[Kusanagi]

I was wondering if it would be possible to implement a SEXP that makes a ship show its damage lightning no matter what its health is. 

[Kolgena]

Maybe... I mean, the EMP triggers damage lightning (or at least being in the Red EMP nebula does)

[FUBAR-BDHR]

Sounds like adding $Damage Lightning Type: Always and a sexp to allow changing the type would be the way to go here.  

Were you wanting this for individual ships or the entire ship class? 

[Kusanagi]

It sounds like it could work for ship classes, especially if you have one ship as a template.

The reason I was asking is because it would be an incredible effect to add to Beast ships. In Homeworld, those ships always had lightning playing around their hulls.

Which do you think would work better in that scenario since they would just be retextured versions of normal ships?

[FUBAR-BDHR]

Well in that case it might be better to just create a mesh around the main hull with no collision and a lightning effect as the texture. 

[Solatar]

You'd certainly have a lot more control over what the lightning effect looked like if you did it that way. 

[Dark RevenantX]

This would still be an useful SEXP for other uses as well.  I could name a number of situations where this would be useful, such as making the impact of a particularly powerful beam seem that much more powerful (the beam won't necessarily knock the hull to 10%, but if it takes off half of the hit points, the ship's going to be in a hell of a shock) by having the ship spark up for a bit and maybe lose the glowmaps/points for a few seconds.  Having some sort of control over the lightning's intensity would be nice as well, but that's entirely optional.

On an unrelated note, is it possible to make it so that the thruster glows don't show if the ship's speed is 0?

[Kusanagi]

Having the glowmaps flicker from a weapon impact? Oooo, I like that idea.

[Bob-san]

Well in that case it might be better to just create a mesh around the main hull with no collision and a lightning effect as the texture. 

Wouldn't that be quite memory-intensive?

[FUBAR-BDHR]

No more memory intensive then any other animated hull texture. 

[Delta_V]

the ship spark up for a bit and maybe lose the glowmaps/points for a few seconds

This could be very cool, and would add to the perceived power of weapons like beam cannons, similar to the beam-pierce effect.  In fact, it might be cool to have the beam pierce happen anytime a beam does more than a certain percent damage to the target, and also have the glowmaps flicker and the damage lightning occur for a few seconds.

[mjn.mixael]

the ship spark up for a bit and maybe lose the glowmaps/points for a few seconds

This could be very cool, and would add to the perceived power of weapons like beam cannons, similar to the beam-pierce effect.  In fact, it might be cool to have the beam pierce happen anytime a beam does more than a certain percent damage to the target, and also have the glowmaps flicker and the damage lightning occur for a few seconds.

yes it would be cool, but that needs to be up to each MOD.

[General Battuta]

Well in that case it might be better to just create a mesh around the main hull with no collision and a lightning effect as the texture. 

Wouldn't that be quite memory-intensive?

I'd be more worried about BMPMAN than memory.

[swashmebuckle]

On an unrelated note, is it possible to make it so that the thruster glows don't show if the ship's speed is 0?

This would be awesome, though it'd be even better if you could specify an alternate image for when the speed is set to zero.  That way you could either make it have no glow at all or have a smaller "stand by" type of glow.  It'd also be great for FotG if were possible to disable the constant jittery flicker that all engine glows do.

[chief1983]

I'm not sure the flicker is the worst of our thruster problems.

[mjn.mixael]

I'm not sure the flicker is the worst of our thruster problems.

It's not.. but this thread is about Damage Lightning.. not thrusters... /getbackontopic   

[Kusanagi]

How about an option in a table entry for damage lightning that works like this:

$Damage Lightning Threshold:

Make it an integer from 0-100 that relates to the percentage of the target's health the lighting will begin to show at. Values of 100 will have the lightning always on no matter what the health of the ship, 0 means its never on no matter what the health, and have it default to 10 which is the "normal" threshold.