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Breakable Ice

Currently, this feature is used in SnowRunner only.

Overview

On your winter maps, you can create areas of "breakable ice".

These areas work as areas of deep mud, but a little bit differently: the player drives on the ice/snow surface, the ice becomes broken, the player's vehicle may get stuck in the mix of snow, ice, and water below the broken ice surface.

NOTE: The player's vehicle will not go fully under the ice. However, the player will experience some difficulties due to broken ice and will see nice visuals.

Using this technique, you can create a frozen swamp:

Or, a shallow frozen river:

Process

To create a breakable ice area:

  1. Ensure that your map has the correct Extrudes To Wetness value. In the Terrain Properties of the map, the Extrudes To Wetness value should be equal to 1.

  2. Create a PBR material with the ice_02 texture as one of the layers. See Material properties for details.
    The recommended scheme of layers for the material is the following:

    a. Layer 1 (base layer) - up to you.

    b. Layer 2 - the ice_02 texture.

    c. Layer 3 - the snow_layer texture.

    d. Layer 4 - do not use.

  3. Paint the necessary area of the map with the ice_02 layer of the material. We recommend you to use areas of flat terrain for that purpose.

  4. Paint the area from Step 3 above (the area with ice_02) with the Mud brush in the Extrudes mode, with the Value = 1.0.

  5. Create a Distribution based on the one the following brushes:

    • IceChunks (for ice on a river)
    • IceDirt (for ice over a swamp)

  6. Paint the area from Step 4 above (the area with ice_02 and Extrudes) with the created Distribution, in the Density mode, with the Value = 0.80.

  7. If you were painting with the IceDirt distribution (to create a frozen swamp), paint the snow (snow_layer) over the IceDirt area from Step #6, to cover the surface with snow.

  8. Create a River object and locate it directly below the terrain surface, to add water that will appear when the ice will be broken.

  9. Optional: If necessary, you can add the ice_underwater_... models below the river surface for prettier visuals.

    NOTE: A vehicle needs to be rather heavy to break the river ice, so use large trucks for debugging it.