Originally posted by KrazyKoasterKid
Well yeah, but still, boneplaya. How awesome would that be, though? Let's think, how can this hurt/help NL.
Help: More fun, cooler (not to mention, realistic) crashes, damage engine and all
Hurt: More noobs, more game-like than simulation
IMO the good outways the bad.
Do you realize how hard it is to program a damage engine into *anything*? Remember, all those trains are are a bunch of polygons, and they would have to warp on impact, which wouldn't be that bad, but simply modeling the underbody in case there is a crash would not only waste poly's, he'd have to warp *those* on impact as well. And if the crashes were to be realistic, things would break, bend, crack, tear, etc, all of which would require real-time, detailed structural analysis, and in case you didn't know, structural analysis is not easy to do in real time in 3 dimensions. Sure he could just make the crashes really RCT-like, but then you lose (in my opinion, anyway) some of the realism that Ole is working so hard on in NL2.
I'll put it this way: as I said, crashes would be great to have, but are certainly not at the top of my personal wish list. I'd rather Ole come out with an incredible roller coaster simulator as NL2, and then hire someone else to work on the more "fun" parts of it. Alternatively, he could provide APIs for people to add their own stuff (like, say, crashes, animated 3ds, a better wood support generator, etc...). Honestly, I would mind it at all if he'd release a development API for NL1. That would make it easy to create your own train styles and everything.