Will a physics engine allow us to mod everything?While I am drooling over the moddability of the game, I look here and think can SD make everything moddable? Here is my try, definitely is just a thought exercise, but if SD can implement it (after there is a refined suggestion comes up) that will be awesome. In that post Frogboy says: For those of you not familiar with modding let’s break this down into its elemental (no pun intended) parts:1. You have asset creation. That is, the ability to make things you can see in the game. 2. …3. You have resource creation. That would be everything from iron ore to magical gems to wood My first question is can we custom make a spell? When there is an existing “Doom Bolt” spell, it should easy to mod a “Super Doom Bolt”. But what if I want to mod a spells that does not look like anything shipped with the game? One of the ways to allow us to have that is having the right physics engine, and everything is broken down into its elementals. So, let me lay down the foundation first. I have post similar ideas in my previous posts.1. Everything is a resource, which can be subdivided to Creature Resources (CR), Natural Resources (NR) and Manufactured Resources (MR). Even Factories, City, on map buildings are considered as MRs. 2. Map tile is a container of resources. Multiple resources can be ‘warehoused’ there.3. All resources are made from at least 1 material. Some of them are physical, like Flesh, Plant, Soil, Stone, Water, ice, wood, crystal different kind of metals, ethereal, shadow, etc.4. All physical material can be damaged by other physical material, and non-physical powers like fire, freezing, lightning, wind, essence, and all kind magic e.g. Life magic, Chaos magic etc.5. With all things equal, 1 unit of Damaging Strength (DS) can reduce 1 HP of its target. When the target resource (may it be made a wooden bridge, or your knight) has 0 HP, it dies or be converted to another material like ashes.6. The physics engine will handle the material conversion automatically, e.g. when I melt the ice by fire, certain % HP of water is created.7. Damage caused = DS * Material modifier (MM). If this value becomes –ve, it means material is created, or flesh is healed. The actual value of DS can be determined by a lot of factors, like the skill of the spell caster, how forceful your knight can swing his sword, how fast & big a boulder is falling onto your head, how hot is the fire burning your peasants etc. Modder can create a Firewall spell that as a DS of 400, or even of higher value. For damages caused by physical collision, the MM equals to “Material Hardness (MH) of Attacker minus Defender”/ ““Material Hardness of Attacker”. Say I’ve my Knight that can swing his iron sword with DS of 40. Iron has MH of 70, Flesh has MH of 25. Then the poor unarmored soul at the receiving of the sword will receive a damage of 40*(70-25)/70 = 25 HP. If the defender now wears armor which increases the defender MH from 25 to 30, he receives less damage from the same blow. When your knight gains more experience & level up, his strike will be more powerful so his DS value goes up. (All numbers are for illustration purpose only) For damages caused by non-physical powers, the MM is read from the following table. Of course the table will be way more extensive to account for all kind of material possible in the game.
Because everything in the game environment is made up from material(s), everything can be destroyed or killed; may it be a forest, a river, a stone wall, the ground. All you need is high enough DS and/or high MM. Ideally, the physics engine should include a gravity engine component, so modder can make the meteor rain spell, or flood the dam to damage the village downhill. DS increase for any physical collision when the attacking object accelerates. I believe complete moddability can be achieved if SD provides some universal rules for us to create & destroy any resources. I’ve mentioned the creation part here, but there isn't much interest.This kind of system must have weakness or problems I am not aware of. OR if you think this kind of physics engine is a must for EWOM, pls let us know here in this thread!
Not entirely sure if this is going to happen. Would be cool, though...... I'm all for "swappability". Of course, we might also want to keep things to some degree simplified, for those of us who cannot actually program, as well as for new modders.
I believe Brad said they are using a version of Havok, this suggest to me you would need the Havok SDK to make a mod for Elemental's physics engine.
Edit: Found the quote
They are using Havok, but nowhere did they suggest that you could alter the physics. If you create a model, the game would automatically apply the physics to it.
https://forums.elementalgame.com/332712
That is the official post on elemental physics. You don't need the SDK, because you don't need to worry about them.
Ah… when I read about Havok, it is quite different from what I was thinking & trying to discuss in the OP. I’ve rename the OP title to “Material physics should allows a renewable & destructible game environment, do you want that?”My point is, if there is no standardized way to create/destroy material, how else can the game be completely moddable? All spells (except those who changes creature ability/behavior) involve creation/destruction of living/organic/inorganic material.For creatures, I believe complete Spell moddability is possible if a spell can change any creature’s behavior via AI Script, plus a way to change its ability statistic.I think this is one of the more innovative (& workable) idea I’ve so far. Voice your opinion! Haha… especially if you are from SD
Is this thread broken for anyone else? It's like all borders and divides between posts have been broken up and stacked on eachother.
Sorry for the OT, but it's horrible to read.
Edit: Wonkyness has ended.
It's definately funky..... but I think it looks better this way.........
No, the formatting is so horrible. Damn, taking 15 minutes at least to fix this formatting issue!
Let me quote the most relevant section:
Case in point: our new Particle Engine (and coorisponding in-game Particle Editor). Obviously, since we're making a fantasy game, we would need some fantastic spells spell effects to get players excited. Besides spells, every weapon swung, item used, dungeon cleared, and acheivement acheived would require it's own special effect. To acheve this we (Ross and Paul) created the Particle Editor, a mighty in-game workshop for the artists (and players) to create effects with.
