Destroyable bridges?

[Swordsmandk]

Will (or is it already implemented?) there be a possibility that you will be able to take down a bridge or bridge laid by the biber with the new 2x500 bombs?

That would make it possible to make some nice scenarios with UAV etc.

Regards

Swords

[Sean]

Someday. Not sure when. Its on the list with destructible buildings and the like.

[Ssnake]

We have models, we need to implement them. This will be done - most likely - when doing some sort of a "building package upgrade" or so. This will also include road overpasses, and for that the vehicles need to learn that they can pass under these types of buildings (in other words, we need to adjust the collision box detection, which may become a bit tricky).

[crazyeddie]

Thanks for the update Ssnake, nice to know its coming along, looking forward to it.

[Red Dagger]

Sounds great and could make for some very intense missions, for example Blue force must contain/defeat enemy bridgeheads then destroy the actual bridges before an overwhelmingly large enemy force arrives to reinforce their bridgeheads.

[cata]

Have just finished a big map for a costume scenario and had thought about how much targetable bridges would have changed the way the game and scenario would work. Building up grade HAS to take into account how many hours it takes to make a town let alone a city. It’s a mind numbing process and as much as I love the game, its killing me finding the motivation not to mention the time to put new maps together.

I think I have talk before about the possibility of creating city or town blocks. That is a ready made 10 building, or something, block pre made that one could fill an area. Perhaps a European version and desert M.East. then we just need to fill in edges and gaps. A better approach might be the ability to copy –past a selected area of objects. So you can customize a relatively small set up in great detail then simply copy - past and adjust at will. Would make a huge difference, killing the inherent fear and dread of starting a new map making project. Destructible buildings WOW!!! Just WOW!!! For the gaming community this would be awesome, not sure what military users would see in it? But when looks at how urban warfare is front and center more than ever its clear SB could do with a little attention in this respect.

SB had talked about adding detail like walls and civ vehicles, barbed wire and others but they never made it into the up grade. But how far off are they? was there work done on these objects? Are half finished projects sitting around on hold?

[Ssnake]

One of our customer project managers expected to receive funding for a boost in building artwork. Of course we wanted to add in "our" new buildings with a big package of licensed artwork that his funding was supposed to pay for. As the associated paperwork can often take months we weren't too concerned about the initial delays, and held off with the integration of our own models. Unfortunately it turned out that his bosses were less convinced about the utility value, or at least had better ways to spend their budget. At that point it was too late to spend time on this matter for a somewhat timely PE release.

We have since then decided not to wait for 3rd party packages, but to develop some sort of a "prefab" solution where we can assemble buildings based on a library of standardized elements ... which would then also allow partial destruction. This must be done in a way that we can replace the existing mono-mesh buildings with identically looking multi-mesh buildings so that the transition is without bumps for those maps that already have large villages in them.

Another aspect is efficiency of map building. I agree that this is a mind numbing job and in the current state of our software I can't seriously recommend that you attempt to compensate the absence of an efficient user interface with manic determination to get the job done nevertheless. So, don't. There are a number of maps that already have large villages (Ft. Drum, to name an example) which I recommend to use until we have better methods.

[CalAB]

Ssnake, I seem to remember blasting bridges out in some scenario. This was before the beta release (maybe two years ago) If I remember it right the bridge spans were split in two. They were repeatedly targeted with arty. I may be wrong but I'm almost certain I destroyed the bridges in question. I'll do my best to remember the exact scenario but I'm sure it's pointless as the engine will either let me take out bridges with arty or it won't.

[Sean]

You are thinking of special bridges where a segment is left out to allow bridge layers to operate.

[Quagmire]

funding was supposed to pay for. As the associated paperwork can often take months we weren't too concerned about the initial delays, and held off with the integration of our own models. Unfortunately it turned out that his bosses were less convinced about the utility value, or at least had better ways to spend their budget

Ssnake, just out of interest, but how much would we be talking here to add the additional 'environmental' aspects to the game?

My thinking? Well, what if additional buildings, walls, street lights, vehicles etc. could be added as an additional (or optional) upgrade/patch so to speak that we the users, could purchase?

Would that be feasible?

Sometimes games will give you the opportunity, at a cost, to make it look better than the standard 'out of the box' version. Is this something worth considering?

I personally would pay for this type of upgrade, even if they were quarterly for example. As they would be seen as 'eye-candy' only and would not affect the standard game they wouldn't interfere with the upgrade releases (like 2.460), so the game dynamics would not have to change. (Hope that last bit makes sense ).

Just a thought.

Quagmire.

[ShotMagnet]

Watch FR grind to a relative halt. The game (OK, my card) already has all it can do to maintain an acceptable frame-rate in a forest.

Give it freeway-speed, couple that with the need to animate railings, lights, traffic, etc, and I expect that my machine (probably a couple of others, as well) will do the electronic equivalent of flipping me the bird.

Shot

[Hedgehog]

Hmm I might have to redo my city if this happens.

At the moment I get a FPS of 2 in there, but this PC is 6 yrs old.

[Hackworth]

Ssnake, I seem to remember blasting bridges out in some scenario. This was before the beta release (maybe two years ago) If I remember it right the bridge spans were split in two. They were repeatedly targeted with arty. I may be wrong but I'm almost certain I destroyed the bridges in question. I'll do my best to remember the exact scenario but I'm sure it's pointless as the engine will either let me take out bridges with arty or it won't.

that is probably a mission where the bridges were separated in the map editor to create a "destroyed" bridge for the mission. peps do this to create bridging scenarios (esp since it's pretty hard over normaly rivers).

