How feasible is a Teardown-style railway simulator?

[Recycler]

Imagine a train sim with photorealistic graphics that lets you crash and burn, but it has the same level of destruction that Teardown has (minus the voxels). The closest I've come to finding one is Derail Valley, but it runs into the same problem older rail sims have in that your train just phases through the trees and other terrain without damaging them when you crash.

Would something like Unreal Engine 5 be able to accomplish what I'm looking for?

 

[Marek_Gutkowski]

Try BeamNG.Drive.
It is made for automobiles but there are trains mods for it.

This game is basically a car crash simulator, and by simulator, I mean what actual car makers were using to simulate car crashes in 1980.

 

[Recycler]

Try BeamNG.Drive.
It is made for automobiles but there are trains mods for it.

This game is basically a car crash simulator, and by simulator, I mean what actual car makers were using to simulate car crashes in 1980.

I've seen that game, but what I'm talking about is going further: imagine if the freight cars in the first crash all telescoped and crumpled and the gravel and rails scattered realistically? I'm aware that no rail sim has done it before because of engine limitations, but UE5 has been called a game changer for years now, and I wanted to know the possibilities.

 

[Marek_Gutkowski]

You are asking alot. Gravel would need to be made up from individual phisics objects.
I do not believe there is a game engine out there that van handle 10000 plus mutually interactive objects and still run at more that frame a minute.

You are asking for a rigid body soft body and particle simulations all at once. I am unfamiliar with anything that can do all 3 at the same time.

 

[Recycler]

You are asking alot. Gravel would need to be made up from individual phisics objects.
I do not believe there is a game engine out there that van handle 10000 plus mutually interactive objects and still run at more that frame a minute.

You are asking for a rigid body soft body and particle simulations all at once. I am unfamiliar with anything that can do all 3 at the same time.

So is it mostly an engine limitation or a hardware limitation? Like if you had UE5 on a high-end Mac Pro, which one would hinder the particle generation the most?

 

[Marek_Gutkowski]

So is it mostly an engine limitation or a hardware limitation? Like if you had UE5 on a high-end Mac Pro, which one would hinder the particle generation the most?

You are asking the wrong person.

That being said I would guess it is a coding problem.
Each individual thing(soft body simulation, rigid body simulation, and particle simulation) exists. No one to my knowledge put them all in a video game. They have been used all together in CAD simulations, for engineering and architecture calculations. And those things have been done in the 1980s on AT and XT PC. You can code something that does each of those so it stands to reason you can code something that does it all at once. But you still are faced with coding each and then having them work together.

So I'm guessing you can create something for a video game that would use all three. No one has done it because why would they? The end user would not see all the calculations the game is using. WWIIOL had a very detailed damage model for example, but the player could only see the very often surprising results. A bullet could penetrate the hull and put a hole in the oil filter, the engine would run for 15 minutes without an issue and then it would set itself on fire. That would appear random to a player. VG designers rarely do stuff that the player doesn't get to see 99% of the time.
UE5 is not a physics engine, it is a graphics engine. Its job is to run visual effects. Its internal workings are not that different from what Quake I engine was doing.

But like I said you are asking the wrong person.