Quote: "The problem with a breakable wall in the sense you are asking about would be the number of polygons.
Typical walls are made with hundreds, if not thousands, of bricks. A normal FPS level with buildings constructed like this run in the single digit frame rate range if they didn't just crash."
if done correctly, this wouldn't be an issue. bricks can be scaled up so that polygon count is irrelevant. excluding bricks that cannot be seen would help too.
the real issue here is computing power. when you say "realistic physics" we have to ask "how far do you want to go?" With games, physics is far from realistic and often has bugs. in games, the goal is to make it LOOK realistic and that is all that matters.
if you haven't taken a physics class then i HIGHLY suggest you take one, or this project will be near impossible for you... unless of course all you are looking for is gravity, basic collision, ect.... then this is doable.
so, if u want complete control over your physics engine and fast collision detection, get sparky's collision plugin. this will handle all of your collision. adding gravity and energy/momentum transfer is relatively easy to do once u get it setup.
if sparky's is over your head, then you might want to check out particles. 3d particles can be used so that once an object is destroyed, it "becomes" a shower of particle objects that fall to the ground and then fade away. no where near realistic, but quite easy to do.
