[Prophet]

How many of you like that when ship is destroyed it first expands in to a fiery sausage, and leaves behind few pieces of junk?

I just loved Starlancer, where the ships leaved behind a burning twisted hulk. Ofcourse we cant do that in FS engine, or can we? As I understand we can define what kind of stuff dying ship leaves behind... So what would it look like when Fenris just breaks in to 2 or 3 big parts. Or Hecate just fades away and stays there, slowly spinning towards the stars...

Ofcourse if Sathanas fires a full barrage at Hecate and it just stays there dead would look goofy. In that case it could blow brightly in to pieces. But not expanding in to a fiery tube.
BOOOM-pot-pot-pot-pot-pot
Few massive explosions around the model that would break it apart would look cool. But just break it, no expanding tube explosion sequence. And the debris would remain there, floating. Velocity almost down to zero. Currently the debris speeds away in to space and it feels like the ship has disappeared. I would like it to be apparent that a vessel was destroyed here.
I know some will state that the blast would push the debris away, but who has accused FreeSpace of being realistic? I like debris field more than two pieces of junk speeding at opposing directions...

How about this?
Would it be possible to make the game count inflicted damage after the ship has died (hull 0%). So that when you torture a cruiser to death with your subach it gives few explosions along the hull and then stays there floating, dead...
But if sufficent damage is inflicted to the ship (like beam or volley of cyclops) the ship says BOOOM! And is cut into 2-4 parts...
Or simply that beams and bombs make big boom. But "laser" weapons leave a dead hulk...

So kinda like Starlancer, only better.
What are your thoughts about this? Would it be hard, or worthwhile to implement?

[WMCoolmon]

*runs*

[Fury]

Dunno but my biggest gripe with explosions is that the engine scales explosions too big, especially on the bigger ships.

[karajorma]

I posted a method to do it over on the BSG forums and got almost completely ignored.

Feel free to use this if you want to.

[Prophet]

Yeah, that works too. But it would look cooler if the ship had a couple of explosions along the surface...
And it would still blow up ugly...

[karajorma]

Explosions could be added (with or without shockwaves) using the explosion-effect SEXP (something I forgot to add to the example I gave).

Blowing up a few subsystems could simulate explosions propagating across the surface.

It's not as cool as a proper SCP coded system for doing it but I've never been one for sitting around scratching myself while waiting for the SCP to implement something. I'll put it in with SEXPs and yank it out again if they implement something before I'm ready to release

[Prophet]

Yes... I was going to mention that in my previous post. But I figered theres no need since it would only be useful in isolated incidents. Thought I indeed have found it handy for creating some extra cool explosion related events...

But that's not what I was aiming for. Nice try...

[karajorma]

Not sure what you mean by isolated incidents. I could get a system like I've described to work with any capship in any mission I wanted it to.

In fact the only reason this isn't in SoR already is that I've only got a couple of caps in the campaign and neither of them should be reduced to a hulk at any point in the campaign

[Flaser]

There's a massive gameplay/FREDing issue: What if a hulk reaims in a mission critical area.
Moreover: How do ships avoid a hulk?

Gameplay issues aside I have had a suggestion quite a while ago:

Let's ditch the whole hull value as the main "heath" of the ship concept...for capships at least.
To simulate the whole cracking/splitting of the ship let's just do that: a ship splits when its structural integrity is compromised.

In English: it's cut. What is it that actually keeps the ship together? The frame. (The armor's only grafted onto the frame.)
So whenever the frame's cut the parts of the ship on the two sides of the cut will break apart.

OK, how do we detect when the frame's cut?
Insert it as a subsystem.
OK, but how will that tell us where the cut occured?
Insert a dozen inter-connected subsystems in sensible locations.
Wherever the subsystem got it is where the cut and break up will be.
OK, but isn't that kinda rudementary?
It is, but it will make a break ups more sensible, and manageable without a very advanced dynamic model format.

Problems, implementations, not so nifty but icky details:

So far we don't have a hit-location sensitive damage modelling.
Moreover ships attack another ship wherever they happen upon its surface.
So somehow this system has to keep the distributed damage too.

This lead to the reusal of an idea, that otherwise will be only useful in a much more advanced damage modelling:
Connect the frame-subsystems in a hierarchy. Whenever a frame-sys is hit, damage is applied to its parent, its parent's parent and so on and then from the parents to the so far unaffected childs. The applied damage is based on a table formulae that tells how much damage is transfered from a child to its parent and from a parent to the childs.

That way all frame subsystems gradually loose hp, but the break will still appear where the most damage was taken.

OK, but I still haven't answered how the split should be implemented.
My guess is that we could use the already existing break-points code, and put them into the pivot of the frame-subsystems.

[Prophet]

Originally posted by karajorma
Not sure what you mean by isolated incidents. I could get a system like I've described to work with any capship in any mission I wanted it to.

