Impressive Environmental Destruction in Company of Heroes 3
The team at Relic Entertainment showed off the destruction system in Company of Heroes 3 on a series of videos demonstrating its capabilities.
- Buildings are multi-layered;
- Broken off pieces are separate objects whose behavior is governed by a physics engine;
- Falling debris can kill soldiers.
Relic Entertainment has released a series of interesting videos from the RTS game Company of Heroes 3. The videos focus on showcasing environmental destruction and come from the pre-alpha version, so many elements will still be improved, but what we see already looks impressive.
The previous two installments of the series offered a good destruction system, but hardware limitations forced many simplifications. The devs showed a lot of ingenuity in circumventing them. For example, the engines that powered CoH 1 and 2 did not calculate the trajectory and behavior of falling pieces of buildings - it was simulated by graphic effects depending on the position of the camera. On the other hand, when a bullet punched a hole in a wall, the engine made that section transparent instead of making changes to the structure's model.
In the case of Company of Heroes 3 such tricks were no longer necessary and Relic Entertainment was finally able to go wild in terms of ambient destruction. Splintered fragments are three-dimensional models and the physics engine is responsible for their behavior. Building debris can, for example, land on a sloping roof of a neighboring structure and slide off. Falling objects can even kill nearby soldiers.
Furthermore, most buildings are multi-layered - there are bricks or stones underneath the plaster, which can also be split into pieces. Each structure has a limited strength and the progressive destruction eventually leads to its spectacular collapse.
Company of Heroes 3 is coming exclusively to PC and is expected to be released this year.
