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

There really isn’t such a thing as thickness per se in 3D models. Every object in any game you have ever played is simply an empty shell, and this shell is infinitely thin. Even accurate physics simulations with millions of particles are limited by the fact the particles can only be so small before it becomes impossible to process by any system that currently exists.

Solid objects in the world have “thickness” because they are composed by trillions and trillions (and so on) of atoms, and you simply cannot make something anywhere close to a real solid object in digital.

There are ways to get better collisions though, but I am nowhere smart or qualified enough to tell you how that’s done.