| Submitted by , posted on 08 April 2003 |

Image Description, by These screen-shots are taken from BrindFX work-in-progress '1944' demo. The demo has been put together to highlight features of the XNS engine. The demo is of a (huge) island and features a beach-landing battle, village area, farms, minefields, railway, railway yard, military compound and much more. Where this differs most from some other games in this genre is that EVERY structure (including trees, bushes etc.) are destroyable in a completely non-scripted fashion.
Advanced hierarchical modelling methods are used to create buildings which can be destroyed exactly at the point of impact of rockets and mortars. This is combined with an intelligent collision system which relies on the original object geometry rather than simplified meshes so that the player can do things such as blowing holes in structures and leaping through them, buildings can be destroyed to the point of individual bricks, rafters etc. while maintaining respectable frame-rates. The landscape is created using 'volumetric feature editing' - a technique we have developed for applying features with geometric shape constraints such as roads, ditches, and so forth on to a noise-based base terrain. This terrain is fully deformable ( rockets, mines and mortars all produce craters) and is rendered using a proprietry CLOD algorithm generating triangle strips.
Models such as buildings are developed and exported as X files and pre-processed into their optimised and exploding representations. The support routines necessary for AI ( enquiring about collision, visibility etc.) are all complete and we are now developing our character animation system and hope to have it integrated shortly. All foliage moves in the breeze casting shadows and sounds and effects can be 'painted' onto areas of the environment to enhance atmosphere.
We are also close to completing a racing-game demo using this technology where you can enter or leave your vehicle, launch rockets into spectators and so on, and are investigating the feasibility of a Medieval castle / war game where highly detailed castles can be sieged, attacked, destroyed etc.

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