rather than getting deformation, but meh.

[An Fiach 10]

Its not engine dependant really, but rather extra functions to remove faces ingame. BF1942 could do it (sort of) and its as static yet more primitive than Arma II. I see absolutely nothing that prevent BIS from making the terrain part of the engine able to cut away faces.

But either way messing with any part of the engine is a major procedure.

Personally I'd be more happy with fixing the broken physics engine rather than getting deformation, but meh.

Well it is, take for example the unreal engine, its world are created by removing bits from a block of clay, the interior being the 'map' and so terrain deformation is possible because it simply removes a chunk of clay. ArmA 2 terrain is not created in this manner so creating holes requires an elevation change in the affected area, deforming the mesh that the terrain is painted on.

[max power 21]

The mesh grid of the island we currently have is not conducive to such features. In order to make it worth while, you would have to substantially beef up the terrain grid, which would effect performance negatively. In order to have such a thing in this engine, you would need to create a function that not only creates holes, but also dynamically and cleanly tessellates the affected area, and changes the way the terrain relates to the height map and other masks.

[Murklor 10]

Well it is, take for example the unreal engine, its world are created by removing bits from a block of clay, the interior being the 'map' and so terrain deformation is possible because it simply removes a chunk of clay. ArmA 2 terrain is not created in this manner so creating holes requires an elevation change in the affected area, deforming the mesh that the terrain is painted on.

Simply removing a face however is not deforming the mesh. It should be a fairly trivial thing and doesnt require any elevation changes.

The idea with his solution was to not render a face and slap an object on top of it: thus creating for example a crater lower than the surrounding terrain (the crater mesh fills the entire hole).

[Pyronick 21]

I've read a discussion about terrain grid density a few years ago on an IRC channel.

One of the developers was trying to develop a grid system which can dynamically split up grid density only on places needed.

Some kind of dynamic quadtree in which a single node can split up in four nodes in which a single node can split up in four nodes in which a single node on it's turn can split up in four nodes and so on and so on.

But they couldn't develop such a thing since they were building a Source mod and they needed access to the engine code.

This should add the details needed without the extreme excessive details of a high density static grid.

It sounds very complex though and not optimal either, but maybe it's interesting to experiment with for the developers?

It could not only add the possibility of reasonable accurate/details deformation, but terrain topographic/geometric details aswell.

[max power 21]

What makes you think they haven't experimented with it already? They seem to do all kinds of R&D. Dynamic destruction, ragdolls, etc. It seems like usually for radical features like that, they find it is not conducive to hardware performance or network traffic.

[An Fiach 10]

Simply removing a face however is not deforming the mesh. It should be a fairly trivial thing and doesnt require any elevation changes.

The idea with his solution was to not render a face and slap an object on top of it: thus creating for example a crater lower than the surrounding terrain (the crater mesh fills the entire hole).

If you remove a face you put a hole in the rendered terrain, not a crater, a hole that goes straight to the nothing that is below it.

[ActionMan 10]

Simply removing a face however is not deforming the mesh. It should be a fairly trivial thing and doesnt require any elevation changes.

Simply removing a face from the graphical component of the scene doesn't fix the problems associated with ray-casting, physics, collision, visibility testing and all the other non-graphical subsystems which may or may not rely on the the terrain being static and never changing.

[savedbygrace 2]

I am certainly no graphics or gaming engineer but couldn't you create the hole in the face and setposition a model inside that hole to fill it?

Wouldn't the engine have to alter buildings and objects in such a way to place one of those craters if the crater was within a specific distance of them?

Just seem like a lot of work to choose to do over some of the more basic features.

I think the above ground crater was just as effective and if done properly such as large enough to look like part of the land squeezed out to provide a deep enough hole to gain cover in, it would require less time and effort to gain it.

[ActionMan 10]

I am certainly no graphics or gaming engineer but couldn't you create the hole in the face and setposition a model inside that hole to fill it?

Yes, but that will only get you the visuals of the "crater".

If you simply cut away some triangles to make a hole in the (visual) ground, the collision system doesn't know there's a hole in the (physical) ground, so you won't be able to fall into it!

The physical representation of terrain is usually quite different internally to the visual representation. So while it may be trivial to cut a hole in the visuals, it may not be trivial to cut a hole in the physics.

[An Fiach 10]

That's the thing too, you start set pos craters and you end up with really bad performance

[MulleDK19 21]

This would need that the engine allows dynamic deformation which it can't handle. They would need to completely rewrite the engine, causeing everything else also has to be adapted to the new code. Ande here we are at a point where it leads that in fact it means to completely writing a new Game.

You have no idea what you're talking about.

BIS uses their Visitor 3 tool to create the islands. Do you really think that one of their applications can do it, while the other can not?

[[frl]myke 14]

You have no idea what you're talking about.

Please, do not speak so rude to me.

And yes, thats indeed what i'm thinkin. While terrain deformation in V3 is more comparable to "offline editing", ingame ground deformation is far more complex.

