Great. A discussion about explosion effects. Prompted by a SCP coder no less
. I'm going to take the opportunity to jump in here. Certainly the explosion effect is looking a bit poor at the moment and is probably in need of looking at. Even the effect as it stands now has some issues:
1. When the ship splits in half the two halves move away from one another far too quickly for large ships. When Babylon 5 explodes for instance the two halves must be at least 50km apart by the end.
2. Too many pieces of debris explode immediately and never make it away from the ship's explosion.
3. Those pieces of debris that do survive fly away from the explosion too quickly.
Now as I understand it WMCoolman is suggesting getting rid of hand-modelled debris geometry from game models entirely and generating it on the fly? So you would split up the surface of the model into groups of adjacent polygons. I think this is the basis of a great idea.
You could also add some stuff into ships.tbl to let modders tweak the effect from ship to ship. Such as a setting to tell the game the percentage of the ship's surface that will be turned into debris, and another setting to tell the game how many seperate debris objects/groups of polys should be created.
The issue though as mentioned is what to do with the back of the debris objects you create. The bit that was "inside" the ship.
I believe there are a few approaches to this. The first is to make the polygons double sided and paste a generic debris texture onto the back. The texture could be specified in ships.tbl . This would mean that your pieces of debris would look like bits of the ship's skin that have come off. This might be appropriate in some cases like for smaller ships such as fighters, but used on big cruisers it might make them appear somewhat hollow.
In the case of bigger ships you really want big
chunks of debris. You want the ship to crack apart. So in this case you're going to have to create some "inside ship geometry" for the back of the ship skin polygons to give it some solidity. You can texture that geometry with a table specified texture that might be a repetition of decks of ships and compartments and stuff and the geometry itself could be fairly basic. Your standard asteroid-esque irregular solid. You would though need to ensure that the inside geometry of your debris pieces did not overlap.
As simple as the "inside ship geometry" could be I still imagine it might be quite difficult to generate on the fly. Especially if you are worried about such things as the inside ship geometry of different pieces of debris overlapping. That would take a bit of thought to achieve. I have this idea in my head of picking a few random vertices inside the ship and using those positions to generate all the inside geometry for the different debris pieces, but I haven't thought it through
Still either of these two, or even better a table defined combination of the two...
$percentagechunkdebris: 65
$percentageskindebris: 15
$debrisobjects: 10
$chunkdebristexture: ship_compartments.pcx
$skindebristexture: smouldering_metal.pcx
... might work
extremely well and mean the end of that most tedious part of model making, debris modelling.
