Right, and what games actually used it in real-time to the scale that it's seen in BF:BC2 (i.e. much of the environment)? Again, only CGI/prerendered stuff did that.
you might equate what is done in BC2 with feature film, but it technically is well short of a full effect.
A full destruction effect would:
1) precut the geometry.(if you wanted a custom look, there are automated plugins that will cut the mesh in a less than esthetically pleasing way)
2) do basic dynamics on those chunks.
3) emit particles from the newly exposed surfaces and run dynamics on them.
4) light and shadow those chunks and sub particles.
5) emit dust cloud particle/sprites to cover the transition animation.
6) composite the scene for best impact
7) throw gaussian blur and film grain on top to cover up any remaining ugliness.
BC2 does steps 2 and 5. Source did step 2 and sometimes 5. Source did maybe 5 fragments and BC does maybe 70. This is in line with hardware improvements. Game engines have been doing this stuff for a while, there just doing more of it. Until they add a few more steps it isn't 'feature quality' to a discriminating eye.
That's why I specifically stated "five years ago," with the direct correlation being that five years from now, we might see something to this effect in real-time in actual games.
And my point was that it will likely be 12 years till we see the effects I was working on come to games. The majority of effects: from bump maps, displacement maps, subdivision surfaces, depth of field, etc have taken on average about 10+ years to transition to games from film use(we have been doing this stuff for a while now). The adoption interval is improving but as we've gone along the screen resolutions and color depth have scaled as well slowing actual in game usage. 1080p resolution, 32bit color, 120hz 3d have and will slow down adoption as much as 2k/4k res and HDRI anchored film effects. The only reason people think this stuff is recent is because pixar has been showing the making of stuff on the bonus dvd. The same pixar that was using photoshop3 back in 2000 when everyone was on ps6.
Just because something has the possibility to be "next gen" doesn't mean it actually will be next gen. Would it make you happier if everyone posted "meh." or a mod locked the thread? I just don't understand some people's posts.
More than a few posters in this thread have conflated this demo with "next gen game engine" instead of reading zaitsevs post about it being a film engine "plugin" because of the fact that the guy is currently working at ubisoft. If any of the early posters had bothered to read the credits at the end of the video or read the comments on the linked pages they would have known this was not game related or real time.
I can either post correct information, or post nothing and let people run around with their heads full of fairydust like tweakboy/bot.