Red Faction: Armageddon powered by "hackery"

Volition's Eric Arnold has explained some of the inner workings of Red Faction: Armageddon's GeoMod engine, describing its physics as "hackery".

"Our stress system is complete hackery," Arnold told CVG.

"There's force times mass times something - basic physics equations in there - but mostly it was about just dropping a building and watching it.

"Does this look good, does it not look good? Go back, tweak things. It was about making it feel good, not making it correct."

Arnold also commented on GeoMod's solution to the problem of exponentially increasing complexity in large-scale destruction.

"We scale things up and down based on what's going on. If you hit a wall with your sledgehammer then we'll use those very complex interactions, but during a collapse you just want to see a lot of stuff happening and flying out. The little pieces? We don't really care," he said.

"At the beginning everything interacted with everything and that's why we crawled. We're cutting things out that you wouldn't notice anyway."