I’ve learned that video game ‘clipping’ is caused by high velocity, thin colliders, and too-slow physics updates. Why are terrain surfaces in most 3D video games paper-thin? Why isn’t terrain given extra fill/thickness inside and under it to prevent ‘falling through the map into the void’?

Question

I could see why you might not want to fill under the terrain in a game that features things like underground caves, but thin terrain seems to be present in a huge majority of 3D games (even those without underground features) and is not engine-specific. Why is terrain almost always a fragile piece of origami that’s so easily punctured?

In: Technology

Answer 1

In older games like Mario 64 they didnt do sweep tests. They did per frame checks. They assumed you couldn’t get enough speed to move fast enough in a single frame to move through a surface. Insert the backwards stairs jumping trick and you gain enough velocity to go through walls. Modern games will parameterize the collision check by time (t0 and t1) and detect when/if the collision happened.