[Scooby_Doo]

Does the ability to enable/disable subobjects/physical subsystems from the rendering engine exist?  For example, landing gears don't need to be rendered when they're retracted.

[MatthTheGeek]

Detail boxes ?

[Nuke]

i think he wants something more along the lines of conditional rendering. ship parts are taken out of play until certain conditions are true. they wont be rendered or be allowed to take damage otherwise. detail boxes technically are a type of conditional rendering, youre just not allowed to re-define those conditions. you could do a lot of interesting stuff if that were the case.

[zookeeper]

I don't think there are any other ways besides destroying the subsystem (and having there be no -destroyed model) with a SEXP which doesn't trigger any explosions or other effects. Or by changing the ship class when the animation completes, but that's obviously not suitable for general use.

I don't think it's really worth the hassle.

[FreeSpaceFreak]

Use the animation code to 'retract' it inside the hull? It won't be gone, but nobody will see it either.

[Scooby_Doo]

Use the animation code to 'retract' it inside the hull? It won't be gone, but nobody will see it either.

That's not the problem, it's just the landing gear it is rather detailed and wasting polys that could go for other details while in normal game play.

[Dragon]

I don't think this would be much of a problem. As long as you keep mapping efficient (with fighters, you're good at it), it shouldn't be a big performance hit.

[Luis Dias]

Consider the LODs as well. In LOD0, you might have some extra hundred polys, but far enough and you can have the same landing gear for 12 polys or so. Most ships out there will be rendered with LOD1, a few with LOD0. So, don't stop sleeping over this issue I'd say.