I know terrain deformation was mentioned in an article somewhere, but the trailer confirmed it--in case anyone missed this detail. Watch the trailer to where the dragon crashes around 1:52-1:54, you can see the snow is pushed aside in a cloud and hudge mounds of dirt are tore up ahead of the crashed dragon. In the final shot of the dead dragon, you can see the dirt the dragon is lying on, where everything else is snow.

Here are some images showing the progression:

http://i73.photobucket.com/albums/i212/TheBlackGhost/Before.jpg
http://i73.photobucket.com/albums/i212/TheBlackGhost/Before2.jpg
http://i73.photobucket.com/albums/i212/TheBlackGhost/Before3.jpg
http://i73.photobucket.com/albums/i212/TheBlackGhost/Before4.jpg
http://i73.photobucket.com/albums/i212/TheBlackGhost/Before5.jpg


Anyways, its cool. What other used might they find for this?

It's not really deforming though, it's just having dirt mesh and textures applied to the ground. I am sure it fades out after a period of time rather then leaving a crater in the ground.

I hope you're right and there is terrain deformation - some info and quotes seem to point at as well.

But that part in the trailer could easily have been handled through particle effects, not true terrain deformation.

In reality, no it's not deforming the ground but in the sense of the game it is. That's all games really are is making something look like it's happening with the least amount of change or processing bandwidth usage. Maybe though, they will set the texture to stay until a conditional command is met like it raining there. If not, you can always tweak the ini to do so like with blood decals.

When I pick up a gun in Fallout 3 and shoot the ground to make a bullet hole (or perhaps to write my name with bullet holes ), the terrain is not being deformed. The bullet hole does nothing and disappears after a very short period of time. I'm sure the "terrain deformation" seen will be the same way.

Okay, well I'm not all that technical, so I guess if its an added mesh and particles, that works to the same effect. I guess I dont really expect the terrain to be changed forever (but who knows), anyways I like that they added it.

Given that the whole dragon fight bit was more then likely a scripted animation sequence, It is likely that it is just a dirt textured mesh appearing and the dragon crashing is one whole animation. The same effect can be seen in Fallout 3:Broken Steel as Liberty prime crawls after being blown up, and even in Oblivion when Martin summons the portal to Mancar Camron's paradise.

So that could mean it will stay there forever, but whatever the case and how its done, its a cool effect.

I am curious if they have done anything about when it doesn't crash land clearly on open ground, what if it hit's rock, tree or water on the way down?

Well while the video was heavily scripted, dragon fight was supposed to be what they actually do in game according to information from BGS. So I'm thinking there will be a ground disruption mesh but it won't last forever. Mainly the dragons are technically scripted, the way the sequence their movements and attacks aren't scripted.

That's just decals. And that technique is older than my mom...

If the video was heavily scripted, (it's hard to believe it isn't) then Pete Hines was flat out lying.

Your mom had you pretty young then lol. But in tech years, those decals are like 200 years old.



What do you mean? I was merely mentioning the fact that the showing the dovahkiin running through the forest and the view from the dragon and the dragon shadow creeping up behind the dovahkiin was scripted. Not meaning that the animations were doctored or anything.

Why do you think the running through the forest or the shadow were scripted?

What i said was just an overly elaborate way of saying that dragons probably have a death animation rather then rag-doll effects.

Possibly. I'm thinking they just have a ragdoll effect but have conditional values attached to them to invoke ground deformation textures and particle effects of dust being kicked up. It wouldn't be out of the scope of the dozens of "first of it's kind" things they are doing in Skyrim which were unthinkable of in video games up until now.



Scripted in the way of directing a video. The dragon was obviously told to fly across that vista and attack the dovahkiin, so there was scripting there. Mainly the scripting I'm talking about was the direction of the video where things were setup but the acts of the NPCs weren't scripted but things like the Dovahkiin standing up slowly for the dramatic effect was obviously scripted and little things like that. However, it has been said that the shaking screen was the screen effect of sprinting.

:rofl: A dragon with rag-doll effects would be hilarious! Can you just imagine smashing it with a war hammer and having it fly, flip, and twist down a mountain side?

It's been mentioned by the devs that when a dragon lands it will dig furrows in the ground. While certainly it looks like textures/bump maps and particles (just like the flaming ground under the hero) I think it would be easily possible in Skyrim, Oblivion and Morrowind.

In the Construction set you can easily raise and lower the ground, this could be done in-game ala Fracture, the only problem would be rocks floating above the ground, etc.

Couldn't the flying rocks and dirt be handled as wood chippings and other particle effects in Oblivion... by disappearing?

Yeah, that would be funny to see, but you can do ragdoll effects that look realistic when falling. You can set weight values to certain parts of the frame of the model to make it fall more realistically. Oblivion looked funny because it was using the first version of Havok physics. Havok has gone through many generations of itself and they have really come into their own.

It does indeed look to me like that could be just what it is, I wouldn't be surprised if it's just an animation we get when dragons die. It's still a nice effect, though, just not as impressive technically as having the terrain actually physically deform.

Yeah that would be impressive but physically deforming the terrain would require instantaneous change of the actual terrain in the game files which would mean high processing power because it is rewriting the file while your running the game and trying to access it at the same time. I'm not even sure it would be possible at this time because of the fidelity it would have. Yeah, now that I think about it, I don't see how they would be able to rewrite the file while it's still in use by the game unless they have a second separate directory to trade off writing and reading which would mean twice the space taken from the game. Oh well, I'm rambling on hehe.

I think (from my graphics-adept point of view) that terrain deformation would be easy to do with just Tessellation and procedural deformation and destruction.

Bad thing? It'd require DX11....

EDIT: Maybe not, seeing how Crysis 2 has included procedural destruction on consoles...

Well that type of procedural destruction is different than terrain deformation though. The destruction is prerendered in the modeller for objects. Terrain would be much harder to pull off and displacement meshes would do the job well of "deforming" the terrain.