We put the final few touches on version 1 of the editor last Wedensday and gave it to Akil and Dan (two of our artists) to create spells with. In just TWO DAYS, they had the tool learned and had created their first 4 spell-ready effects.
I don't see anything wrong with this thread. Neither in Safari nor in Firefox.
A mod (or Climber) must have fixed it. It was definitely broken for a while, probably some tag-trash that came along with a paste from Word (I've seen that called out as the cause in some similarly broken threads).
Word doesn't play all that well with itself these days, much less with others. Not surprised to see it getting wonky with TinyDJ or whatever the 3rd-party input box for these boards is called.
I realize I am not 100% sure how I would go about creating particle effects for spells. I have not worked much with particle effects (or at all really, besides plugging into existing engines)
(yeah, I hate the jusk MS throws into some of its copy/pastes. Though I find less problems with word 2007 compared to 2003.)
Even just copying shit from the board gets you bold text that can't be reset. I wouldn't blame MS for everything.
I think I don't want to need a quad core just to run the physics engine. I'd rather the cycles were put to something more useful, like AI.
Destructible terrain, yeah. Sword swings using actual physics to determine damage is over kill. If I can set off a nuke from my channeler and wipe out half a city, leaving a smoking hole in the ground, I'm quite happy. I don't need to be able to get my rapiers stuck in the enemy breastplates, requiring my swordsmen to drop their shields and use two hands to pull them back out. It wont add anything but massive processing requirements.
You would go about creating particle effects for spells using the particle editor.
Overkill, yes. But really cool? Yes Anyways I agree with you. But that's not really what Climber's saying. However, I think treating everything as some combination of various resources and determining everything based on that would result in excess complication and probably a whole slew of unintended side-effects. Yes, it might make modding easier and/or more powerful, but I don't think it's worth it.
You could do a lot of what he's taking about using a much-simpler universal-tag system: simply put, every "object", be it a tech, spell, building, or unit you create has its own unique internal tag. Any other object can require or unlock that tag. Muuuuch more moddability with minimal dev-end coding.
Would be pretty dumb though as there's only a pretty small angle of incidence that a sword would do much damage to an armored person, and it would take a very large explosion in the first place to send something as massive as a sword very far at all with any amount of force. You'd be much better off just sticking with the tried and true methods of covering the bomb with ball bearings and tacks and other various small metallic objects
..hey, I think we're on to something here..
Yeah, they're called cluster bombs.
Oddly enough I've been waiting for an excuse to put this up.
Put what up?
Edit: Bah, buggered page loads are the bane of my browsing.
My bad the embedded video gave me a bit of trouble. Got it working now though.
But just in case here is the link. WCMD Cluster Bomb
Scoutdog, you have the best understanding of the OP. Let use quote your word & continue with it. Every physical object, be it buildings, land tile, creatures have a Material tag, HP & Weight counter.All energy, like fire, lightning of a spell or weather effects, and physical impact force, have a Material tag and DS counter.If some energy (e.g. a sword swing, fire/lightning/etc) try destroying an object, the physics engine knows determines exactly how much damage it can cause. DS is how powerful that damaging force is (e.g. how hot/big is the fire, how forceful is that swing). MM further adjusts how much damage this something causes base on interaction of materials/energy (e.g. a metallic sword cutting into flesh is more damaging than cutting into full plate armor) After calculating the actual damage, the physics engine will then make a material conversion considering the nature of the destruction; e.g. convert the burnt wood into ashes, or living flesh to dead meat.Traditionally, the Damage statistic equals to how much HP a swing/spell can be reduced. It does not matter if you use your wooden or titanium sword to heave dragon meat. My suggestion put interaction of materials into account by using DS & MM.This physics engine will use some element of Havok (in the rendering the material conversion and destruction of material), but my focus here is EWOM should have a physics engine to allow complete spell moddability. This is the part probably require more work for SD devs. IMHO, it will be worth it, even it might need more CPU.I might misunderstand PigeonX2’s reply #14, but this model might have issues. Like what if an object is make of 2+ materials? For creatures, I’ll say they should always be considered be made from one material, be it flesh, dead meat, scales, or plant, with the traditional DEF statistics. This should simply evade the issues of how much % of the body is covered by armor. Depending to SD’s decision, DEF can also adjust damage dealt too.
lol-- the sword bomb would be better if the winner of the battle got to loot the swords after the battle. Just a random idea.
Personally, I like this idea. It reminds me of a game called Cortex Command, which the modding community is absolutely running away with, and it's not even near done yet. The idea that you can make absolutely anything you want is important to modding, and stardock said that people would be able to mod Elemental into pretty much any land-based strategy game they want, so I'm fairly confident that this, or something like it, would be included.
I find it to be an interesting idea, but the amount of time and energy needed not only to put it in the game but just to RUN the game is prohibitive. Remember, we are going to have GIANT maps here, and while I cannot give even a balpark estimate of the processing power needed to run somedthing like that, it would definately be above the capabilities of most low-end or even middle-,level systems out there.
There are many great features available to you once you register, including:
Sign in or Create Account
