Trees that actually fall

Tree felling has finally had a proper pass.

Up until this point, it was still a little bit prototypey. When you chopped down a tree, everything above the chop point would simply disappear and you would be left with a pile of logs on the ground.

It worked, but it never really felt right.

My goal was always to have trees actually fall using physics.

Ultimately, trees in Evolve are still built from 0.5 metre blocks, so there is only so much you can do before you start fighting against the voxel structure itself. But I decided this was a good opportunity to finally implement a more physical tree felling system.

Now, when you chop through a tree, it actually falls over.

Even though the tree itself is still essentially a long structure made from half-metre voxels, the effect actually looks and feels surprisingly good once it starts moving under physics.

The tree falls from the point where you've chopped it, lands on the ground, and can then be chopped up further. Once the fallen section has been processed, it disappears with a small VFX effect and leaves the harvested logs behind underneath it.

It's a relatively small change from a gameplay perspective, but it took quite a lot of work to get the physics behaving properly.

The end result is that harvesting trees now feels much more physical and much less like a placeholder system.

There are still limits to how realistic this can be while keeping the trees fully voxel-based, but I think this gets the balance into a much better place.

One small note: the screenshot for this journal was taken from an earlier version of the system, so it doesn't quite show the final behaviour where the tree falls directly from the point you've chopped.