Hi all,

I just made some progress with my engine allowing it to destroy (well, actually distort) terrain in real-time. It still needs some more optimization and freedom in the code where you define the distortion, but the basics already work. Here is a link to a video showing the effect. If anyone's interested, I can share the code with you.

http://www.xyzw.nl/DynamicTerrain.wmv

Looks good. How do you intend to deal with path planing in such a environment? What about the terrain becoming impassable.

It's pretty easy to calculate the terrain normal on a cell. So every time the terrain is altered, a 'slope map' would be updated containing the slope of the terrain at each cell.

When a path is calculated, the unit can only use the cells with slopes lower or equal to what the unit can handle.

Or at least, that's what I'm planning ATM

Thus the question about impassible terrain. All i need to do to defend my base (for an RTS) is bomb the crap out of the access areas or all around. Gives turtles a pretty strong hand. Otherwise there is the issue of mission can't be completed cus you can't get to your goal. I realize that "encompassing" terrain due to bombs etc is part of real battles but is it fun?

I was going to have deformable terrain in my game. But the pre-calculation i used for path planing and other AI pre-calculation data about the terrain was going to make it very difficult. So i dropped it.

The destruction isn't something I just wanted to add to the game, but it would really be one of the game play features.

A part of the level bombed to crap so it's impassable can be bombed by some kind of 'averaging-bomb', averaging the terrain height to some degree so it becomes passable again.