Wrecks

Ideas and suggestions for how to improve the Warzone 2100 base game only. Ideas for mods go in Mapping/Modding instead. Read sticky posts first!
iamaloner
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Wrecks

Post by iamaloner »

Would you guys like to see wrecks of ground, air and maybe in future naval units?

It would be nice if depending on specification of units(armor, weapon, propulsion) and if destroyed with certain weapon that has done certain damage to leave the wreck of that vehicle, I dont know if its possible but it would be a nice adition.

The principle of this wreck system:
Weapon+Body+Propulsion -Damage+Hostile Gun = Wreck or Gone

Exsample:
MG+Cobra+Halftrack -350DMG(Max)+Cannon/MG = Gone/Wreck

It should also depend on chance if its going to be a wreck or be gone forever. Destroyed...
When its a wreck it can be destroyed or left alone, it may burn and explode after some time or burn for some times and stay.

Also when a vehicle is destroyed and moving, if its a whelled propulsion it could sway to the left or right while if still got hit and depending on damage it could explode, with posibility that the wreck could hit your or enemies vehicle/structure.

For vtols it could simply crash depending on damage, or slowly falling down, burning and hit something even maybe if its kinda large it could survive the landing and being a wreck.

I hope you will support this idea.
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aubergine
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Re: Wrecks

Post by aubergine »

I love this idea but not sure what effect it would have on gameplay and graphics performance.

Also, I'd like to see smoke from fires be blown sideways a little by the wind like this: viewtopic.php?f=8&t=6816&start=15#p76304
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iamaloner
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Re: Wrecks

Post by iamaloner »

Well It wouldt much i think, eventually it may get destroyed or overuned by some heavy vehicle...
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Re: Wrecks

Post by Jorzi »

I am not saying that we cannot take features from other games, but *cough* supcom *cough*

I.e. my observation is that certain games seem to be on the feature copy list more often than others.
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Re: Wrecks

Post by aubergine »

I've never played supcom but I always thought burning wrecks would be particularly well suited to the concept of warzone. I remember vividly the TV new showing burning oil fields in Kuwait, burning tanks on war programs and burnt out wrecks on journalist programmes. I care not what is in supcom, as I don't play supcom.
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Emdek
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Re: Wrecks

Post by Emdek »

Jorzi, I don't know why most often such things are compared to that one particular game, other ones also have such features (like for example... Earth 2150, closest one to WZ in most of terms). ;-)
And yes, I'm also afraid about performance since already having many static structures (lots, lots of assault guns and hardpoints with rockets etc.) apparently causes horrible performance issues for me, in prefinal mission of campaign (just after last lassat attacks), I get only around 6 FPS on Radeon 5570 HD, which is quite low. ;-)
But that could be probably greatly improved, but we would need someone to rework rendering engine (ideally making it abstract and able to have multiple backends)...
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Re: Wrecks

Post by iamaloner »

Jorzi... I played SupCom(Supreme Comander) and its a great game, I am the fan of the original... The sequel sucked too much...

I never played Earth 2140 but I played 2150 and 2160... 2160 kinda sucked but it was good. I am even suprised that I could ran E2160 on decent framerate with some decent graphic...

Anyway I got a piece of sh*t PC:
AMD SEMPRON 2500+ 1.75/76Ghz
AMD ATI RADEON 9800 Second Edition DDR 128mb VRAM
1x 768mb + 256mb DDR RAM
Motherboard Revision For Sempron/Althlon Series(lastest version and the best one)

I think you guys could improve performance if you Force Shader 1.0 with 3D Analyzer 2.36 disable Shader detection and maybe enable skipping shader 2.0 and 1.4 if you want... Some guys can be runned like that...

3D analyzer is also a VGC emulator, It can emulate Radeon 9800 Pro using CPU and RAM power... If you got a good PC you can emulate R9800Pro... I think it can emulate VRAM as how much you need it, probavly... Great thing if you own an old PC.

Well thats off topic but I remember that I succefully runned COD:MW without 3D analyzer with decent framerate but no sound and graphics were sh*t xD
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Re: Wrecks

Post by Saberuneko »

A possible solution for some systems would be to make an option to disable the wrecks.
Just look at the corpse limit in the first titles of Dawn of War, you can set the level to none, low, medium, high...

That would solve the performance issues for cheaper systems...
About MP, if the wrecks aren't collidable, meaning that units can go through, then there wouldn't be any problem as they would be displayed just as a client-side graphic feature. (This could look weird in some cases though)
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Re: Wrecks

Post by Emdek »

Saberuneko, yep, it would be nice to have some option to set level of details, for even more things that wouldn't change gameplay, especially since texture size seem to usually not make real difference nowadays...
But first we would need more things that could be plugged into such system. ;-)
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iamaloner
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Re: Wrecks

Post by iamaloner »

Agreed... I think that players should process wrecks and it can be shared... Option to lower the lag if wreck are avalible that there would be couple of paterns of behaviour when some vehicle becomes a "wreck"... AgreeD?
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Re: Wrecks

Post by Lord Apocalypse »

err where to start... last post first I guess.