[GH_Lieste]

that is probably a mission where the bridges were separated in the map editor to create a "destroyed" bridge for the mission. peps do this to create bridging scenarios (esp since it's pretty hard over normaly rivers).

Nah, bridging is a piece of cake - you just have to be neat and methodical. (External view is pretty mandatory - dismounted crossing engineer supervising - as you can't tell water depths or slope angles from the driver's position).

[Ssnake]

Ssnake, just out of interest, but how much would we be talking here to add the additional 'environmental' aspects to the game?

Another $25.- for everybody. But to me this isn't really the issue. Of course we all would like to see more diversity in the terrain. The primary reason why we held back for all the years was that we felt that single-mesh buildings were inadequate for any kind of combat involving tanks, artillery, and urbanized terrain. Instead, you want to have the capacity for partial destruction, and you need internal walls to limit the propagation of behind armor debris (be they projectile fragments or bits and pieces of the wall that has just been perforated).

On the other hand, our impression was that for larger assemblies of buildings the technology wasn't mature; there are two aspects to this, the massive overdraw situation in the rendering pipeline, and the memory requirements to store the state of each building so that, if you return to the same spot half an hour and two dozen destroyed buildings later the same damages are still there and the building mesh state doesn't get reset to the initial value (like those "bullert hole" decals that appear in many shooters and which disappear after a few moments; well, I could certainly live with disappearing bullet holes, but walls that magically restore themselves is a different matter).

Creating a lot of diversity with single mesh buildings appeared to be a huge waste of resources since we would then have to re-build the whole library of then existing models with the new "prefab method" to ensure backwards comparibility with existing maps.

Now, while I agree that building diversity is more than a pure eye candy thing, apparently most of our army customers have training deficits elsewhere which we are supposed to address. It is hard to argue with a customer who is in dire need of a feature or weapon system to train soldiers for ongoing operations and tell him to come back next year after we made these shiny new buildings. The soldiers who are being prepared for one of the two current sandboxes don't have the luxury to wait this long.

I'm too much of an ex soldier to ignore this, I'm sorry. Call it an emotional deficit of mine, a lack of emotional distance if you will. We will deal with the buildings, you will get them, and they may be part of a future for-pay upgrade, but I don't expect you to fork over another $25.- right away so that we can start working on this. You deserve to get more in an upgrade package.

[Hackworth]

Nah, bridging is a piece of cake - you just have to be neat and methodical. (External view is pretty mandatory - dismounted crossing engineer supervising - as you can't tell water depths or slope angles from the driver's position).

perhaps i misspoke -- bridging isn't hard; it's hard to find a point narrow enough to use a bridge on most maps.

[cata]

The soldiers who are being prepared for one of the two current sandboxes don't have the luxury to wait this long.

I'm too much of an ex soldier to ignore this, I'm sorry. Call it an emotional deficit of mine, a lack of emotional distance if you will

...roger that my friend...understood!

[Ssnake]

perhaps i misspoke -- bridging isn't hard; it's hard to find a point narrow enough to use a bridge on most maps.

...and those that are narrow enough can often be forded. This is a problem with the terrain mesh resolution that Steel Beasts Pro currently supports, 12.5m. This means that a "single pixel width" type of a stream is 12.5m wide less the space for the embankments, so it can be anything between a trickle and maybe six or seven meters, depending on the direction of the stream and the intersecting polygons of the surrounding terrain. In any case, few vehicles will ever be trapped by this, and can easily ford the obstacle.

Then there are streams which are "two pixels wide" (in the map editor). At the very least these are more than 12 meters wide which in reality would already be a formidable obstacle, and they can be up to 23 meters (again, depending on how the polygons of the surrounding terrain are arranged and intersecting with the water body. You may want to check this in the mission editor where the water is being rendered semi-transparent, giving you a good impression of the radical variances of the stream bed.

As the Biber can span 22 meters, and the MT-55 may bridge 20m, you can see that you need favorable conditions for "natural" water streams.

In the long run we want to increase the terrain mesh resolution in the vicinity of selected objects - water bodies, mountain roads, to name two examples - so that we can have rivers that are still too wide and too deep to be forded yet narrow enough to be bridged by either vehicle.

In the meantime a possible workaround is to modify existing maps so that you replace bridges by two bridge segments with a gap of maybe 10 or 15m. That way the bridgelayers still retain a tactical value, although it narrows down the player's options to attempt the bridging process.

[GH_Lieste]

It is feasible to perform hasty bridging if you have enough bridging assets of rivers up to 3 pixels wide (and at an arbritary location, no requirement for particular bank conditions, except that they should be relatively low and not too steep).

A four AVLB bridge can be laid, used briefly and removed in about 30 minutes, with 3 bridges recovered on the far shore and only one bridging asset recovered on the near shore and not available for subsequent bridging attempts on the enemy side.

A two pixel river can be bridged with two assets in about 9 minutes, although the second bridge can't be recovered to the far bank - unless you bridge 'back' parallel to the first, so that the recovery can be done on the initial bridge first, and completed from the objective side once the all assets are across. This would require about 20-25 minutes of activity, and also four bridges.

Four bridges is a huge chunk of the typical engineering assets available to a Brigade force though, and some armies may not be this lavishly equipped.