A lot of people -myself included- are very
interested in the destruction in Teardown.
The world is made of millions of voxels. Which
has been done before. But what makes this
game different is that, when these voxels
are destroyed, they collapse with physics.
These voxels have different properties. Different
strengths. Some are flammable. Some float!
Others don’t. But how exactly DO they behave
in practice?
Is it possible to destroy an object COMPLETELY?
Say you have an object with a thousand voxels,
and you shoot it. Chunks of various sizes
fall off from the damage, but the object is
now less than a thousand voxels, since some
were immediately destroyed in the shot.
Hit the remaining voxels enough times and
they’ll continue to splinter and fragment
into smaller and smaller chunks until they
eventually disappear entirely.
So yes, in theory you can make an object disappear,
with enough effort.
What’s the deal with floating objects?
Here’s something a few people have been
asking about: a structure won’t collapse
until it is completely detached from everything
else. In the real world you’d expect them
to fall sooner than this because, clearly,
gravity would pull this structure down long
before it reached this point!
And this is something that won’t be changing
before the game’s release. It would require
an engine re-write, and would make the game
far more CPU-intensive than it already is.
So how things will work in Teardown is as
follows: until they’ve collapsed, static
voxels will not have physics calculations
done to them. As he said in this interview,
it does actually help with the gameplay, since
you’ll know exactly when things will collapse.
Smaller structures are exceptions to this.
Some use special soft connections between
parts to make them behave more realistically.
Stuff like this wooden watch tower, or the
pipes, will twist and deform as you shoot
their supports out.
Sometimes, larger structures don’t collapse
even when they are floating- like these pylons,
here… until you’ve cut them up into smaller
parts, at which point the whole thing will
suddenly kick into life and collapse as you’d
expect it to.
I asked Dennis about this and he says it’s
from them not being built correctly, so it’s
probably a bug rather than an engine limitation.
He’s hoping to find a solution to this before
release, but no promises.
I hope a fix is found, because you just know
the first thing every player’s going to
do after they load up Teardown is to try and
blow up one of these structures. So, for first
impressions’ sake, I am hoping that there’s
some way, or option, to bypass size limitations
such as this one. But even with it in place,
it’s still a lot of fun to destroy these
pylons.
And smaller structures, like this watch tower,
go to ‘sleep’ after a few seconds if they’re
moving, but not moving much. They just need
an external nudge to wake them up again.
So there are a few optimisation measures in
place to make voxel destruction of this scale
possible. And while limitations are always
disappointing, you’re still given plenty
of freedom to destroy as you please. And the
most fun things you can do in this game are
when the destruction interacts with other
things, like the fire system. And those things
are a joy to behold.
Performance in this game
I am running Teardown on a Ryzen 3700X and
a Geforce 2080 TI, so you’d hope it runs
well. And it does. Unless I grossly abuse
the game engine, it runs nice and smoothly,
even at 1440p and even then I’m running
at about 100 FPS most of the time. I’m hoping
to benchmark this game on my other systems,
some of which are below the minimum spec,
so it will be interesting to see what I can
get away with. There are different ‘render
qualities’ which, on lower settings, make
the shadows and general raytracing look at
bit noisier, but what will probably help most
is the ‘render scale’, which drops the
resolution down. I hope to cover these things
at a later date, doesn’t seem worth it when
I can run the game on highest settings already.
So let’s test this game and see where the
bottlenecks are. In normal gameplay, it’s
using about 12% of my CPU, 8 GB of system
memory, and my GPU is running at 100%- clearly,
this is a GPU-limited situation where the
only limit to how high my framerate can go
is how many frames my graphics card can produce.
Which is normal in games.
However, as I set fire to the entire house,
the framerate goes down, but something strange
happens- the game gets LESS demanding on my
system! The RAM usage doesn’t go up, the
CPU remains under 20% load and my GPU usage
actually drops down to about 35%. It’s not
immediately apparent where the bottleneck
is.
What I think is happening is that the game
can only run on a certain number of CPU threads
at once, and it only really maxes out one
of them, which is why my CPU is the limiting
factor, even when it’s under about 12% load.
The bad news about this is, if you have a
super fast PC, this game currently won’t
make the most of it. The good news is, you
can expect similar performance to me even
if your processor is considerably slower than
mine. How much slower, I can’t say until
I’ve tested it on my other systems as well.
Level overview
A few of you said how cool the level overview
looked, so here’s more of it. It shows a
realtime overview of the map, you can zoom
in and out of it, and can pan about, and as
you can see, it simply shows everything that’s
happening, but from an overhead view. It doesn’t
let you see inside buildings- even if you’re
in one at the time. But yeah, it’s a useful
tool, especially for checking out the objectives
in challenge mode. You could make a Command
and Conquer-like game using this viewpoint,
couldn’t you. Call in airstrikes and watch
it destroy everything.
