Destructible Environments: Possible with Source?

[Gordon's Beard]

Can destructible environments be made possible with the Source engine ala Geomod of Red Faction or EA's BLACK engine? If so, care to give us modders some 101 on how they're made?

 

[The_One_Free_Man]

yeah i was wondering about this the other day

 

[DjBourgeoisie]

done like in red faction, no. Only way I am aware of would be to create chunks of breakable wall/ground or whatever but it would likely make for some laggy maps and tbh I dont think would look that good.

 

[Pi Mu Rho]

Yeah, you'd have to have preset areas, with preset destruction. It wouldn't really work.

 

[UltraProAnti]

you could fake it, with destructible func_phyboxes and whole lotta EnableMotion outputs

trouble is, you'd need to add gruntier impact noises to your mod than the weak ones valve used, which don't relate to mass or velocity in any way, only to material type

 

[Unarmed]

I have a question. In the early days when all we had of HL2 was the video of VALVe showing off source there was a thing I'd like to replicate... It was in the video where a lot of barrels bounced down between spikes and stuff and then there were a few things that were shot and thrown in a pond.

But right in the beginning there is a earthquake-like thing and the ground changes.... Howto do that so that it looks cool?

 

[JFry]

You can do that with an env_terrainmorph entity. Unfortunately the entity doesn't change the clipping of the terrain so even tho it would look like a mountain you would walk thru it as tho it was flat ground( or whatever shape it was before you morphed it). Also I think they use some dust effects or something as well.

 

[Unarmed]

hmmm... i guess there is some way to work around that clipping stuff...

 

[DaMaN]

You could probably add a few invisible func_doors or movelinears to get around the clipping stuff.

-DaMaN

 

[Gordon's Beard]

Back to topic please?

 

[The_One_Free_Man]

youd have to code animation triggers and such using phy_box's would crash the game.

 

[Unarmed]

And I guess areaportals to damnation or something.

 

[The_One_Free_Man]

i was thinking about this, you could just build your walls and cielings and such out of func_breakable. Also some minor coding could make the effect better, and some custom gibs perhaps but i think this is possible. i'll try it and let you know.

EDIT::::
I tried it and i think with some custom gibs it would really be cool it would take some tweaking but i think areas of the map could be completely distructable without to much cpu power spent.

 

[Unarmed]

You could do that no doubt but there is however one problem.

Func_breakables and props and etc does NOT block VIS therefore making the engine render the whole map. This is why i suggested that you might be able to work around that with Areaportals, but that'd be hard.

You could also have a well thought design with som non-breakable brushes to maybe stop this.

You should try and find DNv Cross somewhere, i believe he was working on a map that was very destructible.

 

[The_One_Free_Man]

occulders(sp?) wouldn't they work?

 

[blackflag486]

well, if you have ever played the map on cs source glassfloor or fy_breakfloor or whatever its called, its kinda got the concept but on a low level basis.