[Galemp]

Hey all, Galemp here. I thought I'd bring up something and see if it's already possible with FreeSpace Open. Namely, the fact that absolutely everything in the game is Made Of Explodium.

Now, I get that this is a conscious design decision. It's a lot of fun watching ships burst as if they were full of pressurized hydrogen, and debris blasting off in all directions. But it would be interesting to see an alternative: debris chunks conserving the momentum of the parent ship, becoming crumbling hulks. It would make more sense and be more impressive for the beam cannons to continue carving up and blasting big chunks of enemy warship.

So where's the variable that sets the explosion force? Can it be set to, say, one percent of its current value, so when a large ship is destroyed its carcass continues to burn and drift apart for minutes afterward, instead of the bits being far flung in space? Rate of propagation (that is, the transition from LOD0 to debris) is just fine currently.

This would have a significant impact on gameplay; imagine how much easier The King's Gambit would be if each ship that jumped in smashed straight into the debris pile-up right outside the node. Therefore it would have to be intentionally controlled by the mod creator, not the player.

[Nohiki]

I'm not quite sure if the explosion force is not set corretly. The ships probably have multiple nucear reactors on board loaded with fuel, and whatever that might be, it's sure to get harmen when the ship breaks appart. And if the reactor was hit by a nuke like cyclops, i think it can make quite a big bang.

[karajorma]

FS2 isn't the only universe using this engine though. In Babylon 5 ships tend to come apart like breaking up lego models (Well in seasons 1-3 at least). Something like this would certainly help make ships look more like they do in the show.

[headdie]

I would also like to have the ability to choose to have a ship just break up, if implemented can we have both Fred and table options for this so a ship can be set to default to one behaviour but if a Fredder decides that for a mission the ship needs to do the opposite they can, perhaps have special explosion override the explodium/fall apart setting in the table.

[Angelus]

I strongly support this. It always irked me, that everything blows up like it has glycerin attached to it. Or explodium.

I would also like to have the ability to choose to have a ship just break up, if implemented can we have both Fred and table options for this so a ship can be set to default to one behaviour but if a Fredder decides that for a mission the ship needs to do the opposite they can, perhaps have special explosion override the explodium/fall apart setting in the table.

^ This.

[Mobius]

Sounds like an interesting idea. Is it easy to do?

[Angelus]

Sounds like an interesting idea. Is it easy to do?

no clue.
But since this FSO and we want this, i guess not. It's never easy. 

[General Battuta]

I'm not quite sure if the explosion force is not set corretly. The ships probably have multiple nucear reactors on board loaded with fuel, and whatever that might be, it's sure to get harmen when the ship breaks appart. And if the reactor was hit by a nuke like cyclops, i think it can make quite a big bang.

Neither fission nor fusion reactors will explode when damaged. The notion of fusion reactors losing containment and blowing up is a long-running myth. But it's maintained in FS because it's cool, I guess.

[Nuke]

i figure it would be realistically difficult to blow a 6km long warship into little tiny bits. i mean you would destroy every crewman and every system long before the ship broke apart. it would be much more like the orion in the fs2 intro cutscene. this wouldnt apply only to capships either. say you shoot out the cockpit of a fighter or bomber, the ship would not just blow up, it would just drift uncontrolled. the only real reason things in games blow up is so they can be removed and the game can run a little faster.

[Fury]

Yes, like most if not all first person shooters have disappearing bodies. Or like in RTS games you have disappearing environment damage and wrecks/bodies. It's about keeping performance up.

I don't deny that hulks would be awesome though.

[Angelus]

i figure it would be realistically difficult to blow a 6km long warship into little tiny bits. i mean you would destroy every crewman and every system long before the ship broke apart. it would be much more like the orion in the fs2 intro cutscene. this wouldnt apply only to capships either. say you shoot out the cockpit of a fighter or bomber, the ship would not just blow up, it would just drift uncontrolled. the only real reason things in games blow up is so they can be removed and the game can run a little faster.

which shouldn't be an issue, if the ships are optimized and one does not play an uber-BoE.
In the end it shouldn't matter if you have 4 capships duking it out, or 3 capships and one large dead ship with smaller chunks of debris floating around.
On a relaed note, since AI isn't applied to debris, by how much would the performance improve( only with 3 instead of 4 AI ships)?

[Fury]

Collision detection is likely the biggest performance hog with hulks.

[The E]

Yeah, one of the reasons why we don't have eternally persistant debris is because it allows us to remove collision objects from the gamespace.

[Nuke]

i figure it would be realistically difficult to blow a 6km long warship into little tiny bits. i mean you would destroy every crewman and every system long before the ship broke apart. it would be much more like the orion in the fs2 intro cutscene. this wouldnt apply only to capships either. say you shoot out the cockpit of a fighter or bomber, the ship would not just blow up, it would just drift uncontrolled. the only real reason things in games blow up is so they can be removed and the game can run a little faster.

which shouldn't be an issue, if the ships are optimized and one does not play an uber-BoE.
In the end it shouldn't matter if you have 4 capships duking it out, or 3 capships and one large dead ship with smaller chunks of debris floating around.
On a relaed note, since AI isn't applied to debris, by how much would the performance improve( only with 3 instead of 4 AI ships)?

im not saying it cant be done, only that it comes at a cost. if you want to do a mod with preference of quality over quantity, by all means do it. you could argue that not all destroyed ships would become hulks, if they took a lot of damage in a very short period of time chances are they would blow up rather violently, but if the ship dies because of that one stray nuke hitting a critical spot, hulking is likely. you might want to limit hulks to particular ship classes, say anything over a km. you could give up rapid firing weapons and instead use slower heavier guns to reduce collision checking. you might want to use collision meshes for highly detailed ships. there are always ways to get a little more performance out of the mod.

[Fury]

Yeah, one of the reasons why we don't have eternally persistant debris is because it allows us to remove collision objects from the gamespace.

And another is that ships may collide with said debris which would give no small amount of headache to fredders since you can't reliably predict where and when debris pieces fly off to.

[Angelus]

hm, would applying a hitbox to the debris chunk have an positive effect on collision detection?

[Goober5000]

Rewriting the collision engine would have the most positive effect on collision detection.  It's a mess and has been so since retail.

And debris chunks already have a hitbox, I think.

[Nuke]

i think it goes through a radius check first. then does a bounding box test, and if that passes it delves into the octrees (i think fs uses octrees anyway). the reson for the first two tests is to eliminate near misses from costing the game a rather time consuming process.