Destructible Terrain

[ChubbyCat]

This seems like a bit of a stretch but I’m curious. If I blow up a rocket on the surface of a planet like Kerbin, will it have any effect on the soil? Like a crater, hole, or mark of any kind? I’m guessing this is wishful thinking, and its totally fine without, but still interesting to think about considering the amount of scientific accuracy and realism the devs are going for.

On a less destructive note, I also wonder if there will be footprints and noticeable grooves/indentations from wheels and things that land on the surface of a planet, obviously depending on the terrains material. 

[Thundy]

1 hour ago, ChubbyCat said:

If I blow up a rocket on the surface of a planet like Kerbin, will it have any effect on the soil?

They confirmed that this isn't in the game, However they never ruled out the possibility of it happening in the future, but keep in mind that it is a typical response, theres a good chance it will never happen ever.

 

1 hour ago, ChubbyCat said:

I also wonder if there will be footprints and noticeable grooves/indentations from wheels and things that land on the surface of a planet, obviously depending on the terrains material. 

We don't know a thing about it, we've never seen game footage of it wheels. I hope we get at least that.

[K^2]

3 hours ago, ChubbyCat said:

This seems like a bit of a stretch but I’m curious.

On the tech side, it's not so bad, though, it would likely be a bit hacky with Unity/PhysX without having access to the source.

The general outline for something like this is that you start by fully embracing the virtual textures for the terrain. That lets you render decals for both visual materials and the height maps at very low cost. If you do this, a crater can basically be just a decal you apply to the terrain. Next, you want tessellation. You can do small deformations with displacement mapping, but if you want a sizable crater from the impact, you need to alter the mesh. If you start with a low poly mesh based on the original height map, then tessellate using the virtual texture, you'll have geometry matching your newly formed terrain features. Finally, you need collisions to respect the deformations. You keep using PhysX scene to handle crashes, but you replace the line probes for landing legs, wheels, and kerbals with a compute shader that tests against virtual texture directly.

What you get is something with almost no performance overhead, but so precise, that you can have large rovers leave tracks deep enough that kerbals would stumble over. This can also be baked into procedural feature generation so that small rocks, tree roots, or any other small features can be applied as decals instead of having to be geometry.

This is a bit of work, of course. I can absolutely imagine Intercept not having people with necessary skills to spare on something like this right now. But yeah, maybe it's something we can get in a future update if KSP2 does well enough, and Intercept wants to put some extra shine before some major DLC or something.

[Guest The Doodling Astronaut]

6 hours ago, ChubbyCat said:

This seems like a bit of a stretch but I’m curious. If I blow up a rocket on the surface of a planet like Kerbin, will it have any effect on the soil? Like a crater, hole, or mark of any kind? I’m guessing this is wishful thinking, and its totally fine without, but still interesting to think about considering the amount of scientific accuracy and realism the devs are going for.

On a less destructive note, I also wonder if there will be footprints and noticeable grooves/indentations from wheels and things that land on the surface of a planet, obviously depending on the terrains material. 

Nate and a few others have confirmed this will never happen

But I would like to see the opposite happen. Where when you build colonies, instead of them being on stands, you can have an option to fill the soil in underneath to make it feel more natural.

[gussi111]

18 hours ago, ChubbyCat said:

On a less destructive note, I also wonder if there will be footprints and noticeable grooves/indentations from wheels and things that land on the surface of a planet, obviously depending on the terrains material. 

I really really hope they make this, Imagine taking screenshots of your first ever footprints on the Mun, or the first wheel tracks your rover left on Duna, it would be incredible!

[The Aziz]

1 hour ago, gussi111 said:

Imagine taking screenshots of your first ever footprints on the Mun

Or skidmarks when the landing didn't go exactly according to plan.

[Dr. Kerbal]

44 minutes ago, The Aziz said:

Or skidmarks when the landing didn't go exactly according to plan.

Or burn marks from leaving.

[The Aziz]

2 minutes ago, Dr. Kerbal said:

Or burn marks from leaving.

Loooong burn marks from emergency leaving because you couldn't kill horizontal velocity fast enough.

[ChubbyCat]

14 hours ago, The Doodling Astronaut said:

Nate and a few others have confirmed this will never happen

They even confirmed the footprints and tread marks thing?

[WelshSteW]

The stuff we've seen on base building / colony building seem to be more of the 'build the base around the terrain' theme rather than the 'terraform the terrain to make building easier' theme, so I doubt this will be something we see. Would be pretty cool though.

[FleshJeb]

1 hour ago, The Aziz said:

Or skidmarks when the landing didn't go exactly according to plan.

Those are modeled into the spacesuit.

[Fletch4]

On 11/27/2021 at 1:36 PM, ChubbyCat said:

On a less destructive note, I also wonder if there will be footprints and noticeable grooves/indentations from wheels and things that land on the surface of a planet, obviously depending on the terrains material. 

i would hope it would be some kind of trail, that disappears after you leave a certain distance from an origin.

[avalancha]

On 11/27/2021 at 9:52 PM, Thundy said:

We don't know a thing about it, we've never seen game footage of it wheels. I hope we get at least that.

While that is true, it is featured very prominently in the cinematic announcement trailer (which I just watched for the 317th time) - and more importantly it is also visible in the Announce Animatic that Nate Simpson put together. It is reasonable to assume that he would put things in there, that he knew the team would be working on. I know this argument is incredibly weak cause scope may have changed or it was just drawn in without deeper meaning.

But yeah, I remain hopeful that this is a priority for the team  

Edited November 29, 2021 by avalancha