First of all, when deforming terrain in V3, the software doesn't have to care too much about effects on nearby, probably affected, structures of any kind.

Ingame this is completely different. Is the deformation near a structure? Is it needed that this structure gets affected (damaged or even destroyed) due to the transformation? If yes, how much and which parts.

Now take Multiplayer syncs and add this to the things the engine has to handle. Another point V3 hasn't to take care of.

And i hardly guess that these things are only a scratch on the surface of possible issues.

[mattxr 9]

Im sure in 2-3 years BIS will have an awesome engine which will exceed Everyones expectations :P for all this fancy eye-candy stuff.

[McArcher 0]

So far I have read the engine cannot support deformation and also cannot support flowing water.

So why are we still working with an engine that does not support some fairly basic things.

I still think that it is really funny when a plane plunges into the ground only to hit a tree and float to the ground like an empty shell and that's it, detracts from the game a lot that sort of thing.

So for me deformed terrain and flowing water would be nice but just make plane crashes more realistic.

I agree... Why are we using an engine in which THERE IS NO DEFORMATION OF ANY KIND....

* damaging model is just a change of 2-3 models of a building,

* or just a change of textures and missing tyres for vehicles...

* burning crates dont even change a texture, they just have an ugly fire above!!! :D

almost no particles or substructures in structures (you cannot break a glass window in a building, you cannot breaka door or half of the building) :(

btw, land deformation is much easier to script rather than breaking objects into particles and to calculate their trajectories and collisions. ground can just change some vertexes to a "hole in the ground" form and change textures (no more needed)

all this could be done instead of unnecesary "additional campaigns", "renaming OFP to arma and then to Arma2, making money for new addons for nearly the same old OFP's engine with some changes :(

maybe in arma 3 they understand that to develop an old engine is much more costly than to make a new one from scratch.. all this is IMHO

maybe some time later the world will make standard universal physics engine, that will be developped by everybody together and with whuch games will be written?...

---------- Post added at 01:30 PM ---------- Previous post was at 01:27 PM ----------

Please, do not speak so rude to me.

And yes, thats indeed what i'm thinkin. While terrain deformation in V3 is more comparable to "offline editing", ingame ground deformation is far more complex.

First of all, when deforming terrain in V3, the software doesn't have to care too much about effects on nearby, probably affected, structures of any kind.

Ingame this is completely different. Is the deformation near a structure? Is it needed that this structure gets affected (damaged or even destroyed) due to the transformation? If yes, how much and which parts.

Now take Multiplayer syncs and add this to the things the engine has to handle. Another point V3 hasn't to take care of.

And i hardly guess that these things are only a scratch on the surface of possible issues.

to my mind, every calculations must be done in server, and clients will send only messages about their actions "like I am here, I fire there" and see the results then, calculated by server, no sync will be needed then. It will make game laggy in MP, if pings are more than 50ms for example, but it will make things easy...

what for do we have multicore multicpu computers?..... for servers....

[Pyronick 21]

what for do we have multicore multicpu computers?..... for servers....

You really don't want to do massively parallel floating point calculations on a CPU. At least, not until 2011.

[max power 21]

I agree... Why are we using an engine in which THERE IS NO DEFORMATION OF ANY KIND....

Because it's the result of a decade of research and development and it provides the finest open world experience on this scale available.

[CarlGustaffa 4]

There is no point in ingame deforming ground. The only tactical advantage it provides is a place of cover in a crater i.e. But that can be achieved by placing a crater object on top of it, but in a good fashion. Like, maintaining original ground slopes, and better texture blending etc.

As far as I see it, there are really no good arguments for it. Only very very negative reasons not to have it.

Boolean removal of ground however, might be nice. It would have to be placed in the editor, for say, to create trenches. But nearby objects, even Visitor placed objects (houses, trees, rocks etc), would have to be removed nearby. But then there is always the problem of AI pathfinding. To date, AI has never been able to perform well even with Visitor placed objects like bridges. So....

[McArcher 0]

I think, we need deformation of ground for many reasons:

1. realism (even in Second World War (WWII), trenches were VERY importand for defence!)

2. trenches (for infantry and for tanks with self-trenching mechanisms - no such tanks in Arma2, but in real life it is very useful to mask a tank, to make only a turret visible from ground and so on...)

[CarlGustaffa 4]

1. I covered trenches as a boolean cut feature instead of deformation. Deformation doesn't work for that since it requires too heavy triangulation in order to obtain the mesh resolution to obtain that level of detail.

2. Such fortifications already exists as objects. You just need to make an engineer team be able to build them, via scripting. I haven't tested how collisions are done, does tank collide (rest on) ground or on placed fortification? I agree that finding good hull down locations in terrain are more difficult than in real terrain. Guessing here (not a tanker), but I think islands with smaller cell sizes helps though.

[FallujahMedic -FM- 867]

Looks like someone is at least trying to do it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhGfEvxt2Hc

Edited December 26, 2009 by Stang69