I wonder...

[LaZermaniac]

I've seen one of the Bink Video demos of HL2, awesome stuff. There was a new one, named "tunnels" it featured player fighting some "manhacks" and combine soldiers. well, the manhacks are kinda like miter saws, but intending to fly into you. anyway, there was a part where a manhack smashes through some srates. and, would you believe it, the crates didn't shatter in complex ways like Valve described it, they gibbed like in good ol' HL1 and, worst of all, THE GIBS FADED AWAY! does that mean you can set the complexity of the world objects? does it mean VALVe screwed up? Does it mean they didn't finish with the physics system? Does it mean they hurried to finish the demo level so much, they forgot to put the complex breaking stuff? soooo many questions...

 

[Rossell]

Please note how old those videos are.

 

[worldspawn]

it means you were watching a video from last years e3.. while that's how the crates worked in that part of the level.. it doesn't mean they will work the same in the actual game.. however I don't believe those manhacks will have acurate blade damage.. they will hurt the player or world if the blades collide.. but I don't believe it will be possible for the blades to cut objects realistically. They may improve how crates break however.. not to look like they gib rather chip off or something but we will have to see.

 

[NUKE]

You are right. Too many questions!!!
But some awnsers: Valve is an amazing company, just wait an extra year and maybe, the bug is fixed.

Let's hope so!

 

[PvtRyan]

Wood objects will just gib, with the exception of things like wooden beams that can be cut in the middle, but they have been modeled that way. It's just too CPU heavy to do actual vertex re-arrangements. Maybe in HL3.

 

[marksmanHL2 :)]

Yup, gibbing is "Cheap" compared to other methods and to be honest it didn't make the game look any less exciting to me....

 

[Mr-Fusion]

What PvtRyan said. No developer in their right mind would make realistic splintering of wood with current computer power. 1 Frame Per Second is not fun for anyone!

 

[Vegeta897]

Gah, so pointless, it's just some kind of placeholder, there will be more complicated breaking in the final, it will not hog fps. Just trust 'em and forget about it, it's not worth it.

 

[ray_MAN]

It will hog FPS if it gibs too much. You would know Vegeta, if yo ucatch my drift...

 

[el Chi]

Yup, gibbing is "Cheap" compared to other methods and to be honest it didn't make the game look any less exciting to me....

It did for me. In fact, I'm not going to buy this game anymore and I think people ought to boycott it until Valve change their wicked, sinful ways.

 

[Vegeta897]

Define "too much" I'm just talking like the six sides of a box, maybe two can still be stuck together, I'm not talkin like split up into every little plank thingy. It won't lag, as you said, "I would know" And I took some offense to that...

 

[Spiffae]

I think what we'll see is something along the lines of painkiller. go play the second demo (city on water) and fire at some of the crates. a good blend of physics, gibs, and realistic breaking.

 

[Letters]

it means you were watching a video from last years e3.. while that's how the crates worked in that part of the level.. it doesn't mean they will work the same in the actual game.. however I don't believe those manhacks will have acurate blade damage.. they will hurt the player or world if the blades collide.. but I don't believe it will be possible for the blades to cut objects realistically. They may improve how crates break however.. not to look like they gib rather chip off or something but we will have to see.

If the crowbar is nothing more than a physically simulated object, then I really don't see why these blades would be any different.

 

[Cutey_Kaite]

ok..worldspawn, i love your avatar!

and on subject, yes having it break in certin places will be a huge hog. Me thinks that having it like in painkiller will be the best way to go.

 

[BabyHeadCrab]

this has been explained, things break because you set the models to have breaking points but to many break points and it hits the cpu hard it cant have real world breakage because well thats impossible in todays tech (nearly) you can pretty much set were you would like something to break for instance a chair on each leg and maybe in half or something and if you hit close enough with enough pressure it will break in a realistic fasion its pretty much like hl1's system except with more detailed breaking instead of just into a bunch of pieces they could each for instance be phsyically simulated with there jawesome tweaked havok... the realism of actions such as this have to be calculated by the mapper/modder or in this case valve with performance and such in mind

 

[Vegeta897]

Ohhhhh, I didn't know we were talking about breakpoints, I thought you just meant you hit it and it breaks into a set of gibs, (6 sides of a crate)

HL2 will not have multiple breakpoints as far as my knowledge. It doesn't need them, that's going too far. As said, earlier, Painkiller works great.

 

[Brian Damage]

Errr... well, for my two cents, IIRC Gabe and others have said that objects in the game world can be made up of several sub-objects, with defined breaking strains on the joins between them. So that translates to being able to have a crate made of, say, twelve different pieces. Whether the calculations required for what could be more than thirty joins will slow down a CPU detectably is anyone's guess...

 

[Xenome]

Omg that tunnels scene was great..and you are whining about some gibs fading away?

Amazing what some of you notice

 

[worldspawn]

If the crowbar is nothing more than a physically simulated object, then I really don't see why these blades would be any different.

that is a meaningless term.. and even if it had meaning.. that doesn't mean that ever crate is a physically simulated object capable of breaking realistically. The game will be great but it won't have this level of detail.

 

[worldspawn]

ok..worldspawn, i love your avatar!

thankyou. ...

 

[FictiousWill]

sorry to go OT, but I know I've seen a larger version of that avatar on the web somewhere. I assume that's what you used to make your smaller version. Can you post a link to it?

 

[worldspawn]

sorry to go OT, but I know I've seen a larger version of that avatar on the web somewhere. I assume that's what you used to make your smaller version. Can you post a link to it?

