[aldo_14]

ooh... forgot about lods actually.  Incidentally, i wasn;t thinking of a boolean geomod as such, rather a sort of 'denting' effect.  If I ever get hthis framework thing I'm working on started, I'll try and come up with a wee demo, just for illustrative purposes.

[IPAndrews]

Then you're going to get the problem of pushing / denting polys out the back of your ship. A problem which goes away if you perform a boolean subtract type operaton. Which you can still use to perform your dent effect by using a shallow cone shaped blast geometry.

[aldo_14]

Originally posted by IPAndrews
Then you're going to get the problem of pushing / denting polys out the back of your ship. A problem which goes away if you perform a boolean subtract type operaton. Which you can still use to perform your dent effect by using a shallow cone shaped blast geometry.

I know, i know...it's just a theory at the mo, and that was the one thing that stuck out to me.  But I think it may be implementable and effective in some form (maybe not in the FS2 engine, of course).  At the end of the day, it's just blue-sky thinking on my part - I should probably have kept my mouth shut.

[IPAndrews]

Originally posted by aldo_14
I think it may be implementable and effective in some form

The day will probably come soon when the maths and optimum methods for real-time geo modding become well known and well documented enough that joe programmer (- maths PHd) can make use of the effect. I reckon it'll be cmmon place in games within the next few years. You'll end up having to spend as much time on the internals of your model as the externals.

[Flaser]

When that time comes IMHO modders would have to spend just as much time designing the interior of their models as their hide...BTW that would be great for making some good cutscenes.

[Sticks]

Then you're going to get the problem of pushing / denting polys out the back of your ship. A problem which goes away if you perform a boolean subtract type operaton. Which you can still use to perform your dent effect by using a shallow cone shaped blast geometry.

The problem with this method is that you generate tons of extra geometry. Think back if you ever modeled anything. Boolean subtracting even a simple plane gives you a mess of triangles to deal with, and cleaning those up isn't a whole lot of fun.

The only real solution I've seen is a voxel type technique which utilizes a set of voxels to represent polygons in a mesh, which are then deformed/removed according to some physical properties. The downside? Don't expect to run it on anything less than a multiple processor system (in real time).

Red Faction used a simplistic CSG subtraction method, and placed rather severe limitations on what could be done. Most of the trouble lies in how to reorganize your mesh data for efficient culling after it has been deformed, not to mention the actual CSG implementation. Then you also have to reorganize AI pathfinding to account for the fact that a portion of the mesh is missing/altered.

The best that FS_Open could hope for is perhaps additional LODs that are damage models. Even then there are significant hurdles.