Just a small thought but for most "ground-breaking" landings in the Matrix movies, no more than a small area is ever damaged. EG. when morpheus' knee goes through the floor in the dojo or when he breaks the tile on the roof in the "jump" program. Only Neo really smashes the place up.
A small smash sprite projected (shadow style) or positioned fractionally above the surface landed on, and a small but of dust. Surely the textures include surface types for producing sound effects. eg: dirt, metal, concrete, wood. Right there is the 4 possible landing effects you would need. dirt (gravel, grass) = dust only. concrete = dust and smash. metal (tops of signs, warehouse roofs) = dent. wood = same as concrete (perhaps brown dust for wood and white for concrete)
If you want to talk lag, the above efects are all generated client side and can consist of as little as 4 triangles (2 per square sprite - 1 for smash and 1 for dust) and 2 maybe 3 textures depending on dust and impact textures.
If the sprites are small there will be little overhang. perhaps the code shockwave shoud start at the level of the surface impacted. Basically the shockwave is the matrix code taking the force that would normally crush bone, and displacing. So code coming out of the ground would make sense.
I would like to be able to roll out of a landing and come up running if the jump was less than, say, 75% of max distance for my level or less than 20m, however this would require the player to be holding the "forward" button upon landing to produce the roll effect. I could see why this might not be implimented, imagine landing on a thin ledge and tumbling forward on the spot.
