Sidenius

Destruction

Added 2024-08-25 23:37:34 +0000 UTC

Environmental destruction is a feature that really fits in a game with giant fire-beathing dragons. I've been exploring different options to implement this for a long time but haven't really shown much of it. One thing that sets Dragontwin apart from many other games is the scale of everything, it's not enough to just be able to destroy some vases or a wall, ideally entire buildings or even cities should be destructible. That requires some special consideration.

Initially, I made a custom system that runs on the GPU to simulate building destruction with really high fidelity, but it has some significant limitations and also needs a lot more development to be usable, which I don't really have time for. Another option is the destruction system that is built into UE5, which has a lot of features and can give good results but is very computationally expensive. It's the one used in the recent sneak peeks. However, it may be too expensive if I end up making entire cities destructible, so I will probably have to try the last option on the list as well, which is another solution that uses the GPU. It basically bakes the destruction simulation offline and replays it when you destroy the thing, but only the pieces you actually interact with. This makes it more interactive than a regular baked simulation, while still being very cheap and capable of simulating a lot at the same time. I'll showcase that system some time later when I've had time to implement and test it.