Triggerable Avalanche, Possibly?

[117]

Would it be possible to make a triggered avalanche? It sounds plausible to me, but I figured I'd ask around and see what you guys think about it.

[English Mobster]

Well... Yes and no.
You could fake one with lots of scripts and lots of trigger volumes, I suppose...

Problem: How the hell would you animate it? Animate every damn particle of snow sliding down the hill and make them scenery?

[annihilation]

Possibly make it a vehicle falling down hill.
E: I don't think my idea would work.

[English Mobster]

You'd have to make every flake of snow a vehicle for it to look believable.
The sheer physics calculations for that would cause exceptions.

[Higuy]

It's possible. Both idea's would work. Just a matter of looks really though. I would go with animation, it would most likely look better.

[jcap]

It depends if you want your avalanche to be in the distance as something pretty, or if you want the person to be inside it. If you want it to be in the distance engulfing scenery, you can probably just do the same approach as smoke.

[Dwood]

It depends if you want your avalanche to be in the distance as something pretty, or if you want the person to be inside it. If you want it to be in the distance engulfing scenery, you can probably just do the same approach as smoke.

Con, I request you do an avalanche sky and make a tutorial out of it.

[117]

I was thinking something with smoke particles or something similar; using vehicles is impractical and laggy, and I do want to see if it works with players/etc. I'm thinking that the "snow" could have damage attatched to it, so it has the force behind it to shove things around and etcetera. I'm not too worried about the after-effects of it; simply killing anything that happens to get swallowed by it would work, then replacing the area smothered by it with a large piece of scenery via a script would work, or simply having it run off a ledge or something out of the map also could do it. The only thing I'm unsure about is if the engine could handle so many particles moving around; lots of smoke from an explosion is similar, but I doubt it has nearly as many as an avalanche would have. I suppose adding some small "Snow Rocks" in it would work as well for looks.

[Con]

Simply looking at this, you can tell a particle system is out of the question for anything realistic. They're hard to get right, and halo's system isn't able to do anything like this in both behaviour and number. However, if it's something that has to interact with the player and the map, then you would have to settle with something crude. You would need the trigger point to spawn particles with physics that follow the hill. These particles would then create a "smoke" trail of billowing snow that slowly fades out. It would look best if this all stayed within one narrow valley to keep framerates up and make it as convincing as possible. Finally, the physics particles would need some sort of damage effect and sound attachment.

I'm not very familiar with halo's particles, but you might need to use projectiles for the leading ones.

@Dwood
I don't think art tricks can pull this off.

[English Mobster]

This would be very hard to do under ANY circumstances.