[Herra Tohtori]

Once we get parallax mapping, we could probably pull off some good blast decals, though.  You never know...

We have parallax (height) mapping, it's just that damage decals aren't working and as far as I know, aren't being worked at for the moment.

I'm guessing that with material system it would be possible to set different levels of surface damage to be rendered, either depending on general hull integrity or, say, amount of shots that have hit the ship. Ideally a damage decal would appear where the hit is detected, but I dunno how that would be done regarding the mechanism on how to make a damage decal texture appear on some UV coordinates of the model's surface, and how to make it so that it doesn't meddle with what's going on at the location with normal and height maps otherwise.

[Rodo]

Doing it just for a few subsystems would be a lot more feasible, I guess. But not completely getting blown off, just changing to another submodel that looks slightly damaged. It's been done before (like on the HTL Hecate). Though Galemp didn't say whether or not it was a ***** to do.

what you mean using a replace texture sexp??

[Topgun]

no, blow-up-able subobjects.

[Galemp]

It works pretty well, as you can see on the Hecate. Realistically it's not that different from creating debris, and (despite what VA says) smoothgroups tend to come out well.

There are two big problems: one that's been brought up is that it has to be an unoccupied section of the hull. A turret floating in space above a destroyed object is unacceptable. The other is that sometimes subsystems are repaired in-mission. Consider 'Argonautica' where the Aquitaine is disabled. If the lower engine pods were completely destroyed, when they were reactivated by SEXP the engine glow would be disembodied, with no engine for it to come from.

[bfobar]

I'm anticipating seeing the decals working nicely. The old decals from days gone by looked like I was shooting the ship with notebook paper.

[Gregster2k]

It works pretty well, as you can see on the Hecate. Realistically it's not that different from creating debris, and (despite what VA says) smoothgroups tend to come out well.

There are two big problems: one that's been brought up is that it has to be an unoccupied section of the hull. A turret floating in space above a destroyed object is unacceptable. The other is that sometimes subsystems are repaired in-mission. Consider 'Argonautica' where the Aquitaine is disabled. If the lower engine pods were completely destroyed, when they were reactivated by SEXP the engine glow would be disembodied, with no engine for it to come from.

For this reason I'm thinking that destroying parts of ships should be relegated to in-game cutscenes, or special SEXP'ed events caused by beam fire etc, i.e. a Hecate's engines get ripped off by a scripted beam sequence, but never a bombing from a player.

[Solatar]

Or perhaps an in-mission checkbox on the ship? If I know the engines will get repaired, I check "no destructible subobjects" and they can't be destroyed.

If I'm just going to blow the ship completely away anyway, why not destroy a few sub-objects?

Would it be possible to somehow "slave" sub-objects to other sub-objects? If that large fin goes or whatever, the two turrets mounted on it go as well.

[Vasudan Admiral]

Would it be possible to somehow "slave" sub-objects to other sub-objects? If that large fin goes or whatever, the two turrets mounted on it go as well.

Yeah you can do that by setting those turrets to be children of the subobject piece that they're attached to. Though I've never tried it myself, AFAIK that works ok.
Hierarchy wise it would then look like....

Hull
|- StarboardFin
|   |- Turret01
|   |- Turret02
|
...kinda thing.

Setting it up so that you can blow up pieces of a ship isn't hard and can look good, but setting up a ship so that you can do that too the entire ship is a different thing all together. The effort you'd have to go through to do that for even a small capship, and the massive blow to rendering efficiency it would cause are both huge.

[Kaine]

I think having permanent damage decals with parallax support would be a good way to go. Setting some up to glow brightly would give the impression of internal fires then fading to a dark hull hole. Also making ships not break up into such small chunks... I'd like to see cruisers broken in two, smouldering as it drifts through space like in this pic...


breaking ships up as much as we do right now doesn't leave much room for detail or atmosphere, with so many chunks we are forced into low poly, low detail debris. My ideal scenario would be hulking wrecks of ships becoming battlefield obstacles to be dodged during combat, fighters flying around the ruined hull of a cruiser in chase of enemies with tiny pieces of debris making dull thuds as they glance off their hulls... With a couple of large pieces of a ship and a surrounding/trailing debris field we could create an awesome atmosphere.

