APEX Destruction

APEX Destruction enables artists to quickly generate pervasive destruction, which significantly enhances the gaming experience. The turnaround time for adding full or partial destruction to an object is a fraction of the time it once took, due to the fully artist-focused APEX Destruction tool. APEX Destruction provides support for full and partial destruction and both of these Destruction types can be gameplay affecting or not gameplay affecting. Regardless of the Destruction type you use, both will enhance realism in your game.

APEX Destruction is truly cross platform. You can author content once and later easily scale it up or down, based on the underlying hardware platform’s compute performance.

Use APEX Destruction for walls, statues, and fences, plus for more complex items like jointed objects and full buildings. The artist can simply apply any of the standard material fracture settings (glass, stone, wood, and brick/tiles) to any destructible object or adjust the standard settings to create the desired destruction behavior. In addition, these modified material fracture settings can be saved so they can be applied to other destructible objects.

Key features of APEX Destruction include:

• Artist-focused tool to ensure turnkey solutions
• Full artist control over the size of destructible pieces, damage characteristics, and destructible behavior
• Full and partial destruction support (gameplay or non gameplay-affecting destruction)
• Capability of applying any standard or modified material fracture setting (such as glass, wood, stone, brick, and tiles) to any object (walls, statures, fences, jointed objects or even full buildings)
• Cross-platform support (PC, PC+GPU, PS3, and Xbox 360)
• Ease of scalability for all supported gaming platforms
• Support for GPU-accelerated Rigid Body debris
• Support for networking and AI
• Level of Detail control - the amount of persistent destructible debris can be scaled up or down fairly easily to accomodate the capabilities of different hardware platforms

 

APEX Destruction Authoring Tool - PhysX Lab

We designed the APEX Destruction tool (PhysX Lab) with the artist in mind. This focus allows artists to quickly generate fully destructible environments that significantly enhance the overall gaming experience. Artists have full control over destructible object size and behavior, as well as different material settings. Additionally, a preview window lets them simulate the authored destructible assets, dramatically reducing iteration time for creating realistic and fully destructible environments.

 

Additional Game Examples

 

To show how easy it is to add APEX Destruction into a game environment, we converted the walls in the UT3 level "Deck" into chippable walls. Using APEX Destruction, one techhnical artist-no PhysX programmers-spent only 5 days to convert a static game environment into a fully destructible environment. The result? A much more immersive game experience without changing actual game play.

 

Destruction characteristics easily scale, based on the amount of persistent destructible debris, and can therefore be scaled down or up fairly quickly for different hardware platforms.

APEX was designed to ease the game engine integration process which has been successfully verified vis-à-vis our success in integrating APEX into a major game engine which was used to develop the highly acclaimed game Batman Arkham Asylum as can be seen in the video below.