My 2 cents and idea, for your consideration:
Question for all you coders... how hard/resource intensive would it be to impliment a sort of extremely temporary damage decal-style effect, that would allow incoming weapons fire to trigger a small animation on the surface of a ship's hull? Like strafing a capship with some kind of heavy weapon would produce mini-shockwaves parallel to the hull? I would like to see something that creates a simple two-sided polygon (so it could be seen if it bleeds over the back of a small spike or extrusion) that is simple plane mapped with a ring shockwave. Preferably both the size of the shockwave and the animation to play would be modder-defined in weapons.tbl but that may be a later step. I would think that creating the plane itself would be simple enough, but perhaps locating it on the polygon getting shot would be a bit more of a problem. I don't know what makes the damage decals so slow, and I would imagine what I am describing would face similar hurdles, but if there is a way to do it without creating overlays on the geometry itself (not form-fitting animations in other words) I'd love to see a stab taken at it.