[Snail]

I think having permanent damage decals with parallax support would be a good way to go. Setting some up to glow brightly would give the impression of internal fires then fading to a dark hull hole.

That's how it did work (there was a short "burn" texture which became a "hole" texture)

Also making ships not break up into such small chunks... I'd like to see cruisers broken in two, smouldering as it drifts through space like in this pic...
<snip>
breaking ships up as much as we do right now doesn't leave much room for detail or atmosphere, with so many chunks we are forced into low poly, low detail debris. My ideal scenario would be hulking wrecks of ships becoming battlefield obstacles to be dodged during combat, fighters flying around the ruined hull of a cruiser in chase of enemies with tiny pieces of debris making dull thuds as they glance off their hulls... With a couple of large pieces of a ship and a surrounding/trailing debris field we could create an awesome atmosphere.

Well, we already have GIANT debris for the Colossus and some destroyers, which become kamikaze chunks (capable of downing other destroyers), which bugs me. It makes no sense that the debris of a ship could do more damage than the ship itself.

[lostllama]

breaking ships up as much as we do right now doesn't leave much room for detail or atmosphere, with so many chunks we are forced into low poly, low detail debris. My ideal scenario would be hulking wrecks of ships becoming battlefield obstacles to be dodged during combat, fighters flying around the ruined hull of a cruiser in chase of enemies with tiny pieces of debris making dull thuds as they glance off their hulls... With a couple of large pieces of a ship and a surrounding/trailing debris field we could create an awesome atmosphere.

WMCoolmon's build looks promising with regards to hulking wrecks.

http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php/topic,55622.0.html

[Vertigo 7]

i have a crazy idea...

What if instead of having one ship with various sub objects, we have various ships docked with each other to make 1 ship... think legos. i know it would be a ***** to table and a ***** to fred but.. it might work?

[Excalibur]

Not sure if this would work, but just have the subobjects to be destroyed as "turrets", so a ships could basically be a large hunk of "turrets", and when they are destroyed, the destroy detail texture appears.

As for debris, just have some low poly objects classed as "ships" in the tables, etc. and have them "appear" when a ship is destroyed, or have them there at the start of the mission. Have them non-targetable, or low priority or something so they don't appear in the hostile targeting list.

[General Battuta]

Urgh.

[WMCoolmon]

Creating a "ship" involves a hell of a lot of overhead that creating "debris" doesn't. The way that a ship blows up and debris spreads can be incredibly complex. Ever notice how a ship actually splits apart when it blows up? That actually appears to be something in the code that's entirely different from debris, but which is used as the basis from which debris is created. That's also what the "Expl propagates" command toggles. If it's set to NO the ship blows up all at once; otherwise it splits into chunks, those blow up, and debris is formed.

Once debris is formed, you also have to calculate how it's going to move, and how it's going to spin. Not only do you now have to consider those chunks splitting apart, you can also consider the force of the explosion, the mass of the chunk, and the surface area of the chunk facing the explosion, as well as how that might relate to the chunk splitting off either the parent ship or the half-ship. (Does it break apart evenly at all points, or are there support beams etc. that are connected to the chunk that would make a certain part stick a little more?)

Now you can generate lots of little particles to represent portions of the ship. Do these bounce off of ships the mission (prohibitively collision-checking expensive) or do ships unrealistically fly through them?

How does debris go away? Do the lights on the debris flicker or do they go out all at once? How do they flicker? Do textures get replaced with an animation to make it flicker, or is it done in-game? By a special shader? Does the debris move when a ship hits it and, if so, how does it move?

If a ship is moving when it blows up, does the debris continue on course, or does it fly in all directions? Or does it randomly pick one of the two options? Something in-between?

Freespace 2 doesn't do a lot of advanced physics thinking, it approximates a lot of stuff. This makes some things easier, but it also makes it a lot more ambiguous - how many Newtons of force does an explosion with a damage value of "100" represent, anyway? Tooling around with this conversion factor (or how you don't have a conversion factor) can dramatically impact backwards compatibility. Along with all this other stuff. Once debris becomes something that stays around in a mission and doesn't disappear a few seconds after the explosion, it can now hit other things or pose as an obstacle to the AI, or block further shots to ships behind a ship that was destroyed. You can also tool around with debris hitpoints.

[Vasudan Admiral]

i have a crazy idea...

