An interesting idea, no idea how to do it......

#1 Can you post a link to the video so people know what your talking about?

#2 You'll need to incorporate a physics system and combine that with breakable objects (if you're talking about Torque). Here are some resources to get you started:

Moveable, Destroyable, Mission Area Aware ITEMS

ODE Physics library (can be used with your own engine/code)

Adding ODE physics library to Torque

#3 Bah. i cant find just that peice of footage, but...
thx bil, but for the destructable items, i mean like it breaks apart depenant on where it gets hit. Has anyone seen the HL2 physics tech demo from e3? the same one with the huge pachinko machine? im gonna keep looking for the video of it.

thx for the 'adding ODE to torque' btw i was looking at ODE :D

#4 AFAIK the stuff that breaks apart dependant on impact point is pre-broken... I could be wrong though. :)

#5 No, there is actually an article in game developer on that. It's called Continuum Mechanics. They used this in Cel Damage and I also saw some of this in Super Mario Sunshine, but both of those were much simpler than splintering wood. The issue is the September of 2002 issue Pg. 30. I remembered this one because it was just such a cool concept, being able to break meshes in real time.

#6

Quote:I was planning on implementing a material system, actually alot like HL2's, an di wanted to have wood like that as well.

TSE runs off a material system for it's texturing and shader process. If you know what your doing you could dive in and manipulate probably to run other attributes too (like penetration and etc etc). Would take some work but would be simpler than trying to start from scratch in TGE atm. Might be worth checking out though.

I'm just a guy and no jack about code so maybe someone else could elaborate more on that who has more experience in that matter.

#7 Two different material systems there ;) Really, although perhaps the physics system may read the material of the mesh to determine if it's going to perform the continuum mechanics, but after that it's physics code.

#8 It might look good, but does it improve gameplay? is it a vital mechanic for a game?

Why are you bothered about it?

#9 Well, I can think of quite a number of gameplay scenarios where you could use this effect. For example you could have barrels sitting on a wooden shelf. If you shoot the shelf in the right place snapping it the barrels go a certain direction for any number of reasons. You might also use it on some sort of see saw puzzle. Maybe you've got a really heavy object on one end and then a lighter object on the other. However you need to spring the lighter object over to someplace so you shoot the see saw between it's pivot point and the heavy object to send the lighter object sailing. Of course you could get more complex where there are multiple objects per side and so the need arises to actually shoot and break off parts of the wood at certain times.

#10 Jeremy, do you have a link to that article?

#11 I doesn't seem they actually have the article online but you can buy the issue.

https://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/store.php?item_id=152&category=22&book=

There's also this at Amazon, not sure if it's any help though:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0486401804/ref%3Dpd%5Fsl%5Faw%5Falx-jeb-6-1%5Fbook%5F2135384%5F1/104-1389500-5147107

#12 AHA!

i went looking at GDM's web page and they had a 'source code section' where tehy had a snippet of stuff showing the continuum mechanics demonstration from the sep 2002 issue.
*beams* Alrighty lets take a look at it.

#13 Not too bad, would anyone know of anything else that references continuum mechanics? (the resource used a spring system, so i may use some of that too)