Look at this, this was a destruction physics demo for 2008's Star Wars the Force Unleashed. This came out nearly 15 years ago think about that!!!! So will we finally see games that give us realistic looking destruction?
It
was a destruction physics demo for tech being experimented with for in 2008's Star Wars: TFU. Play the actual game and there's only so much DMM in it, and the little that did get used had to be simplified over the demo. (Also, the first clip is not realtime BTW.)
DMM unfortunately didn't pan out for videogames as well as hoped; it was hard to work with and it dragged the game. They got to a happy point with some of its techniques combined with other tricks and effects. They put up big concrete slabs or tree huts made of 2x4s just to show rectangles breaking apart using the tech, and they mixed in common effects with DMM to give the full sense of destruction they had hoped for. Ultimately, it couldn't go much farther as it was, and DMM disappeared from games (despite still being in film production FX suites to this day, I believe.)
The effects aspirations of defining a material so that it breaks naturally has come into more modern physics approaches like Epic's Chaos for Unreal or NVIDIA Blast. Mostly they default to simulating glass/ceramics/stone because that's more commonly what you find in games (and the more doable breaks without the heaviness of physics engines hitting it hard,) but there are some parameters as well as some physics plugins or FX packages out there for wood as well.
Physics are unfortunately not the same playground for ideas that they were in TFU's day (and games get eaten alive if they have any wonky physics bug, so it's way easier to build a non-procedural physics effect which looks nice but behind the scenes is an animation or rigged sequence than it is to have fake rocks bouncing around the scene and causing errors,) so you don't see physics forefronted like back then. Also, even promising tech like Chaos Physics has not delivered the big boom as hoped. So I'm not sure who's out there ready to take a chance on a big, cool game full of physics systems. (For some reason, advancements in cloth seems to be way sexier in physics simulation these days than destruction, which is also needed, but is unlikely to make for cool gameplay.) And then, with But it's not been a dead end; unfortunately, it also has not been the hardware horsepower holding it back as much as game fans assumed when they dreamed of what next-gen platforms would do.
No, power of the cpus is quite overblown. Ai is difficult to make work well with destruction and networked destruction is pretty much unsolvable problem due to speed of light being slow.
It came up earlier in this thread or somewhere else (and unfortunately they didn't go into it much beyond just an aside,) but somebody was saying they were connected to either DMM or Euphoria at the time and were shown how the techniques of the engine actually worked, and that now they knew the "trick", it was hard to unsee the limitations. Can't be sure which that was, and I look at DMM and still see some impressive impact points and radiating fracture dependency, so maybe it wasn't DMM? There's some things I see in that demo that I think, Ah that's interesting but I could see how that could dead-end the tech, and other things I have a hard time understanding why games can't do it and if there's a trick to the simulation that makes it possible here but not everywhere.
). That game should have been patched honestly.
:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/21997220/Marvel_s_Spider_Man__Miles_Morales_20201024180003.jpg)