What if instead of having one ship with various sub objects, we have various ships docked with each other to make 1 ship... think legos. i know it would be a ***** to table and a ***** to fred but.. it might work?

Sorry, but that would actually be even more fiddly to set up than building the main capship out of destroyable subobjects, and having a single ship built out of dozens of others would mean you could fit maybe 4 into the 130 ship limits before running out of slots. You would also cause tons of errors and problems like SEXPing things.

Overall for the effort you'd put into building one complete ship you could have built and released an entire campaign. And you'd probably have lots of bugs left over as well, not to mention it would still not look very good.

Not sure if this would work, but just have the subobjects to be destroyed as "turrets", so a ships could basically be a large hunk of "turrets", and when they are destroyed, the destroy detail texture appears.

As for debris, just have some low poly objects classed as "ships" in the tables, etc. and have them "appear" when a ship is destroyed, or have them there at the start of the mission. Have them non-targetable, or low priority or something so they don't appear in the hostile targeting list.

You can already do the second one - you just need a bit of creative SEXPing and a hulk model ready.

The first one is essentially the same as the standard destroyable subobjects idea, with the added instability of making all those subobjects into turrets, which would mean those subobjects would then BE turrets. (Turrets are just specialised subobjects) There'd be no less effort involved than the standard method of making the entire hull volume destroyable subobjects, so all the cons (no pros ) of that method would all still apply.


Overall there are 3 viable options to improve debris beyond what is already in existance:

1) Make more subsystems physical submodels that can be destroyed (as has been done on the hecate). This method doesn't require much more work, and the localised sections mean it's far less likely to mess up much if any smoothing. It can't easily be applied to existing HTL ships but it could be done on future ones.

(Side note here: Galemp - the reason the hecate didn't have messed up smoothing is mainly because max is FAR better with smoothing than the COB format. You can achieve smoothing in max that far exceeds the messy slop that is COB smoothing. If I were to convert the exact same hecate model with the best smoothing settings I can achieve we'd get bad distortion around the seams of the debris chunks.)

2) Have a line in the ships table for each ship that defined a pof to use as a hulk after the main ship is destroyed, and a flag in FRED for each ship to define if it becomes a hulk or not. Upon destruction there'd be the usual explosion but no debris, and the clipping planes would just move out from the centre of the ship in both directions - without the sections drifting apart though. The hulk would be clipped in at the same points - the transition being covered by the explosion, in exactly the same way the current debris work.

3) Parallax/displacement mapped damage decals.

The fourth viable option would be Geomod, and we all know how soon that will be implemented so don't even think about it.

[Vertigo 7]

meh it was just a thought... I only got the idea because I was thinking of doing a model of the Enterprise D  and making the saucer section a separate ship from the main hull and docking the two together, while having the engines from the saucer powered down while it is docked.

[WMCoolmon]

2) Have a line in the ships table for each ship that defined a pof to use as a hulk after the main ship is destroyed, and a flag in FRED for each ship to define if it becomes a hulk or not. Upon destruction there'd be the usual explosion but no debris, and the clipping planes would just move out from the centre of the ship in both directions - without the sections drifting apart though. The hulk would be clipped in at the same points - the transition being covered by the explosion, in exactly the same way the current debris work.

Is there any reason for it to be another model? Do you really need thruster glows, dockpoints, insigniae, gunpoints, missile banks, etc etc?

The fourth viable option would be Geomod, and we all know how soon that will be implemented so don't even think about it.

I already implemented Geomod, but it was in a parallel universe. It's the Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky bridge that's giving us the problem. As soon as it's stabilized, we'll have geomodding.

[Vasudan Admiral]

It should be a separate pof rather than not-moving debris because I know I for one would model hulks very differently to full ship volume debris. Gaping holes, huge blast marks and stuff.

It would also allow us to add hulkified versions to existing ships without the very VERY time consuming process of converting back and forth and making sure everything still works.

You could also do it really snazzily and have debris set for the hulk model. The hulks debris would drift away as soon as the hulk was created, meaning that you could have more delicate aspects of a ship get broken off and float away rather than just disappear upon destruction. That could be quite cool and would be quite doable from a modelling standpoint.

[Vertigo 7]

ooo ooo ooo can we have lil miniature models of people floating away from the hull breach?!