Have the dev team considered collasping floors and roofs on some of the decaying buildings in NV like the destruction mods in fallout 3. Not suggesting all buildings should be destroyable but it would add a bit more excitement and risk to exploartion given unstable floors and roofs. Perhaps even add a dynamic to combat eg. toss in a granade on a bunch of raiders in thier hidout and watch the roof fall in. Or am I pissing in the wind and asking too much?

pissing and missing bud srry

The obvious and easy answer for me would be to say you are pissing in the wind and that the engine cannot handle it (as seems to be the excuse for lots of ideas nowadays). And this is also the most likely case.
But I love the idea, and would love them to implement it. Kind of like how BFBC2 has such destructible environments, rather than COD. It'd be awesome to fall through a floor and hurt yourself, and it would really add to the intensity and 'fear-factor' of exploring a ruin or something. Lol, I'd love to see a raider fall through a floor after being exploded by a grenade.

Only problem is that they can't have holes in floors, roofs and walls stopping passage through some sort of door or area of a ruin. As in, having a hole in the floor in front of a door you need to traverse could be very problematic.

I think this would be damned awesome. It would at least double the immersion for me. There's been times where I've stumbled into a building, muttered to myself "Geez this thing is barely standing", yet three hours later not a twitch.

Could the engine handle it? That bloke sp in seemed to pull it off with his destrcution mod. would it not be a matter of creating new models for sections of floor or roofing like the other movable junk in the wasteland? I remmber elder scrolls had debre falling from some of the dungeons.

Ehh, I dunno. The engine seems to be pretty awkward and clunky. Well, not awkward and clunky, more inflexible. But then again, it shouldn't be too hard.
But the thing is, they haven't mentioned it at all yet. Meaning I highly doubt (talking 99.99% here) that it won't be in. Wish it was.

Everything would'nt have to be destructable to do this.
I really like this idea.....good thought on your part mate
And i dont think your pissing in the wind,it's a sensible idea in my eyes.

You fell through a few floors in Point Lookout :rolleyes: I liked that. Although that probably was scripted, but I wouldn't mind more of those. Like you do some quest, chase some NPC and he falls through the weak floor and dies. Damn it! I had a lot of questions for that guy...

I'm not entirely sure if the engine can handle it, but not the point I'm going to make here.

Remember this is an OPEN WORLD game. Unlike Battlefield 2: Bad Company, the game isn't divided into levels. This means you can return to a previously visited area and the game has to remember what changed from the default on your previous visit.

This would result in savegame bloat and you only have to poke into the PS3 and Xbox H&S forums to see some of the problems people started having when save files started reaching a certain size.

Besides, since we've heard nothing about it, I really dount it's in.


And before someone points out Red Faction Guerilla, That game was lower detail and it's buildings were pretty sparsely spread out for the most part and lower detailed. Plus the engine was made from scratch to support destructible enviroments, where as the version of gamebryo being used here wasn't.

we if you guys remember point lookout in the house you fall through two floors into the basemant, but that was scripted, but if they made the bit of floor that you want to break apart, a object like all the random stuff in the world but made blend in , i think it would work

I disagree...it's not any different than having goo piles lying around,barrels etc being moved ,or clutter from objects being thrown around from explosions.
Something is just changing location,not that hard to do i dont think....example....say your walking up the ramp at arefu,and you walk over the wooden planks & they break,you fall down & the planks do too,meaning they just moved down,to a new location...cant be that hard to do,it can be simplifed & still be affective.....hope that makes sense
Also indoor area's load seperate to the wastland,so again this could be done.

Point Lookout and Mothership Zeta were the only DLCs I didn't buy for FO3, so I didn't know this. Awesome, though!
Yes, this is exactly what we need. Even if they can just put a couple of these areas in each ruin, it'd be soo good.

That's exactly the train of thought I had, no different from the rest of crap lying around the wasteland all it needs is to be placed in the right order. Corrugated iron sheets was a common material used for roofing in 50s with stick frame construction buildings. The plank assets are already in game for trusses and the roof sheets could be plonked on top. that would give you a collaspable roof. Just imagine a mini nuke blowing the roof off...... heheh!

It's different enough.
While the engine manages both objects and structural information in a similar fashion--x/y/z coordinates, x/y/z-axis rotation, scale--structures are usually made up of large pieces that 99.9% of the time don't move.

While it's possible to have a few scripted cases where structures consist of smaller pieces that do move and have their status saved, it's highly unrealistic to expect a destructive world as seen in games like BF:BC2. Not only would smaller pieces need to be used but because their status can change, every piece's status information would need to be saved. Save file size would grow exponentially, as would save/load times and the amount of memory the game requires to play. Dealing with many small pieces versus large ones will also put a very high burden on those creating content since they will both have to deal with more pieces and ensure their areas are playable despite destruction.

Comparing this kind of engine to BF:BC2 is like comparing a semi-trailer truck to a sports car. This engine is designed to support a game with massive amounts of content, most of which is static and can be returned to at any given time. It's also designed to do this without requiring players to upgrade to the latest processors and graphics cards. BF:BC2 presents a relatively tiny amount of content at any one time and once you move to the next level it's able to throw away everything from the last, since there's no way to revisit it. And even despite this limited presentation, BF:BC2 came out as one of the most hardware-demanding games.

