Author Topic: How to implement damage Decals on ships  (Read 7630 times)

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Offline Raven2001

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How to implement damage Decals on ships
hmmmm... you talk a lot about the poly count drawing too much mem, but here's what I think:

What really may slow the game are textures. Why?

Take starlancer for instance: a fighter there has 1200 polys!! Darn too much for FS, but in Starlancer in my old 800 MHZ with an ATI Rage 2, the last mission (where you have lots of caps and fighters - BOE mission :) ) works just fine, while in FS the mission of the Colossus vs Repulse, when the Colossus jumps, the game slows down... I think this is mainly because in Starlancer trhey change a ships textures when it is a BIT far away to a lower resolution, and don't use lods... while in FS the game only changes LOD's and textures, when the ship is pretty far away (of course, that can be changed in the .tbl file...)... So the big probs with slowing downs are the textures, not the models. Am I right??

So what we need to do first is find a better way of texture changing before doing anymore tweaks in the graphical engine...

I say NO to LODs (not the debris, of course...), but yes to better texture changing only...
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Offline Bobboau

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How to implement damage Decals on ships
I am beond sure SL uses LODs
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Offline IceFire

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How to implement damage Decals on ships
100% sure that they use LODs.  I've looked at the model format a bit and thats a for sure.  There's a bunch of reasons why they can pull off 1200 polys on a fighter.

1) They have a more recent engine with more features and taking advantage of a faster DirectX version.
2) They have a fairly efficient LOD system but its kind of noticeable.  On the highest of details, do a flypast into the sun.  Watch as a few details from the ship disappear (especially the underslung missiles).
3) The way StarLancer works, your close to a ship less often than in FreeSpace.
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Offline EdrickV

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How to implement damage Decals on ships
FYI, the Robotech MOD uses some fighters with 1096 polys. Granted, not all of them are shown at one time (due to the fake turret transformation system) but that's still a lot of polys for a fighter with only 1 LoD. And it works, though I think too many fighters may cause my computer to crash with that mod. But I just have a several year old V3. :)
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Offline Grey Wolf

How to implement damage Decals on ships
My X-wing has 1500 polys and works fine in FS2. Admittedly, it is in 3 subobjects, but....
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Offline Bobboau

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How to implement damage Decals on ships
well it has to be with that many polys
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Offline Grey Wolf

How to implement damage Decals on ships
Also, the third subobject is so you can blow up R2....
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Offline Bobboau

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How to implement damage Decals on ships
:D

anyway I like Dave's Idea
(#2)
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How to implement damage Decals on ships
Quote
Originally posted by Raven2001
hmmmm... you talk a lot about the poly count drawing too much mem, but here's what I think:

What really may slow the game are textures.


More polys inpact mostly the CPU, where more/larger textures have a greater impact on the video card. Which slows down things more depends on which is the bottleneck on your system.

I like Dave's method #2 too :)

 
How to implement damage Decals on ships
The real question now is, does anybody know how to implement it?

 

Offline Kellan

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How to implement damage Decals on ships
dave does. :p

Umm...regarding damage. Maybe it'd be best to start with damage decals applied only for beam weapons and bombs - which would immediately cut down the number of possible decals that could be applied. Fighter weapons might not do enough damage to leave noticeable damage other than the usual spark trails...

 

Offline IceFire

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How to implement damage Decals on ships
I'd feel satisfied with that for sure Kellan.  A big mother of a bomb leaving no mark sometimes feels a little silly :)
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Offline aldo_14

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How to implement damage Decals on ships
Actually....if you could have a fairly simple design, you could use a second hullpate-  a 1 sided plane - which gets blown off to reveal damage...  tough, but probably do-able if you are very careful with clipping.

Obv. not ideal, but it;s a workaround until someone figures out how to code real decals.

 

Offline Nico

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How to implement damage Decals on ships
for gighters, maybe switching to an alternate damaged map when the hull drops under 50% would be way enough, i think.
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Offline Bobboau

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How to implement damage Decals on ships
what about only leaving say 60 decals from small weapons, only 20 per ship, then swich damage skins
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Offline Turnsky

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How to implement damage Decals on ships
check out the damage modeling in Homeworld, then look at it on cataclysm.
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How to implement damage Decals on ships
LordHavoc implemented a "damage" style thing for the world geometry in darkplaces http://sf.net/projects/darkplaces/ that could probably be adapted for models, etc. He calls them "stainmaps" he uses them for blood and slime, etc. in the game. You can't use any code at all from his project in the freespace2 source because of the license issues, but you'll need to do somewhat different anyway, so read for an example to get ideas, then write your own...