After much pondering, I have determined a way to enhance the destruction and work around engine limitations. More detachable parts. Windshields that can pop out. Why? Due to parts being unable to be torn currently, windshields are effectively indestructible and will stretch with the pillars infinitely. Popping out would help negate that trait. Seats that can come apart from the base of the car. It would take a lot of force, but it is possible. Glove boxes opening, Radios popping out of the dashboard, and other minor things like having the rear view mirror detaching. I find that the small stuff is often the most important for immersion. Sections of the car becoming separated from the frame. We can already lose wheels, it would be amazing if we could have the engine or radiator become loose if we have a bad enough impact. Additionally, separating the passenger shell from the bottom frame would be amazing. Same if we could rip out the front or back suspension. Having sections of the frame itself break off at seams, would be a major part of making cars be able to be torn in half, as well as showing the effects of more extreme crashes. Altogether, I feel that these would help the game out in one of it's weaker areas, the simulation of extreme amounts of damage to the vehicle using things already in the game.
I can have 4-5 vehicles at one time with negligible fps loss. Not a concern, at least for me. Edit: Seriously, it says I have approximately 2000 fps with five different vehicles spawned.
That's the physic engine speed, not the actual frame per second the game runs. I can handle a few more cars, but many can't. If you want to check the actual FPS get fraps or some other program like that.
You can use Ctrl+F for a menu that has the FPS, along with a lot of other [useless to me] stuff. The FPS is the first thing you see. Also, if your computer is actually good, if you are not getting choppy gameplay with the extra cars, then okay. But for people who have toaster computers, like me before, will suffer from all of the extra parts.
It is always a compromise between performance and detachable parts - would you rather have 4 cars at once smoothly or 2 cars at once smoothly, but the second one has an opening glovebox and the windshield can fall off? The little parts add up really quickly to impact performance. The Moonhawk has a completely separate body and frame (you can rip the body off completely), and the radiator support, inner fenders, and outer fenders are all detachable. For this reason it has almost double the performance impact as the D15 (which has a more simple physical construction). The H-Series has detachable seats (simply because I could not make the flexbody work right without giving them a node/beam structure). The Gavril T75 has a detachable radiator The truck is also extremely FPS hungry, having far more beams than any of the existing vehicles (and I haven't even made the mirrors yet).
I don't currently have any plans for making them detachable (for performance reasons) but it's not out of the question.
As we optimize the physics and computers get faster you can run more cars at once, but I'd rather run 12 cars at the current LOD than still be running only 4-6 with more detaching parts. With my i7 3820 and the latest physics optimizations (coming in the race update) I get 45 fps with 6 D15s (compared to 25 fps with the current public build).
Now that got my attention. Mind dropping some details on the next update? It's been a month since we've had a blog post
I've been posting scattered updates around the showroom and the Facebook page - there's been significant progress on the T75 and Pigeon, and on the programming side we've made the physics faster (as I said) and we've also just greatly improved the parking brake code (less rocking back and forth, better hill holding, more realistic torque values). Right now we're rebuilding the whole UI and debug system to be more user-friendly and using HTML rather than the old canvas drawing system. We will publish a blog post when it is ready to show.
