I've noticed certain objects deform now, wheels on the 60's cars etc... is it possible to export armco as deformable?
Textured armco damage is a planned feature (or it was last time I heard ). Deformable armco would require more polygons, and the armco support posts would have to deform as well. The deformation for each vertex would have to be calculated, which can be a bit costly in terms of performance. I can't see that happening soon.
I guess it would be costly in regards to performance Although I have seen quite a few demos of soft body physics running on the GPU in games and it seems to work well, but I assume that would require a massive amount of code...
I see it as normal vertex damage that we already see on cars. Instead crashing AI car and damage it, you crash ARMCO and damage it. Yes we can't do it know, but we could... And it's not very much of a performance hit.
As luc said, we do have plans for visually damaged walls and armcos (by way of texture). We did talk about physically deforming armcos and such, but that's a lot further down on the list at this time. But yes, it is possible once they have a chance to code it...
GPU physics has been ruled out for many reasons including that it'd likely require variable rate physics and most (of any) improvement would be seen only in serial processing of separate events. There's a thread on it way back yonder that predates the beta's release somewhere. Best I can understand GPU physics processing only works when physics accuracy and processing is a secondary concern, such as in FPS/action games where it's largely used to govern debris.
It would be very nice to have a sort of "mass" for specific (and movable) objects, like tirewalls...without thinking at this colliders as a rigid walls...
Use the .gdb for that: sign_pbarrier=(75, 45.0, 45.0, 150.5, 2000.0, 120.0, 0.8 ) //<mass>, <inertia x>, <inertia y>, <inertia z>, <spring>, <damper>, <friction> That's one kind of plastic barrier (usually filled with water or sand) I put up that is movable (by a fair bit) but does posses enough mass that it will significantly slow you down/throw you off your line if you hit it. With some experimentation I'm sure you could find some values to simulate the stacks of tirewall with it, if that's what you want.
LOL... If you were curious enough to open some default TDF track file in Notepad maybe you'd reach the genius graduation too.