Can falling objects damage other things?
Yes they can. And quite substantially, in
some cases! The exception to this is the player,
who doesn’t seem to take damage, even when
half a house lands on his head. But I guess
if you did take damage from falling structures,
you’d sometimes randomly die when something
above you shifts slightly, so I think it’s
a lot simpler just to be like ‘don’t worry
about falling stuff, but do worry about fire,
the countdown, and that murderous attack helicopter
above you instead’.
Movement in the level
Now’s a good time to talk about the movement
in the level, which is a crucial part of any
game, but especially one where you’re trying
to navigate as quickly as possible. As long
as something’s below head-height, you should
be able to jump up onto it. You can squeeze
through tight spaces, and crawl through extremely
small holes. You can’t jump up on one-voxel-wide
ledges, which threw me off a few times because
with some fences it looks like you should
be able to hop up over them in a couple of
jumps, but this isn’t the case. I particularly
enjoyed climbing these fir trees, then to
leap from peak to peak like a blocky tarzan.
Spray paint
I didn’t cover this tool in my first video,
but the game lets you spray paint surfaces
to leave messages, or to indicate to future
you where you need to go next. Because I did
say that some of the challenges get rather
complicated, so being able to write messages
to yourself does have quite a lot of value.
And yes, this spraypaint remains on objects,
even after they’ve been destroyed.
Planks
In a world of destruction, the planks stand
out as being the one constructive tool at
your disposal. You click on a point, drag
it out and then let go, and a plank is spawned.
This is mostly used to build bridges between
gaps, but as you just saw, can also bind objects
together. It is also enough to stop these
pipes from falling completely. The possibilities
seem pretty much endless.
You can also construct primitive structures
out of them, but it isn’t exactly minecraft.
And I suspect the reason you’d do this would
be to then destroy them or set them on fire.
Cable physics
The cables in this level serve more purpose
than simply looking cool. It’s best I just
show you here. I can break off the top, and
it will be left dangling in the air, held
in place by the other posts either side.
NOW what I can do is to use the plank tool
to attach it to a vehicle, and then I can
drive it away, turning it into a massive slingshot!
Either I cut it loose, or it will eventually
gain enough strength to hurl my vehicle back
from whence it came.
FIRE
I did not expect the fire in this game to
be as much fun as it was. The game doubles
up as a burning building simulator and it
was great fun to find the largest wooden house
that I could, and to start a fire downstairs
before either hiding somewhere upstairs, or
to wait a while and then to try and extinguish
it myself.
I did notice that, after a large building
like this had burned, performance tanked.
Which is odd because you’d think there isn’t
a lot left for it to simulate! Again, this
is something I’m not too worried about because
the fun comes from burning it in the first
place.
I’ll end this video with a burning building
sequence, which I’d say is one of the most
fun things you can do in sandbox mode.
What will teardown be like?
When you play Teardown for the first time,
if you’re anything like me, you won’t
start with the challenges. It’s just too
distracting, you’ll take it seriously for
a while but then you’ll really want to blow
up a tree, or carve a face into a wall and
you’ll fail the objective. So instead, when
you first play, you’ll probably jump into
the sandbox mode and will mess about with
it for hours, doing all sorts of things that
haven’t been possible in other games. And
I think that’s the best training you can
do for the game’s other modes! In the sandbox,
you’ll mess about with the weapons, the
vehicles, the physics and so on. Eventually,
you’ll have a good feel for how it all works.
You might want to try another level, and may
have to complete a few objectives to unlock
it. I suspect, over time you’ll jump between
the sandbox and challenge modes, gradually
working your way through whatever campaign
this game will eventually have.
I see people saying how they’re not interested
in anything other than the sandbox, which
is fair enough. But I do think the game’s
other modes DO complement the destructive
gameplay well. They’re there to give you
missions to complete, and a way of testing
or focusing the destructive skills you’ll
have practiced in the sandbox mode.
Like, from my point of view, I can see so
many opportunities with this game. I want
a command and conquer style game based on
it from a top-down view. I want huge, dynamic
battles or storms you must try and survive.
I want a fireman simulator. I want a world
editor. I want Destruction Darius 3. Tuxedo
labs are onto a winner with what’s being
built here, but I think they’re right to
focus on finishing Teardown before considering
what else they can do with it. But by all
means, leave a comment saying what you want
from the game, because it can only help them
to know.
So thanks again to Tuxedolabs for providing
me with an early preview. When they messaged
me I was actually half way through making
a video summary of everything that had happened
to the game since last time I covered it,
but obviously there was no point in doing
that if I had access to the game itself. It
really wasn’t something I had expected when
I woke up that morning and it did put a smile
on my face, to be able to preview the game
that is possibly the second most anticipated
game in the world right now.
