A question is whether your going to have new vertices for all the damaged places or will you just change multitextured textures on the terrain and change heights? In case you are doing the first one i would have a check every frame checking whether frame rate dropped under 30FPS. If this is the case delete old damaged areas. I know this is what your trying to avoid but if you dont then the slower computers will begin to have a disadvantage in a network game over time. So if this game is to be network played, try to make the damaged areas a ''chrome''feature, meaning not necessary to play the game or slower computers cant join.
If your thinking of adding things like movement speed is decreased on debree this may cause a problem in a multiplayer game cause you will never be able to delete damage causing a major speed drop over time.

Just some thoughts.
-CProgrammer
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You haughty fortune cookie! What is that you are displaying? I have not seen the likes of that cloud anywhere in the sky! Where will I find my dish detergent if I can not approbate my degenerating DNA structure?
End Transmission! (_|_)

It''s apparent I haven''t been to clear about certain details of my engine in it''s current state, so to alieviate confusion Here are some more specific details.

The maps are not terrain, they''re made in GTKRadiant. Most of the maps I have in mind are city-scapes, but anything is really possible. The gameplay is a ship flying through these maps fighting other ships. Basically dog fighting.

As for Bezier Patches. I imagine that in the future I will implement some form of that as I think it''s a good way to add detail that is dynamic. But at the moment I don''t think they will help with deformation.

Another thing that needs some consideration. How should the Verts be stored for use in Direct3D. As of now they are in one giant Vertex Buffer, and all the indicies are also in one giant index buffer. Since I intend to deform the world, I will be adding and removing verticies. If all the verts are in a giant list then modifying that list becomes expensive. If they are in small lists then vertex buffers need to be switched more often, which also incurr''s a penalty. I wonder which will prove most efficient overall.

-Zims

I love playing red faction, and it has very nice deformation with its geo mod technology, i wonder if there is a resource on how its done in that game?

If you want to make a proper deformable world, visibility culling is the least of your problems!


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quote:Original post by d000hg
If you want to make a proper deformable world, visibility culling is the least of your problems!

I would say that''s the main problem.
IMHO Red Faction uses BSP tree merging for its CSG operations, but how do they handle a destroyed portal or the recompution of a precalculated PVS ...
What''s left is dynamic culling which is costly