The only destructible buildings I can think of planet-side are the Resource deposits where you pick up the Armadium.
But yeah, if my base is going to be under threat of getting destroyed, the WiFi is getting turned off.
Where would the fun be in spending a tonne of resources building a base, only for it to be destroyed by someone, have all your resources stolen AND cost you to rebuild it.
This isn’t Clash of Clans or a Total War game. I’m sure however they implement Multiplayer and specifically, PvP, it will not affect the current game drastically.
This is game mechanics based, with base defending. Havok has nothing to do with any of that. But if there are cities I want them to be destructible in some way, and not like the freighter and the pods. That’s just horrible
There needs to be serious optimization before anything like destructible cities happens, this game still coughs and chokes with a bunch of animals - imagine a city getting wrecked - 1 FPS
I think most people’s confusion is coming from what is a game engine and what is an engine plug in.
Havok is a “physics” system you can plug into your game engine without having to do all the hard work yourself, you just pay your licence to havok and Yr all set.
Unreal engine, naughty dogs ICE team and their engine are two examples of game engines. The first is one created by epic, originally for their FPS titles, however they eventually went into the business of selling their engine to other companies. The latter is an in-house engine used solely by naughty dog while the ice team will lend aid to any other first party Sony teams.
Creating a game engine is a monumental task that requires both lengthy research and development times and a lot of troubleshooting and bugs come along with it too, plus most times you gotta train staff on the tools, so that’s why you don’t see a lot of custom built engines these days. The only time it’s justifiable in the AAA market is if your game is so unique you need to tailor make a game engine to deliver the experience or its been a few years and consumers have finally noticed call of duty twenty is the same as “call of duty 13.2 recall edition” so better throw in some sweet fish AI on the next one
Where was I? Oh yeah, so long story short, no mans sky is a custom made tailor fit engine using Havok plug in for its physics.
When people show you star wars using “havok engune” it’s talking about object collisions etc, the storm troopers reaching for things, is not havok, its a combination of AI pathfinding and maybe some sort of kinematics with the arms blended with hand made animations when needed, these do not come from havok though the information provided by havok does help the AI know that low beam is coming in pretty fast.
I’ve never made a game, don’t really know much about most of it but I’ve always watched tech videos and behind the scenes and latest advancements in GPU etc at conferences for decades now (it was like, porn for someone who didn’t own a gaming pc but REAALLY wanted to) so waiting for jedidida to correct my errors and preach the good word of beautiful game design
I don’t think PvP will be or can be totally unrestricted and not negatively affect the game…wanting people to live and build together in large numbers doesn’t mix well with unrestricted PvP. The way I expect PvP to work is it will be restricted to a new game mode or gated in very specific ways…like to a galaxy or two where you have to expressly choose to go there.
Uh, no. Little misunderstanding. That’s the part Havok can’t help you much with. It can be used to help animations interact with the environment, but not for high-level decisions. In an analogy, If you walk on some stairs, Havok doesn’t tell you to move up or down, but it can tell you where to place your foot when you make your next step.
Addendum: I just checked up on Havok and realised that they do in fact offer an AI module for dynamic navigation mesh generation. How well that would interact with the NMS core I don’t know. It might be possible that they’re already using it.
It’s what makes it look and feel awesome, yes. What I have been trying to explain is that there’s a lot of work involved until you even get there. If that isn’t in place, Havok can’t do anything about it.
Again, a slight misformulation. Havok is in charge of how what you see happens. It’s the making it happen in the first place that’s missing, which is a not insignificant amount of work. Especially in ProcGen.
Take the resource deposits like Heridium for an example. Those are kind of destructible, right? But you can cut them in half, and the top stays awkwardly in the air. What’s the problem with that? Havok handles this kind of physics in its sleep, so why does the bloody thing not fall down?
And the answer to that is, because the top and bottom are still part of the same object. Because that object was procedurally generated as a whole, and while manipulating its mesh a little is fairly trivial, actually taking it apart and making the individual parts behave independently, in a way that is consistently recreatable when generating the object again , would be a very impressive magic trick.
Which…again…that’s the problem I’m talking about…you can’t expect people to build and live together with unrestricted PvP…the days of hubs and address sharing would be over…permanently. And it sounds like Hello Games also very specifically want players to gather and build together…you need PvE only to enable that…and I think that’s exactly what most of the game will be…just PvE…unless you very specifically choose to go into the unrestricted PvP areas/mode.
Yes, this is I would say the most likely, it would be a good way for everyone to start on an even footing then, can you imagine a brand new player picking it up for the first time and running into yourself with S-Class everything. It would be over very quickly!
Either that or in High Conflict stars, anything goes. The player then decides whether to warp there or bypass it entirely.
I don’t necessarily think the PvP will be in places as specific as just certain star systems…I think it will be either separate galaxy or game mode. They could just do something like you go to the anomaly station and plug yourself into a second level of simulation that takes you to a PvP galaxy…that would work best as players could jump in and out of that as they desire…but yeah the balance of gear would create issues.
There’s a few pretty images and some buzzwords, not really much technical language.
The thing that jumps out immediately in the context of this discussion, however, is at the end, and nicely illustrates my point:
BUILD DYNAMIC DESTRUCTIBLE WORLDS
An artist driven toolchain to rapidly populate game worlds with destructible assets.
Note the key word: Artist-driven. If your assets are procedurally generated, that means that you also have to generate the whole parametrisation for Havok, which would be the artists manual work otherwise. This is exactly where things get complicated…