In a way it's a classic case of quantity vs. quality. This engine is designed for large quantity with good quality. BF:BC2's engine is designed for small quantity with high quality. Current tech is nowhere close enough to support Fallout:3/NV-level quantity with BF:BC2-level quality.

Personally I think Bethesda has done an amazing job giving us the level of quality they have. This engine, though now years old, still feels ahead of its time to me.

I'm not talking about mass destruction,of an entire room or area etc...i'm talking about doing it simple...like i said a broken plank or 2 ,that wont make that much difference & could be easily done. To change the whole structure of a building etc ,then yes i agree it would be more of a strain...but like i said this can be done very simple & still be effective.
And like one poster said...this happened in point lookout too,so it can be simple.
Also i agree,bethesda has done a good job with game & it has alot of qualities...but it ain't perfect either,nothing ever is ( games wise )

This is 100% correct, and there have already been several mods made that not only Also add http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=12978 (such as SkyKappa's) that many of us use as modders resources. Pkleiss made good use of it with traps that use such materials (http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=11018). The technology is already there and used to Great effect in point lookout (and Oblivion before Fallout3 with the secret doors made of wood planks that you could push/break aside).

The engine not only supports this, but the GECK gives us an Enormous amount of flexibility in developing them with the http://geck.gamesas.com/index.php/Destructible_Object_Stage of an object. Once an object breaks (or is decided that it's time for it to break via script or whatnot), the destruction stage allows us to add custom explosions, custom debris, custom effects and even scripts that could make for prolonged effects if necessary. So not only is it already in the engine, but I would argue that its a Highly Refined feature. I fully expect to see it in use with New Vegas.

There are very little performance issues to worry about because it's well supported, the real risk is in making sure that the traps are not just Death Traps that the player cannot detect or get out of. Death Traps are a primary frustration factor for players in games, and while they are fine to have, there must be ways to detect and/or avoid their effects if the player is clever or alert. With the skill that Obsidian brings to the table, I'm not worried about this either.

Miax

You are missing out on Point Lookout!... on Motehership Zeta, not so much. That DLC blew. Although I liked the audio tapes from all the abductees.

It sounds like a good idea, but maybe not in so large a capacity. Remember those buildings in Fallout 3 that were basically just walls with planks thrown across to move around? Also there were buildings where there were planks covering giant holes in the floor. In some of those buildings, you could actually walk into a hole in the floor. Well anyway, what if you could just knock those planks around. That wouldn't be too straining on the game and it would certainly make a lot of areas more dangerous to explore. It doesn't really matter. The game is already basically done. At this point they're just tweaking stats and trying to fix as many bugs as they can find. Maybe some of these ideas will make it into Fallout 4. I'm not exactly a supporter of the whole destructible environment thing in Fallout games, since everything you destroy is going to be like that for the entirety of the game. The whole game world might get destroyed over time without you having anything to do with it (raiders blowing a building all to hell because of a random spawn enemy).

A fair opinion. But this feature is already in the game, and doesn't impact on performance when done correctly. You are correct in that it would become problematic to make All buildings that way, as many of the buildings are also used as barriers to the player to keep us rats inside the maze and to prevent areas from being totally blocked-off to the player. So in some cases it's not practical to use destructible environments, but in just as many cases it's very doable and is up to the level designer to make it so IF it makes sense to have that in an area.

As said we have seen it in Fo3, and will likely see plenty of it in New Vegas. We're still a bit off yet in having the Entire world be made of destructible materials. I don't think we will ever see the day when it's a Good thing to have the entire world be destructible until we reach the point in computer processor power that it doesn't matter anymore how many objects we have in the game world - and I would suspect that's still 10 years away at least.

Miax

Fallout 2 was to have areas where we can collape roofs with explosive but it was taken out. For New Vegas there is Black Mountain and the description for it has "On the way to the mountain, there are shortcuts. Be careful as these shortcuts might have tumbling rocks that will kill you." If this is true it has hazardous terrain. It would just be odd for Black Mountain to be the only location to have traps like that.

Well, if not implementing it completely, I think a really nice thing would be more sound effects. Hearing it creak and moan would enhance the nervousness, you know? It would be great to have more, but that would be an easy addition.

That's the point, though. It's already done but people want *more*. The ability to do it isn't in question. The problem is the engine can't support a lot of it due to the additional resources necessary to track & save these additional modifiable objects. Think about the sheer number of objects it has to handle and it's substantial, and it likely only saves the state of objects that have varied from original placement, so resource requirements increase the more you explore and touch things.

They could do like they did in Oblivion when walking in caves stones may fall down in some places, happend to me when exploring ruins. so why cant they do that? like walking in an old rotten building then suddenly a support beam goes crashing down.

Engine can't handle it.

Bah - re-read the thread please, it can most certainly handle falling rocks and trap pits!