A few weeks ago, a promotional trailer was released for Brothers in Arms 2. It’s interesting from more than a marketing perspective because it reveals many challenges that should be familiar to developers working on first-person shooters. A big thanks goes to Remco Straatman for pointing out some of these issues and the original video. It only hit me a while later that this would make an awesome video blog post.

In this first part of my analysis, I look into destructible cover, in particular how it becomes much harder for the AI to handle if it’s simulated using a regular physics engine. When raycasts are too computationally expensive as a solution, then a behavioral approach is always a good fallback. Watch the video below for more details; it’s 7.8 Mb and lasts for 2:47 minutes.