Moving capships? If the ships stands still in a battle it sure as hell gets blown up, and we get to fiddle with explosions. But how often we can accuratley predict where the ship will be and when it will explode? Thats what I meant with isolated incidents...

Originally posted by Flaser
There's a massive gameplay/FREDing issue: What if a hulk reaims in a mission critical area.
Moreover: How do ships avoid a hulk?

Just a FREDing prob. And most certainly not a massive one. And the hulk would be like debris now is. When it hits something it gets blown up.

The rest of your post... I'm not sure if I understood correctly... You're talking about geo-mod?


Anyway. We have now established that we can produce ship hulks without further code changes. Even if the method is crude.

But I havent heard what you think about the results of ship being blown up.

A. Remember when Sathanas got blown up? It was cut in two. And those two pieces went flying trought space with boom-boom-boom sound. I think it looks funny. Not cool anymore.
Now imagine what it would have looked like if the explosion had not expanded like that. But instead the ship had been eaten away by fire right where it is, not kilometers away. Besides, what kind of explosion expands only in two directions, when there is empty space all around?

B. When a ship blows up in FS only small pieces remain. Where does the rest go? 4/5 of the ship just disappears. A car is not vaporized when you shoot it with bazooka as far as I know. The debris should be bigger!

[StratComm]

I'd love to have a FRED-setable tag for ships (on an instance basis) for leaving a hulk, sort of like a special explosion.  The hulk could be LOD0 without glows, or a special submodel or POF chunk that the game recognizes and could be added to models.  The biggest problem with a hulk is the tendancy of debris to fling away at hundreds of meters per second, which obviously a burnt-out hull would not do.

[Prophet]

Now thats a good idea! Just requires damaged texture maps.

[Turambar]

banging up a texture shouldnt be too hard

[Flaser]

Originally posted by Prophet

Moving capships? If the ships stands still in a battle it sure as hell gets blown up, and we get to fiddle with explosions. But how often we can accuratley predict where the ship will be and when it will explode? Thats what I meant with isolated incidents...

Just a FREDing prob. And most certainly not a massive one. And the hulk would be like debris now is. When it hits something it gets blown up.

The rest of your post... I'm not sure if I understood correctly... You're talking about geo-mod?


Anyway. We have now established that we can produce ship hulks without further code changes. Even if the method is crude.

But I havent heard what you think about the results of ship being blown up.

A. Remember when Sathanas got blown up? It was cut in two. And those two pieces went flying trought space with boom-boom-boom sound. I think it looks funny. Not cool anymore.
Now imagine what it would have looked like if the explosion had not expanded like that. But instead the ship had been eaten away by fire right where it is, not kilometers away. Besides, what kind of explosion expands only in two directions, when there is empty space all around?

B. When a ship blows up in FS only small pieces remain. Where does the rest go? 4/5 of the ship just disappears. A car is not vaporized when you shoot it with bazooka as far as I know. The debris should be bigger!

NOT GEOMOD!
Don't even say it!

(Looks like it will be one of those ideas I will keep repeating until something else will actually develop into that).

It's about advanced damage modelling and break up simulation.
With the current system any ship simply breaks up to a pre set parts of debris and that's it.

By using non-targetable, damageable subsystems a little tweaking and an intelligent reworking of the current break up method we could create the hulks you're looking for (that will break up in a sensible manner, where they took the crippling hit.)

[Prophet]

Originally posted by Flaser
By using non-targetable, damageable subsystems a little tweaking and an intelligent reworking of the current break up method we could create the hulks you're looking for (that will break up in a sensible manner, where they took the crippling hit.)

Thats not what I was talking about... But would be very nice to see...

[karajorma]

Originally posted by Prophet
Moving capships? If the ships stands still in a battle it sure as hell gets blown up, and we get to fiddle with explosions. But how often we can accuratley predict where the ship will be and when it will explode? Thats what I meant with isolated incidents...

I can place one big shockwave at the centre of the model easily by using something like this in the SEXP I posted earlier

Explosion-Effect
-get-object-x
--< argument >
-get-object-y
--< argument >
-get-object-z
--< argument >
Other Explosion-Effect perameters.

I could also make random explosions at other subsystems without too much of a fuss using the get-relative-object-axis SEXPs.

It wouldn't look as good as a proper SCP implementation most likely but it would probably look less out of place than the current debris flying off at the speed of light system we see now

[Prophet]

Say what? I didn't know you could get x,y,z from a moving object!?

Hmn. What I mean is that I have not been FREDing for months because of assorted hard drive problems.

[WMCoolmon]

http://fs2source.warpcore.org/367sexps.html

You can get a 100% up-to-date list from any build by using the "-output_sexps" command line parameter and openeing "sexps.html"

[Prophet]

Most useful that link is...

[karajorma]

Originally posted by Prophet
Say what? I didn't know you could get x,y,z from a moving object!?

You've been able to do that for a while actually. One of the earlier SEXP additions in fact.

There's a lot of stuff in FRED that people have hardly touched you know