Can someone actually explain why destructible terrain is impossible? No one's ever given a clear explanation of why it's impossible, at best we get excuses or vaguely condescending "it's too technical for you" type responses.
It's constantly stated that the Q2 engine can't handle it, and yet I can boot up Quake 2 right now and blow open a wall in the first level. No one is asking for Minecraft level stuff here where we completely redo a landscape, they just want to blow the wall off a building, something which was doable in a 15 year old version of the engine you guys are using. I haven't gone through the code line by line to see what's different between base ID tech 2 and your enginge, but I would think that if anything it'd be easier now than it was then.
Occasionally someone changes the excuse that it'll cause lag, but I think anyone who has played XCOM will tell you that they'll be happy to sit for a few seconds while that gets sorted out. This sometimes gets tied in with, "it'll break lighting" which didn't even work until a couple months ago anyway and is still finicky. If this is really the case why is an actual gameplay feature getting passed on for the sake of a minor graphical detail?
More recently it's starting to shift towards, we can do it but we'd need to make some new models for exploded walls and/or redo the maps? If it's the art, why do you guys need a half blown up wall to begin with? Just let it be a hole, little art assets like that are things that you can add down the road once the actual gameplay features are done. If the maps are the actual problem I'll fire up the ol' map editor tonight and start poking at them. It'll be time consuming and a pain in the ass, but it's a low skill job that can easily be passed off to the community and taken care of.