 

[Apos]

There's actually some info about this in the info thread, but the bottom line is that you can do things like a breaking crate any way you'd like in Source: you just have to consider the poly and performance issues. You can build a crate out of smaller, breakable pieces, but doing so will of course mean that now every crate will involve way more polys.
Is that worth it to you to spend your polys on? Do you want a single solid crate built out of a few polys to form a cube that is swapped out with crate gibs when destroyed? Or do you want to build that crate out of 6 sqaure flats that can break apart and be simulated as individual physics objects? Or do you want to make each of those flats breakable into four more pieces?

It's up to the designer to decide: it's not an engine constraint. In fact, we've SEEN examples of a wooden object even more complex than a crate realistically breaking into distinct parts. And I'm not talking about the wooden board structure in the techdemo.

No: look at the strider video, preferably in Quicktime format, where you can go slowmo. If you watch that ornate dresser hit the strider, you can see it realistically breaking into its component elements.

 

[Apos]

Oh, and shame on your thread title! How's anyone supposed to know what the thread is going to be about from "I wonder...."

 

[Murray_H]

Valve may have made a magical program that creates random break points on wooden beams, but limits the number of points so performace isn't hindered

Who knows where i got that from!

 

[Letters]

Who knows where i got that from!

I do, Murray... I do...

 

[Apos]

It wouldn't be too hard to write such a program for use in something like Softimage to apply to simple objects, but I doubt they'd use something like that, simply because
a) it's easy enough to do manually
b) you'd always want to fine tune where you put the breakpoints. There are good places and bad places, and its more of an art than something you can automate.

 

[Lucifer Crass]

You are right. Too many questions!!!
But some awnsers: Valve is an amazing company, just wait an extra year and maybe, the bug is fixed.

Let's hope so!

n00b with ur avatar, fear mine!

 

[hiln]

Two other things I've noticed in the bink movies.
One is not even an error or whatever but:
When a combine soldier dies you hear this almost beep, or maybe a ring. Its strange. The barricade video shows the sounds pretty good, just listen well.

The second thing is in the traptown demonstration. When he turns on the fan to chop the zombies in half, the fan isn't connected to the machine under it, its spinning in thin air.

This has probably been discussed to death but another thing:
In traptown when he closes the door and puts the table up to it, it seems like the combine is scripted to just shoot right above the washing machine. It seems like the player went "oh crap, I'm late" then ran under the cover to look like it wasn't scripted. And then the combine busts open the door, but he never follows. Then the one shooting gordon from outside the window stops shooting after gordon focuses on the next one up the stairs.
But this isn't a complaint at all, for all I know I'm wrong as shit, its just something I've observed.

 

[Apos]

Some stuff on breakpoints. Consider the extremely crude representations on the left and right, below (ignore the dots). They are supposed to be rectangular boards (which exist in 3dimensions as well), not crooked monstrosities, but the x's represent the lines on which the boards can be set to break. Now, the one on the left has two different break points, and breaks into three 3d pieces. The one on the right only breaks into two 3d pieces, and only has one break point.

------.............------
|......|............|\.....|
--x---............|.\....|
|......|............|..x..|
--x---............|....\.|
|......|............|.....\|
------ ............------

However, the neat thing about this is that the one on the right "breaks" much more realistically. Shoot the board on the left anywhere but a break point, and it will look goofy breaking somewhere other than where the bullet hit. Shoot the board on the right just about anywhere and the break will feel much more realistic: it will feel like the board has splintered. Also note that the board on the right has a break line that transverses the entire board: meaning that if the board is fairly thin, then a randomly placed bullet shot is actually more likely to be closer to a breakline on the right board than on the right, even though the one on the left has more breakpoints. If you look at the techdemo video, this appears to be what Valve's breaking boards do: they splinter lengthwise rather than breaking perfectly along horizontal lines.

 

[Apos]

This has probably been discussed to death but another thing:
In traptown when he closes the door and puts the table up to it, it seems like the combine is scripted to just shoot right above the washing machine. It seems like the player went "oh crap, I'm late" then ran under the cover to look like it wasn't scripted. And then the combine busts open the door, but he never follows. Then the one shooting gordon from outside the window stops shooting after gordon focuses on the next one up the stairs.

Hopefully to avoid a hijack, let me just sum up what we came up with from debating this one to death:
1) according to Valve, the soldier that shoots in the window doesn't know where Gordon is in the room: he just knows Gordon is in there, and fires randomly to flush him out
2) If they wanted to conceal the fact that it was scripted to shoot the washing machine, why not just redo the demo until they got it right?
3) it's the easiest thing in the world to program an enemy to shoot directly at the player: much easier than scripting it to miss. So why would they do it?
4) the soldier shooting could have stopped for any number of reasons: reloading, moving around to enter, etc.
5) maybe it was scripted, but then, they could have scripted the player's movements too, so again, why would they script something that doesn't make sense?

C) We just don't know what's going on, and we'll have to see for ourselves. I don't think, out of all the threads we devoted to this topic, that we have any better answer at this point.

 

[hiln]

Hopefully to avoid a hijack, let me just sum up what we came up with from debating this one to death:
1) according to Valve, the soldier that shoots in the window doesn't know where Gordon is in the room: he just knows Gordon is in there, and fires randomly to flush him out
2) If they wanted to conceal the fact that it was scripted to shoot the washing machine, why not just redo the demo until they got it right?
3) it's the easiest thing in the world to program an enemy to shoot directly at the player: much easier than scripting it to miss. So why would they do it?
4) the soldier shooting could have stopped for any number of reasons: reloading, moving around to enter, etc.
5) maybe it was scripted, but then, they could have scripted the player's movements too, so again, why would they script something that doesn't make sense?

that's fine, I'm just saying it looked like it

 

[FictiousWill]

It's the way wood is in reality. Nobody wants 2x4's that go against the grain. Just turns out well for all involved.