I’ve got this idea in my head for making a city of destructible buildings. Maybe it’s because we watched Pacific Rim recently and I’ve got building-pulverizing action in mind. I’m not sure WHAT – in gameplay terms – would destroy the buildings. Superheroes? Godzilla monsters? Missiles? I dunno. We’ll figure that out once we have a working demo of blasting away at a building until it falls over.<\/p>\n
The idea works like this:<\/p>\n
I’d have a procedurally generated city of buildings. The buildings would be made from voxel cubes, Minecraft-style. Note that the world isn’t made of Minecraft cubes. One of the drawbacks of Minecraft is the huge memory footprint required for huge volume of cubes. But here each building would be its own local cube space and the area between, below, and above each building wouldn’t need to be tracked. This would give us a nice set of mutable data that doesn’t need to eat tons of memory or take tons of time to generate. Each little cube space would have its own local axis, which would mean the buildings don’t need to be aligned to the world axis. In plain terms, you could have buildings along curving roads and turned at an angle without turning their walls into jagged blocky diagonals. <\/p>\n
 <\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\nEach building would have these conceptual support pillars going up through them. Every block must be within a certain distance of a support pillar to be considered… erm… supported. If we hit the building with an explosion, it will remove a volume of cubes. If a support pillar is broken, then we remove the pillar above the point of the break. After the explosion and particle effects go off, we re-evaluate the building again and look for cubes that lack support. Any cubes that are without support will be removed from the building and dropped as physics objects.<\/p>\n This is not the problem.<\/p>\n The problem is this:<\/p>\n
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