[headdie]

I wish to bring up the long-deprecated experimental feature of damage decals, which I would also like to see combined with persistent surface explosion effects to simulate massive damage from hull breaches.

this would be awesome

[Cyborg17]

 I agree that ways to show permanent damage would be the best next graphical step, since it would add the most to immersion.  I also agree with spoon that shields could use some love.

[headdie]

I agree that ways to show permanent damage would be the best next graphical step, since it would add the most to immersion.  I also agree with spoon that shields could use some love.

I had missed that one and yer would love to see that, especially if the test code is still about

[The E]

I had missed that one and yer would love to see that, especially if the test code is still about

It isn't. It got purged along with the rest of the DirectX code a long time ago; Any new implementation of this feature (and I wouldn't hold my breath for it) will have to start from scratch.

[Luis Dias]

That would require a kind of a Valathil-like brilliant shader-fu to pull it off.

[The E]

That's the other thing as well. The original decal code was made long before shaders were a thing in FSO; any new decal code would have to be based on Swifty's work here.

That being said, a working decal implementation would have a few nice sideeffects. Nameplates, for example, would be much easier to do using them (instead of the somewhat awkward way they're done now).

[Swifty]

Yeah, if we were ever to do decals and better nameplates, they'd likely be a screenspace effect since we'll soon have deferred lighting available. It would be the easiest method of pulling it off but would prevent decals from being available on the forward shading pipeline.

[Trivial Psychic]

The original decals were displayed as simple black burn marks on the surface of a ship.  It was never implemented with beams however, because with slash beams, the number of times it makes contact with the hull is dependent on the frame-rate of the machine running the game.  As a result, instead of a swath of damage, it would look more like the beam skipped its way along the target hull.

As for my concept of persistent explosions, the effect would have a single large explosion in the center of the impact point, that would be continuously looping.  Then it would have a series of smaller explosion effects around it, crossing over with the edge of the central effect.  This would give the impression of fires on the surface of the ship fed by hull breaches.  Over time, the explosion cluster would shrink as the oxygen is consumed.  As the explosions recede, the burn decal would be visible underneath.  Obviously, only high-damage weapons would create damage to this extent, and perhaps like beam gutting, it only happens once a ship's overall hull strength drops below a certain level.   All of these could easily be modder-controlled in the tables.

[The E]

Yeah, if we were ever to do decals and better nameplates, they'd likely be a screenspace effect since we'll soon have deferred lighting available. It would be the easiest method of pulling it off but would prevent decals from being available on the forward shading pipeline.

I don't think that's a hindrance, really. If we maintain the forward renderer as the low-end fallback option, missing effects on it are a feature, not a bug.

[Bobboau]

I demand Anisotropy!

[torc]

Oculus rift would be awesome....i know it's not the major improvement, but i'd really like to play diaspora with it

[Deepstar]

I would love to have a real multi-threaded FreeSpace 

Afaik it is still a single-core application? It would have a big performance boost... especially for all upcoming effects and 4k resolutions .

Or instead of new graphiceffects, maybe some sound additions? Things like hardware accelerated surround sound, like in Retail. AMD TrueAudio or others... because ears are also very important .
I think OpenAL uses EFX... but i am not sure if that is used correctly by FSO. Retail uses only EAX(1.0) afaik.

[AdmiralRalwood]

I would love to have a real multi-threaded FreeSpace 

Afaik it is still a single-core application? It would have a big performance boost... especially for all upcoming effects and 4k resolutions .

There have been some experiments done with multi-threading. Unfortunately, since nobody wants to rewrite the entire engine, they've so far been limited to specific sections of the codebase, and the additional overhead tends to cancel out any performance improvements there.

Or instead of new graphiceffects, maybe some sound additions? Things like hardware accelerated surround sound, like in Retail. AMD TrueAudio or others... because ears are also very important .
I think OpenAL uses EFX... but i am not sure if that is used correctly by FSO. Retail uses only EAX(1.0) afaik.

jg18 has been working on improvements to the sound code.