With how complex and detailed the physics are in this game, I think it would be really cool for the environment to have physics as well as the vehicles. For example: hitting a guard rail would cause it to deform and bend instead of acting like a solid wall, or or buildings (or other structures) could be damaged by a vehicle plowing into it. Maybe also smaller things like driving on a rocky road and having the rocks get moved by the tires. It would really make the game more immersive
I absolutely agree, but everything needs to be a entity then. Every rock, every wall, everything. So everything needs to have physics. It could only work if you have like a ultra good pc or something. You can get a taste of how it would go if you spawn like 10000 cars and set A.I. on. That will only be playable with the best pc's.
I think stuff like guard rails, poles, signs and what not could probably be done and handled fairly easily on a modern PC as they are usually fairly simplistic items that there isn't a terrible number of. Trees on the other hand... well... there are just so many trees... even with the simplest of JBeams, I am just not sure there would be a way to handle all the trees. I feel like the only way around that would be to almost implement a different type of system for vegetation... something that could interact with JBeams once they came in contact, but would have to be MUCH lighter on the physics front just to have a hope and prayer of running... something along the lines of what Motorstorm Pacific Rift did (I think that game had flexible vegetation, but I just can't even remember anymore) On the plus side, they don't have to worry about 99% of the physics that a vehicle needs like drivetrain, thermals, fluids, or any of that other stuff leaving room for a lot of overhead... its just the shear number of them that would be a problem. I wonder how other games like Spin Tires/Mud Runner does it.
At this rate, if the Beam Devs keep listening to our pleas, we would barely run gridmap (the original) with one pigeon on Nasa's computer at 20 FPS. The trees would be a huge problem, as there are countless trees. Maybe count all the trees as one core on the CPU? It would be good if we could build a tree out of 8 nodes, connecting them into a single rod. If every single thing was made of jbeam, that would be pretty epic. We could knock a whole building down by putting a bunch of pigeons on it (As in bunch I mean 100) We do need at least one breakable building, like that gas station mod The most complicated thing that we should come across is the water, sand, and mud physics. Should water be a bunch of nodes that occupy space, all clumped together such that each one is a glob of water? That would be resource intensive, but I feel like that should be a feature.
maybe it could have a render distance thing, so when an object goes out of the render distance the game stops calculating it's physics
I don't think you quite get how Jbeam works lol. You can't stack nodes on top of each other like this, it will collapse.
the environment physics could work like other games when the object is not moving it will freeze so it won't effect fps
The thing is, freezing an object is not a thing in this game, the closest to it is pausing the physics, but this can't be done for each prop separately. There would have to be a new core mechanics of only freezing physics on a certain vehicle and unfreezing when collision is detected somehow.
when your in the level editor when you move a vehicle it freezes is that different that freezing one vehicle at a time?
I haven't really tried moving a vehicle in the editor while also driving another vehicle at the same time so idk
I mean... if they were only working with Torque3d, then perhaps... but the devs have made SO MANY changes to the graphics engine that, at this point, there are more differences then there are similarities.