[WMCoolmon]

Take that one step further...how about ani-glowmapped decals. Dear god!!! The possibilities!! You could have a beam run across a ship's hull and leave behind the glowing wreck of hull plates, that would slowly fade away with time.

*sob* it's so beautiful in my mind... :')

[Bobboau]

I've already thought of all that, now I'm thinking about haveing something that will alow you to leave behind shattered hull plates that conform to the origonal texture, the idea being to give each ship a  damage skin and use the alpha of a decal to blend that texture in over the non-damaged texture + scorching.
once I'm sure the basic decal system is working with out flaw the next thing I plan on doing is (after I get decals working for beams, that is going to be a nightmareish propasition) implement dynamic decals, decals that change texture from frame to frame, this wil alow me to then implement animated decals with animated glow maps, so you hit a ship it's hull busrsts into fire a second later the molten metal cools leaveing a scorched mark on the surface, I can also make some realy cool hit effects useing non-clipped decals set to disapear after the animation runs (this is a hit effect that Carl asked for specificly, I was already planing on implementing it)

so the current decal code, once determined to be solid will, then get beam decals and decals for subobjects (you may have seen that they don't show up on turrets, ect...) then I can start playing with new stuf

[Lightspeed]

The damage texture is a VERY good idea.

[Flaser]

What if we could splice a ship into materials (define areas of a texture) than make custom debris for each material?

As a hit effect each are could spew their own debris model.

[JarC]

Originally posted by Bobboau
the next thing I plan on doing is (after I get decals working for beams, that is going to be a nightmareish propasition) implement dynamic decals, decals that change texture from frame to frame,

One thing, this is all good and well and I absolutely am thrilled by the idea, I do have one minor remark...please, please, please, build in a max-distance at which this effect is shown...like it is not as if I am going to see any of it when the target is more than 500 clicks away from me...? I just pulled this from my hat, have absolutely no idea at what distance this would realy be still visible, but logically speaking this is detail that only should be visible within a certain range (thinking of how much power a GPU must have to keep a decent framerate and how much RAM this is going to cost to store all these ANI frames...)

[Fineus]

Well, in theory you could have LODs for this... further out you might just get a slightly smudged black dot for each decal, which resolves itself as you get closer...

[Flipside]

You'd probably only need 2 lods, one full and one about quarter-size. Anything beyond LOD1 isn't going to need them apart from Beam scars, I would have thought.

[Carl]

just make sure you have indepentent glow+enviroment/spec maps for the damage decals. last thing you want is for a charred mark to be shiny and reflective.

[DaBrain]

Is it possible to use an ani for the decal ?

That would be awesome. (at least for people with high end machines )

[SadisticSid]

Just one thing, can you also make a flag to specify the frequency decal renderings for a beam, since a slasher beam going in an extremely wide arc across a hull can leave only three or four explosion effects right now, which looks kinda stupid.

[Lightspeed]

Originally posted by DaBrain
Is it possible to use an ani for the decal ?

That would be awesome. (at least for people with high end machines )

What would be cool is if you could use an ANI that played to the end and then stopped.

You could make for some nice heat glow effects. But as it is now it would pulse around- something we dont want

[Fineus]

Perhaps if there were two .ani files - an initial damage and a permenant one that plays immediately after and loops... so it could start with heavy fires and sparking then settle down to pretty much dark metallic damage with the occassional spark.

[Lightspeed]

You could do that if looping ANIs work properly with it.

That's a pretty good idea, actually.

One ANI that starts with heavy fire and sparks and loops some sparks after the initial 'blast'.

[Bobboau]

as for beams, I intend to make a spline type thing that uses hit points every few fraction of a second to make a big giant swath of decstruction, on the ends of each spline there will be a capping texture, and there will be a tileing texture between the points in the pline. now the only realy hard part is that with the new decal code this may be extreemly hard to implement as it currently relys upon the UVs out of range not being rendered at all, so tileing of the traditional sence isn't going to work.

and the idea with the damage skin would be something like, you blast a ship with a big missle, then you see exposed internal suports and stuff, the texture would not be alighned to the decal but to the UV coords of the model.

[WMCoolmon]

I just thought of something - how are the textures being applied? I know HTL doesn't like ships with lots of textures, will this cause the same sort of performance drain you'd get with adding more textures to a ship?

[Bobboau]

yup, but there usualy won't be more than two or three textures per ship, and they tend to be the same two or three textures per ship, this is why I said not to give every weapon diferent decal textures.

[KARMA]

1-animated decals for shield hit effect on capships
2-it may be good to have a different shine effect on the decal, overriding the original shine effect. In theory those damaged areas should be less specular than before the damage.

[Bobboau]

if you look at it now decals are totaly matte (well actualy they arn't even lit, but there so dark you don't realy see it)