Hidden Colors
We're back for a brand new edition of Weekly Apart and couldn't be happier. There is nothing like a super-productive sprint in which all the planned additions to Dawn Apart are coming along nicely. We can't share anything yet but this week alone we've added some very cool gameplay functionalities and assets to our space colony sim.
Some of the in-game pioneers even claim they, for the first time, laid their eyes on the I'tak, Aurora's indigenous humanoid alien population, but so far the sightings haven't officially been confirmed (more on that in a future post). Today we follow a more dev-centric approach and want to further elaborate on Dawn Apart's awesome destruction physics by giving a peek at an important debug view we have in game.
But before we dive into what lays beyond Dawn Apart's shiny metal surface, please check out our new presence in the Epic Games Store. Take a quick break from reading this post by clicking on this link, throw Dawn Apart onto your Epic wishlist and then grab your weekly free game (but make sure to come back here to finish reading the post:)
[h3]Color-coded destruction physics[/h3]
As previously outlined we have a sophisticated system that predicts how an object will fracture when it receives damage. For instance, when a space marine fires bullets at an It'ak house, each bullet will generate rays with a specific force that will travel through the object and reduce its force depending on the type of material it encounters. Not all materials are destructible through physical damage, and in such cases, the force vector will rebound and travel in the opposite direction, leading to more fascinating destruction patterns.
But how does our engine differentiate between different materials? Well, since the planet Aurora and everything on it consists of three-dimensional analogues of a pixel, also known as voxels, we can take advantage of the incredibly powerful medium: We take raw .vox files (from the free GPU-based voxel art editor and interactive path tracing renderer called MagicaVoxel) and parse out color/material/physical property data into data structures that we then can use on our end.
Think for example of lasers breaking and burning through wood voxels, causing other flammable voxels to catch fire, or hitting a very heavy metal and just visually heating up that voxel instead. For this system we took great inspiration from Dennis Gustafson and the team at Tuxedo Labs who developed the game that dragged voxel games kicking and screaming into the modern age, Teardown.
[h3]Tron Apart[/h3]
So basically each voxel physical type has a set interaction with a damage type and a large number of lists of modifiers for how much force it takes to interact with it. In the case of fracturing we dynamically calculate the Total Mass, Center of Mass, Volume, and Inertia Tensor based on the physical type of each voxel that makes up the debris and send it on its way.
In our work-in-progress build we actually have a key shortcut to display the differently colored materials, which creates this very cool looking, Tron-like look of your mining operation on Aurora.
At least in this debug view building and tearing down factories has never been so colorful. Should we leave this rainbow-colored behind-the-scenes view in the game when it comes out? Let us know in the comments and see you next week!
Some of the in-game pioneers even claim they, for the first time, laid their eyes on the I'tak, Aurora's indigenous humanoid alien population, but so far the sightings haven't officially been confirmed (more on that in a future post). Today we follow a more dev-centric approach and want to further elaborate on Dawn Apart's awesome destruction physics by giving a peek at an important debug view we have in game.
But before we dive into what lays beyond Dawn Apart's shiny metal surface, please check out our new presence in the Epic Games Store. Take a quick break from reading this post by clicking on this link, throw Dawn Apart onto your Epic wishlist and then grab your weekly free game (but make sure to come back here to finish reading the post:)
[h3]Color-coded destruction physics[/h3]
As previously outlined we have a sophisticated system that predicts how an object will fracture when it receives damage. For instance, when a space marine fires bullets at an It'ak house, each bullet will generate rays with a specific force that will travel through the object and reduce its force depending on the type of material it encounters. Not all materials are destructible through physical damage, and in such cases, the force vector will rebound and travel in the opposite direction, leading to more fascinating destruction patterns.
But how does our engine differentiate between different materials? Well, since the planet Aurora and everything on it consists of three-dimensional analogues of a pixel, also known as voxels, we can take advantage of the incredibly powerful medium: We take raw .vox files (from the free GPU-based voxel art editor and interactive path tracing renderer called MagicaVoxel) and parse out color/material/physical property data into data structures that we then can use on our end.
Think for example of lasers breaking and burning through wood voxels, causing other flammable voxels to catch fire, or hitting a very heavy metal and just visually heating up that voxel instead. For this system we took great inspiration from Dennis Gustafson and the team at Tuxedo Labs who developed the game that dragged voxel games kicking and screaming into the modern age, Teardown.
[h3]Tron Apart[/h3]
So basically each voxel physical type has a set interaction with a damage type and a large number of lists of modifiers for how much force it takes to interact with it. In the case of fracturing we dynamically calculate the Total Mass, Center of Mass, Volume, and Inertia Tensor based on the physical type of each voxel that makes up the debris and send it on its way.
In our work-in-progress build we actually have a key shortcut to display the differently colored materials, which creates this very cool looking, Tron-like look of your mining operation on Aurora.
At least in this debug view building and tearing down factories has never been so colorful. Should we leave this rainbow-colored behind-the-scenes view in the game when it comes out? Let us know in the comments and see you next week!