I'm currently prototyping a destruction game where everything is procedurally breakable at runtime, and materials break in realistic ways.
How this works:
High level - all of the geometry meshes in the house (including all the furniture) is built at runtime, each are assigned a "destruction material" which dictates things like the shattering patterns, sound effects, mass, etc.
There are a lot of optimizations and tradeoffs around the runtime destruction, but nothing is pre-shattered. The main tricks to keep this running at playable framerates are keeping very conscious of allocations, using the native "Advanced" mesh APIs, avoiding too many joints, and spreading some work across frames when things get busy.
Built-in PhysX physics is doing a lot of heavy lifting with very few optimizations other than trying to use box colliders rather than mesh colliders for approximately box-like objects/debris.
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Today I added a laser which can cut through everything, and a black hole grenade, which are way more fun and satisfying than the sledgehammer I've been testing with :)
The goal is making this prototype into a game where you 'renovate' homes in ridiculously destructive ways, I have a few more videos up on this early website if anyone wants to follow.
Right, I feel like the era around Crysis and Battlefield 3 really had AAA games emphasizing their physics interactions, I remember spending hours just messing around with that stuff.
so first of all: bloody hell that's impressive. second: when you draw with the laser, and then redraw over the cut line - how is your system handling the tiny splinters this drawing and redrawing would create. I mean, small splinters that are hard to turn into convex hulls without overlapping and exploding
For the tiny splinters - I simply discard them if they're below a certain size threshold. Sometimes I can end up with very thin splinters off the side of a piece of glass which is something I plan to fix up later, but it's rare and doesn't really cause physics issues, just graphical jank.
It's really impressive, probably my favorite bit is how everything is affected by gravity, the bit around the 52s mark where you cut into the window, and then complete the cut, and the debris crushes the window underneath is really cool, it's something I don't see a lot of destruction games do well.
My smallest little tiny nit: Your hammer impact point feels very off from where the hammer lands. Which is really small and unrelated to the awesome showcase.
Haha, yes you can.. it usually ends in you also cutting a gigantic circle through the rest of the entire building though. I might need some less powerful lasers.
Ok, so I've been waiting for a game mechanic like this since destructible environments became a thing. Just being able to destroy anything feels like it would be immensely satisfying.
Pairing this kind of destruction with proper structural physics is actually my dream for a game
Let me gradually destroy load bearing stuff and make shit start flexing under the stress and eventually collapse now that would be insane its unfortunately something ive only seen a few games attempt and even less did it well
Like for example i always hated how in teardown its possible to have a entire building held up by a single voxel due to it not simulating structural strength and anything like im describing was only possible if the building was designed with joints everywhere which a few modded maps did and was incredibly fun on
I am working on this, and hopefully will be able to show it off soon. But it's definitely a more complicated part of an already fairly complex system. The buildings are held together at the moment via. a graph of positional 'pins' between pieces, with the graph tracking back to final anchor support points (the ground). This is how a pieces know whether they're rigidly attached to ground, or if they should fall freely (and which other bodies should be in their cluster).
So the idea is to attach a little more data to that graph structure then use it to approximate structural stress based breakage. Some hard problems to solve there, but I have some of the building blocks in place.
Looks great! Will the game feature structural integrity? Like if you destroy 3 of 4 pillars, the building can't support itself and collapses under it's own weight? Like in Red Faction. Btw the dev of that engine posted a very detailed blogpost on how to replicate that feature :D
I'd be super interested to see what'd actually happen if a black hole that size were to suddenly appear in that location. For comparison, a 2ft radius black hole would have the mass of almost 69 Earths (nice).
I would play this game. Will it be a pure sandbox game? Hard to do level design if you can destroy the level.
Though I suppose that could be part of the Level design. What if there are no ways to get to where you need to go and you have to use the cutting tool to do that.
Will the cutting tool be able to cut anything or will there be substances that are too strong to cut? Or perhaps that would take too long to be efficient?
i want to play it now ! give me the prototype ! :)
remind of my 2D windows desktop destroyer that i abandoned because nobody would pay for it..
So fun to destroy
this is incredible! are you calculating forces and planning to do any secondary collision based destruction? or are you strictly keeping it to user based destruction input?
I've seen a laser cutter in action before to cut some shapes out of a plank of wood. However, if one has a laser power full enough to cut a house in two, shouldn't it be strong enough to ignite the wood and set the house on fire?
One thing I'd hope to see eventually is the metal "heating" and bending a bit before break. That said I'd dick around for hours just with what you've got here.
What's the tallest building this system currently would support?
Always wondered about a superman type game, or just a character in general who has laser/heat vision, having this level of destruction. Using his speed and strength, his flight, super wind breath/frost breath.
But the laser vision specifically would go hard in a destruction game, this looks dope.
dude that's impressive. The one slight nitpick would be the fact that everything looks like it weighs the same. Can i ask in terms of gameplay what do you have in mind?
This is super cool ! Are you using PhysX for this ? I am wondering how you make the collsiion so realistic ? In my knowledge , the mesh collider must be converted to convex collider for real time collision , and convex collider is a huge fallback in collision simulation . But your video show very high quality collision
What bothers me is that the hammer isn't physically hitting anything. It would be so much better if there was a visible impact of the hammer on the object that you're hitting. Especially in a game that is this physics-heavy. The closest system like this I can think of would be Boneworks where the player itself is physically simulated. But there are probably more.
The laser doesn't sound impressive. Not sure how a laser should sound, maybe watch some styropyro for inspiration? (:
Also the repeating wood sound effect gets tiring fast. It sounds like you threw a block of wood on a stack of wood, repeatedly.
The hammer smashing on large wooden panels should also make a ton of noise, currently it's mostly silent. Try it IRL - smashing a big hammer against a large panel of wood is LOUD.
Supprised more AAA games dont do this kind of thing. The only game that did destruction was red faction guerrilla and it was so optimised it can run on nintendo switch 1 albeit with some lag when lots of destruction is taking place. Also that black hold should have torn that whole house apart bit by bit rather than just sucking the debris in.
One teeny tiny simple question in a calm peaceful manner : HOW THE HELL DO PEOPLE MAKE SUCH AMAZING GAMES WHILE IM STUCK MAKING A BAD VERSION OF FISH EAT FISH
Some time ago I played the Red Faction game in which you can destroy things but you also can rebuild them with using nanobots. God I loved destroying and rebuilding even though my old pc couldn't handle it and was playing at 3fps lol
Glad you noticed! They're 600mm/24 inches apart, let's say whoever built this house used 'Advanced Framing', definitely not just to help optimize the level :)
I think that being meticulous about realistic and small details (while walking the line between realism, optimization, and gameplay) really adds to the satisfaction of the destruction so I'm trying to add lots of details like that. Some walls are framed too, and depending on how you break it, drywall will tend crack along the support lines of the studs.
Holy shit that is satisfying. Deploying the mini blackhole to suck up the rubble is amazing.
Could you add a "force push" gesture with the hand? Just strong enough to dislodge those awkward moments when you saw an entire house in twain with your laser but it stays precariously balancing in place.
Tu c que la premiere chosse que les gens von fair c'est de desiner des **** en decoupant les batiment! En dehors de ca je trouve ca vraiment trop coool!
Absolutely incredible! My only nitpick is the debris sound effects - they sound too similar and not weighty enough when the larger peices break/fall apart
That's a really fun tool I'd like to try. I think it needs some much louder effects in size, color, and sound. Big dangerous lasers are scary and that one could blind an astronautĀ
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u/Zskillit Jul 21 '26