Mule

[chuck_starchaser]

Sounds good, Klauss; I'm all for it. It's going to be a hell of a lot of work, though, like we need to upgrade HUD's to have ship schematic representations showing the damaged areas. As far as showing local damage on the textures, I'm not sure how this would work; but games that animate meshes need to send bone positions and stuff to the gpu somehow; so we could conceivably use a similar mechanism to indicate which areas are more or less damaged, then the damage is computed per vertex in the vertex shader and interpolated?

[Deus Siddis]

When a hull section looses structural damage, the graph lets the engine analyze which other sections would "split apart" - I don't think we can show splitting yet, but the damage system could account for it, so if a wing gets pounded too hard, wingtip hardpoints and their weapons get destroyed as well.

I was going to suggest the same basic idea about a year ago, but I thought no one would want to implement it.

In addition, I think we should consider building models with this in mind- modeling the individual models as subunits or such. Then the engine doesn't need to split the mesh intelligently, the subunit and any dependent subunits are destroyed, an explosion sequence is played and maybe the severed areas bleed fuel/gas/fire/plasma/etc. It would add so much more aesthetic and gameplay depth to have ships lose major sections as a fight gets serious, rather than ships just exploding all at once when they've had enough.

I would apply the same treatment to fighters as well, I find that in game there are just so many opportunities to target specific parts of an enemy strike craft during a fight, if only there was some value in it.

[Turbo]

it is pretty easy --or at least much easier-- to turn the thruster itself. The same applies, to a lesser degree, to chemical engines in space, where getting rid of excess heat is so difficult. A fin would heat up pretty quickly and melt.

I see your point. I suppose conditions inside the thrusters are different than out in the exhaust stream, so while the thruster won't melt, a vectoring fin might. And it's less stuff to model.

As for damage modeling, being able to disable systems on bigger ships would not only be immersive, but could lead to new types of missions, such as to disable/capture a target by destroying its engine and weapons only.

At the ranges I prefer to fight, enemy fighters are barely bigger than my targeting reticle, much too far away (and moving too fast) to think about targeting specific areas.

[klauss]

At the ranges I prefer to fight, enemy fighters are barely bigger than my targeting reticle, much too far away (and moving too fast) to think about targeting specific areas.

But targetting subsystems is not the only way to acknowledge the existence of the more accurate damage model. Watching a damaged unit fleeing at sublight speeds shows that its SPEC engine was destroyed, or watching a unit spin out of control would suggest damage to one of its RCS thrusters.

In essence, it's immersive, even if you can't target anything.

Ok, so since many people think it would be cool in one way or the other, I'll try to document something feasible on the wiki and later post about it. I'll try to make the system compatible so that it can be implemented without having to rewrite anything.

[Neskiairti]

well, thinking about this... before you get too deep in to bothering to make the ship have damage sections.. you can always take the old starcraft method.

have a little hud item that shows a section by section layout of the ship, color coded to display damage. most of the time you dont see your ship anyway.

then can do the same for the target. a single particle emitter per section arranged in the ship model (or overlaid more likely) can show air leaks, flame, sparks or detonations.

obscure that section of the ship with effects and you should be fine.

with capital ships those would be one per subunit, remove the subunit from rendering when destroyed.