[Snail]

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

And put your mugshots on all of them? Yeah!

[Dark RevenantX]

Everyone hit by beams/lasers/missiles or the ship blast would be absolutely incinerated and annihilated.  People floating away would invoke the feeling that they were covered in an adamantine suit or something.

Anyway, I feel that the best course of action is first to replace the current blastlet and flame particles with something better as soon as they can be safely modified.  After that would be the time to modify the tables and code in such a way that one of several generic hull-damage overlay textures is revealed on the ship as it suffers damage.  This texture obviously would have a glow map, specular map, and height map.  The third part would be the most lengthy: getting decals to work again.

Also, WMCoolmon's current model for debris is probably the best we'll ever get.  Besides, post processing can probably make the ship explosions look even better.

[Vasudan Admiral]

Anyway, I feel that the best course of action is first to replace the current blastlet and flame particles with something better as soon as they can be safely modified.  After that would be the time to modify the tables and code in such a way that one of several generic hull-damage overlay textures is revealed on the ship as it suffers damage.  This texture obviously would have a glow map, specular map, and height map.  The third part would be the most lengthy: getting decals to work again.

Of all the HTL models that I haven't made, exactly one of them features a custom drawn texture. I don't rate the idea of people going to the HUGE effort of making underlying damaged hull textures for ships as being much higher than say, geomod.
Additionally, that would mean another 3 to 5 large textures per ship, which is way too much cost to performance for the effect you'd get out of it.

The three stages I listed have the advantage of 1) being possible now, 2) being possible with relatively simple code modifications and 3) being already recognised as a long term SCP goal anyway.

Also, WMCoolmon's current model for debris is probably the best we'll ever get.  Besides, post processing can probably make the ship explosions look even better.

Actually unless WMC or a like-minded coder beats me to it, I want to at least attempt to implement that hulk POF idea as practice for my Embedded C course at uni this semester.

[Dark RevenantX]

What I meant was 3-5 total generic damage textures of varying sizes that are applied to the ships.  Just assign a blast texture to a material or something.

[WMCoolmon]

What I meant was 3-5 total generic damage textures of varying sizes that are applied to the ships.  Just assign a blast texture to a material or something.

You'll be able to do that with scripting when I get around to fixing texture replacement. You can also do it in FRED right now, but of course you'd have to do it for every mission in order for it to be effective. (Yes, you can replace all map types with the new texture replacement code in my builds, as long as you assign that kind of a map to the ship originally. So a ship needs a normal map before you can replace it with a damage normal map.)

[Kaine]

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.

I like this idea, a separate "hulk" model for dead cap ships would rock.

As for the "deadly debris" collision problem, I can't see it being a huge code change to allow cap ships to "see" large debris items and treat them as ships to be avoided. the hulk idea would work for this particularly because when you spawn one you could flag it appropriately. The collision detection/avoidance code needs work still anyway iirc.

[Spicious]

Capital ships don't even avoid other ships as it is.

[Kaine]

Capital ships don't even avoid other ships as it is.

oh I really need to get my C on.