Hello .

I just wanted to know whats the best way to make a simple soil simulation , 2D of course, something like Pocket Tanks that you can move on it .

-Is working with mesh and mesh deformation good enough ?

-it's just for a mobile game i don't want to create small cubes or planes that will lead to low performance.

Thanks and please help me.

You can draw such terrain with a single quad. Just create a texture either by rendering your terrain into it somehow or by filling it texel by texel yourself. Or you can use fragment shader that discards or fills fragments according to fragment's position (x,y) and 1D-heightmap values (index heightmap with fragment x position and compare returned value with fragment y position). In case you'd want to have holes you'd need to modify the shader a little bit.

Rendering with a mesh doesnt look promising to me, especially, if you want it to be dynamic ("sandy") as it was in Pocket Tanks.

You can draw such terrain with a single quad. Just create a texture either by rendering your terrain into it somehow or by filling it texel by texel yourself.

how will the physics work then ? should i write it by myself?

It depends very much on how realistic you want it to be and if it is suppose to work like a height map or particle simulation.

Working with particles can be very realistic but needs a lot of calculation power. The height map method is very fast but can't deal with things like caves or bridges (like the unity terrain tools).

I worked on a height map based soil simulation before for 3D something like this:

It gives every square metre (or every metre in 2D) a height value and velocity to simulate the movement of soil. A bomb or a heavy tank will accelerate the soil and cause the movement of the ground.

Edit: Just checked out Pocket Tanks. Wouldn't even call that a simulation

You can draw such terrain with a single quad. Just create a texture either by rendering your terrain into it somehow or by filling it texel by texel yourself.

how will the physics work then ? should i write it by myself?

It depends on what you need. Maybe, approximating terrain with a polyline and using box2d or chipmunk will be sufficient for you. Otherwise, most probably you will have to do it yourself. But first of all you need to decide what you want your game to be.

I worked on a height map based soil simulation before for 3D something like this:

Awesome. It could become a great game.

You can draw such terrain with a single quad. Just create a texture either by rendering your terrain into it somehow or by filling it texel by texel yourself.

how will the physics work then ? should i write it by myself?

You update the texture every frame. You handle positions of the dirt as a series of dirt-columns across the screen. Every frame you update by breaking columns where an explosion hits them (or crater, etc) and then output that to the texture. To speed it up you could also write just the changing parts of the world to the texture, instead of the whole thing.

There is also the requirement that you can code simple abstract concepts, like an array of dirt columns, and be able to generate textures.

Whenever I want to do something that I don't know how to do, there is always learning involved. So, be prepared to learn something.