This is for future development, direction where some games are already going.

I'm talking about adding new parameter to polygons, that defines what they are, wood, plastic, metal, glass. This would be just one parameter that effects how polygon/model reacts to forces, does it go to pieces, bend, etc.

Also would be good to have strength parameter added to it so you could define how strong material is, for example armco metal is stronger than body panels etc.

This is just to give ideas and heads up for direction where future goes

Nice idea, but I doubt it will ever happen. Physics engines need to be written to support the different materials. LFS would likely have to be almost completely rewritten, so I don't think we'll even see this in S3.

We've got rubber, metal, glass, and brick/concrete. I think that defining those four things would be plenty, and other than glass it's pretty much already done (not by defining the material, but by defining the object). I don't see a whole lot to be gained by going through the trouble of worrying about other materials.

Quote from Cue-Ball :

Nice idea, but I doubt it will ever happen. Physics engines need to be written to support the different materials. LFS would likely have to be almost completely rewritten, so I don't think we'll even see this in S3.

We've got rubber, metal, glass, and brick/concrete. I think that defining those four things would be plenty, and other than glass it's pretty much already done (not by defining the material, but by defining the object). I don't see a whole lot to be gained by going through the trouble of worrying about other materials.

No we don't have any material yet.

This can be made simple method or not so simple method, one coming PS3 title is using not simple method, but I doubt PC will have such resources even at time of S3, however even with simple method we could gain a lot.

Also I don't see why whole physics should be rewritten as basically it is only part of damage model.

Quote from JTbo :

This is for future development, direction where some games are already going.

I'm talking about adding new parameter to polygons, that defines what they are, wood, plastic, metal, glass. This would be just one parameter that effects how polygon/model reacts to forces, does it go to pieces, bend, etc.

Also would be good to have strength parameter added to it so you could define how strong material is, for example armco metal is stronger than body panels etc.

This is just to give ideas and heads up for direction where future goes

What you are saying is actually quite a lot work to put into something the end-user might not even notice. Modern games already have these "polygon materials", but mostly it is just can break/can't break type of simple check box in the editor. There aren't many other check boxes even needed imho. Graphically we can already have quite many different materials. But to give polygons physical properties and calculate everything from that is just a huge task. In games it is the most important thing that the graphical effect is as close to desired effect, not that the armco bends just right or the house explodes just right when you throw a grenade in.

The "simple" effects we have today are parts of the game engines' own code. I don't expect this to change. Of course it is possible to make a game engine that simulates different materials but the name of the material isn't enough, the said system needs to be able to calculate the forces using the polygon's dimensions. This is where it gets tough

Umm, we have only moving of vertexes now, quite many current games have only this.

It is possible to make pretty decent simple form of this without need to go from one extend to another
Also it is possible to add features without rewriting everything.