There’s a topic that I’d like to start spurring discussion on, since I haven’t seen anything recent addressing it yet.
Model destruction is undoubtedly an extremely important decision to make this early on in UII’s development, and is not to be taken lightly, since the effects will be felt over the lifetime of the game. That being said, what do we have to consider specifically?
Destruction of Buildings
On one hand, we can take a Battlefield/R6S-esque approach and give structures huge amounts of destructibility. However, doing so would present a number of challenges:
The performance impact of such assets in a huge open world would be really, really tough to optimize. R6S uses incredibly small-scale environments that reset every round. The BF series manages to pull this off on a stunning scale, but the BF series uses a proprietary purpose-made engine to do so - far more than we could reasonably expect for UII.
Due to the persistent nature of the world, it would be difficult to balance destruction on such a scale. Coming across locations with gaping, player-made tank-sized holes in their sides might be a cool idea on paper, but also really jarring and probably OP if exploited fully. This would also be detrimental to loot spawns, Turned pathfinding, and other typical elements of the survival experience.
On the other hand, it’d be really cool to at least have support for such design in buildings and other large props, and it would certainly add to gameplay in terms of strategic variety - especially given the potential for modders to take this to the next level. Then again, all of this would present a lot more work for modders too. Maybe this feature should have mod support, but not be utilized too much in vanilla.
Some additional points to consider:
What is your opinion on destruction in building models?
Fully destructible: Battlefield tier, entire buildings can be leveled with enough ordinance.
Partially destructible: R6S tier, many walls and surfaces may be destroyed but not the entire building.
Extremely limited: only in very special or specific circumstances should buildings be modelled to this level of destruction in vanilla. Presumably, there would be extensive mod support for this still.
Not at all: absolutely no destruction of buildings in the world, comparable to U3.
I support: fully destructible
I support: partially destructible
I support: extremely limited
I don’t support it at all
Null option
0voters
If building destruction were to be added, how should replenishment of that destruction work?
Timed replenish: destroyed parts of buildings are automatically replenished and repaired after a set amount of time, and presumably when out of sight of players.
Gradual replenish: destroyed parts of buildings are automatically replenished gradually rather than instantly. Perhaps mapmakers can set this replenishment to stop at a certain hitpoint limit, making previously destroyed points easier to destroy again.
Repair only: just like the options above, but only for when a part of a structure has not been entirely destroyed.
No replenishment: destroyed parts of buildings stay destroyed for good. They can probably be repaired by players, but will never automatically replenish.
I don’t want to die because I walked past a microscopic kill hole someone made in a wall. R6S destruction works because the maps are small and simple, with destruction making them complex. Having destructible walls would make map making take WAY more careful thought and planning to make pvp not suck. Also how would zombies work if you can just shoot them through wall holes? Would every turned be able to break through things? That would be weird. Would they just route to you like normal? Seems really cheesable. Having a lot of destruction mechanics would make most aspects of gameplay super complex, and I dont think that would be beneficial for unturned.
I think most people are overthinking the amount of destructive elements needed for immersive destruction.
Arma 3 uses a system where instead of small parts of buildings being destroyed (like R6S) larger chunks of buildings can be destroyed [as can be seen in this video from the alpha build of the game.] (https://youtu.be/lHIrFfHB4S8)
With some added effects this gives really good destruction on a large scale. While also being lighter then some other methods.
And with buildings being fully destructible there’s not reason you can’t just have the loot spawn at the top of the rubble, or even slightly in it.
Mostly, what I had in mind was solely for quite heavy ordinances, such as explosives or high caliber/anti-materiel weapons, being used against walls - as opposed to having U3’s literally indestructible world buildings. I do agree that the full extent of R6S’s destruction is over the top for UII, as far as being able to punch a hole through a wall just by punching it and then having a peek hole. At minimum, what you’d end up with would ideally be a fairly sizable chunk of the wall taken out.
There’s a very fine line in terms of balance here, I suppose.
Agreed, buildings shouldn’t be indestructible. Personally I’d consider .30-06 ammunition and larger to cause some damage to buildings in terms of the cutoff. @GreatHeroJ
Building destruction would be nice to prevent people from having invincible walls in their bases like in 3.0. Not sure exactly how I feel about it being in vanilla maps but I’d be interested in having mod support for it for the select few situations that could rely on it.
Well yeah, I intended for this to start some discussion on the topic since I hadn’t really seen anything about it after Nelson’s prompt. I didn’t really have any particular execution in mind.
If you have an idea for a potentially good way to implement destruction in building models, I’d definitely be interested in hearing what you have to say (especially knowing you’ve worked on such modded/modelling projects before in U3).
This discussion is very important actually. These type of things need to be decided early in the process of making the game.
I am personally for gradual replenish and partially destructible and most people voted for those.
As how things instantly pop up after being destroyed in U 3.0 it’ll be much better if they gradually replenish. It won’t look as strange.
Someone mentioned how this would help counter being using city buildings as indestructable walls for bases, but how would this feature tie into base building?
Would player structures be entirely exempt? While we might be concerned with pixel holes, what about the concern of people just making stealthy crawlspaces into your base? If there is a similar level of destruction, could it work with ideas like weight/physics/stability (anti-skybase ideas)?
i think it could be interesting if you begin to live in a building, you’d have to repair it on your own. Could be interesting if buildings don’t replenish if a player is near them/logged out near one. That way you could tell if you’re in a town that potentially has a base or a player near it.
About how a system could work though,
The way that battlefield works and even fortnite works, is that each building is made up of many smaller individual segments that become torn off when they are sufficiently damaged. This is a pretty basic system. if they repaired gradually, it would need to be pretty linear in the context of this system, but it could be done in the order of children on the actual house object. But I’m using Unity brain here and not Unreal brain. I’d imagine they would still be able to function similarly.
Although the major downside with a system where the building is made up of individual meshes would be the work required to make sure that these work.
(I’m sure the La Perla creators can testify to this, since they made segmented destructable buildings)
This would just make the game really laggy and needlessly complicated. There should be some smaller, destructible buildings (small sheds/trailers, etc) but not every building.
Maybe there should be some buildings with destructible walls (like a warehouse with sheet metal walls you can destroy, for example) but the pillars and main structural parts of the building are static objects.
If everything was destructible there would be no buildings on relatively active servers. And even if they would respawn then there’d be no purpose of even having destructible buildings, so all useful purposes of this would be gone. if they’d just come back, so you couldn’t build around areas or whatever.
And if whoever was trying to murder you had a rocket launcher or something you’re fucked, and can’t take cover behind anything. So if full destruction was implemented it would really suck for the following reasons:
incredibly laggy, making the game unplayable to anyone who doesn’t have a computer from nasa
no cover in PvP if your opponent has explosives, a vehicle, or high caliber weapons/machine guns/a weapon that can destroy stuff
a complete pain in the ass to implement, because every building made has to be fiddled around with a whole lot more to make it destructible
no point of making pre-built buildings into bases because they’re destructible, if anything I think this should be something that should be encouraged
In simpler terms, if you have a toaster computer, imagine your toaster computer but it overheated so much that it’s now a toaster that just came out of an oven.
That also means that your toaster has just internally combusted and is completely decimated, just like how your Unturned base will be if this gets added.
