Solid ground scatter

[SofusRud]

It really bothers me that I can drive straight through solid boulders at high speed with no consequences. Some sort collision mesh for the ground scatter would be nice (excluding grass).

[check]

Yeah, especially now that the new suspension system is implemented. Would be cool.

[Scotius]

But wouldn't that massively up the load on CPU and RAM? I mean, then our rigs would have to calculate and remember the location and size of every rock and tree on relevant planet. Or maybe only in 2.4 km zone of active physics?

[Awaras]

I'm pretty sure that one of the devs (Harvester maybe? I can't find it now) said that adding colliders to terrain scatter would be easy. However, doing it without crippling game performance is very difficult and would take a lot more time.

[lajoswinkler]

But wouldn't that massively up the load on CPU and RAM? I mean, then our rigs would have to calculate and remember the location and size of every rock and tree on relevant planet. Or maybe only in 2.4 km zone of active physics?

It should work fine enough if the zone is defined and small. 2.4 km is too much. I'd use less than 1 km.

The problem is that if you put your Kerbal on top of a rock and use a rover to travel outside the zone, the Kerbal will fall through the rock. What happens when you get back? He dies horribly?

[pizzaoverhead]

But wouldn't that massively up the load on CPU and RAM? I mean, then our rigs would have to calculate and remember the location and size of every rock and tree on relevant planet.

How do you think they know where to place them currently? They're procedurally generated, meaning their position is the same every time for a given seed. It's the colliders themselves that are expensive. No doubt HarvesteR has been thinking about a way of figuring out how to only add collision detection to the scatters that need it, rather than every one in the scene.

[Idobox]

It should work fine enough if the zone is defined and small. 2.4 km is too much. I'd use less than 1 km.

The problem is that if you put your Kerbal on top of a rock and use a rover to travel outside the zone, the Kerbal will fall through the rock. What happens when you get back? He dies horribly?

If the rock is outside the physics radius, so is the kerbal on top of it.

[lajoswinkler]

If the rock is outside the physics radius, so is the kerbal on top of it.

That's an excellent point.

So the only problem is if the rendering will be too much for an average computer. These details we're discussing are much finer than the best detail level in the terrain graphics settings even if the collision mesh is simple, like a cube, instead of following the visible mesh outline.

[FirstSecondThird]

From what I remember from a class in computer science in high school is that simply leaving collision physics to a GPU can increase performance, and I have an Nvidia Quadro NVS card which has CUDA enabled, so that means that things like collisions can easily be calculated if only Squad would port the games physics over to CUDA, and the GPU would calculate both the graphical effects of the collisions, plus the physics for them. A GPU is a very good chip for crunching numbers, if used with the right programming.

[PikachuNL]

You know this thread is more than 1y old? They don't really like "necroposting" here...

[Xaiier]

Necro aside, this won't work because Unity works on a PhysX version that runs on CPU only. It's unlikely that will change due to the Nvidia exclusivity of PhysX GPU physics.