@loner - lag shouldn't be limited by the number of wrecks as ideally the game should synch to the slowest system for best results. If not, well then the slowest system wont really lag out but be out of synch. Lag is more dependent on your net connection than anything, especially if you have people playing scattered all over the world. You have to worry about who has what connection speeds, how the various routers are handling traffic between regions (the longer the hop the higher the lag). A game can get caught up if lag isn't too bad, just look at any mmo out there. High lag just means your out of synch with the rest of the game for awhile (too long and you will usually get disconnected). Provided you don't have more than a few dozen wrecks (set in code?) on screen it shouldn't really matter.

@Emdek - Get the other devs to check out the doom 3 source for some useful ideas if need be ;)

@Sab - unless the collision code is really crappy this is a moot point, shouldn't affect anything unless your going to be able to drive over wrecks which leads to more calls to the renderer which WILL cause issues. Best bet, use collision to destroy wrecks if a heavy unit drives over them.

@aubergine - burning wrecks could and probably would kill the graphics engine, at least it could anyway.. Even using a particle engine to handle all the smoke or doing the fire/smoke procedurally (would make for some killer gfx) your talking about adding pixel/poly level details on top of everything else the renderer already has to deal with. I think the renderer (as already stated) needs a serious facelift.

@Jorzi - There is nothing wrong with finding some cool feature from another game and reusing it. What do you think happens with eac successive generation of FPS/RTS games? Everything is a clone of the previous generation but with more eyecrack and features. Wrecks were nothing new to the RTS genre as before SupCom, Total Annihilation had wrecks, and before TA one of the Warcraft games had them (I think WC2). Not sure if any of the C&C games had wrecks. I do think Dune 2 had wrecks that just faded out after a few seconds (That was a really long time ago so can't recall).

@All - Overall I think wrecks are a nice feature to add in, just not as a recyclable item as in TA/SC/SC2. To use a wreck (smoking or not) would make gameplay more interesting and really spruce up the sparseness the game currently holds. The occasional rock, tree, building, carwreck, etc is all well and good but lets face it.. The landscape looks too pristine when your done eradicating the enemy base.
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Re: Wrecks

Post by Emdek »

Lord Apocalypse wrote:@Emdek - Get the other devs to check out the doom 3 source for some useful ideas if need be ;)
That would be hard to do. ;-)
First it would be needed to consider if it is worth to improve our rendering engine or maybe better switch to something existing (like Irrlicht Engine, AFAIR already chosen for at least one fork).
First path would require lots of work, but at l;east could be done gradually.
Second would also require lots of work since AFAIK our rendering engine has some game logic mixed in but ultimately it would open way to other platforms.
Personally I think that abstraction of rendering engine is needed anyway in long term, so new eye candy features or some optimizations (available in later specifications) could be added without ifdefing parts of code (well, in this case some code duplication could occur but that's probably lesser evil which could be probably avoided anyway). In theory we could also get DirectX (at least for version 9) engine so Windows users would be happier. ;-)

About wrecks, how should be model generated for them? Should it depend on turrets installed (that could require lots of models, even if we would "group them", like only one model for destroyed cannon etc.) or only on body and propulsion plus some random scraps?
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Re: Wrecks

Post by Giani »

Lord Apocalypse wrote: @aubergine - burning wrecks could and probably would kill the graphics engine, at least it could anyway.. Even using a particle engine to handle all the smoke or doing the fire/smoke procedurally (would make for some killer gfx) your talking about adding pixel/poly level details on top of everything else the renderer already has to deal with. I think the renderer (as already stated) needs a serious facelift.
Only if they are very high graphics...
Because the oil derricks burn, so if wrecks burn they won't make the game slow or anything like that. If not all the tanks become wrecks and if the burning doesn't have good graphics.
And what about if wrecks stay for seconds, like in AOE3?
My maps: http://forums.wz2100.net/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=9501
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Re: Wrecks

Post by Emdek »

Giani, they won't (or at least, they shouldn't, if done properly) cause slowdowns.

About burning wrecks, I'm not sure if they should burn... Maybe only during up to five seconds or only as enhancement to explosion effect.
And would make them disappear when hit / run over / attacked by other units or when we want to build something, so game won't need to check constantly if wrecks are scheduled for removal and only remove them (maybe with sound effect, like in some other game ;-)) only when they are in way of other units or structures.

So we talk about vehicle wrecks, but what with buildings? Probably they also shouldn't simply disappear for consistency. Though I'm not sure if their remains should become more permanent obstacle, it would be easier to make them behave the same (well, easiest would be to leave them as they are now :-D) but making them a bit harder to remove (like require to attack their remains to remove them - at least for enemy structures, not those abandoned ones) would be more realistic (in some other game they did them that way and it works fine, but there it makes more sense since nearly all buildings can have weapons which will attack you until you wreck building).
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Re: Wrecks

Post by Giani »

Emdek wrote: About burning wrecks, I'm not sure if they should burn... Maybe only during up to five seconds or only as enhancement to explosion effect.
Yeah, they should burn for some seconds. Nothing can burn for ever...
My maps: http://forums.wz2100.net/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=9501
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