[Nighteyes]

I've been thinking of practical ways to add visible damage to ships as their health gets near 0, after reading a replay of Fury I can see I'm not alone in looking for something like this 

I can think of 3 ways to do this, first is the obvious way of adding all sorts of sub objects that would break apart as they are destroyed, the big problem with this is it takes a lot of work, and most modellers won't have the strength to do this extra(big) step, and even when its done most of the ship still looks 100% clean.

another way would be to add burnt marks and such to the textures and use a script to replace the textures every % of hull damage, the problem with this is the need to have LOTS of textures, both diffuse as well as shine maps would need altering.

third way is probably the "best", I was thinking of having an invisible mesh, a tiny bit bigger then the base mesh, and applay burnt textures with an alpha map only to it, have maybe 3-4 degrees of burnt textures and applay them to this mesh as the hull % goes down.
main advantage of this method is the option to use only 1 texture for the whole ship(good for ships with 2+ textures), decide what resolution to use, as well as not needing to have shine maps.

as I said I would like opinions, maybe there is even a shader solution for this that I'm not aware of...

[JGZinv]

Didn't detail boxing come up with a solution for this a couple years back, or was that the subsystem method?

I'd like to use it in all our ships, but as you said it's very work intensive. Would be nice if PCS2 could auto-gen a damage model
as in your 3rd idea, based one of the existing LODs (probably 0).

[MatthTheGeek]

What you're really looking for is decals. I think I heard a coder say it would be possible once the material system is up. Don't take my word on it though.

[Angelus]

I've been thinking of practical ways to add visible damage to ships as their health gets near 0, after reading a replay of Fury I can see I'm not alone in looking for something like this 

I can think of 3 ways to do this, first is the obvious way of adding all sorts of sub objects that would break apart as they are destroyed, the big problem with this is it takes a lot of work, and most modellers won't have the strength to do this extra(big) step, and even when its done most of the ship still looks 100% clean.

another way would be to add burnt marks and such to the textures and use a script to replace the textures every % of hull damage, the problem with this is the need to have LOTS of textures, both diffuse as well as shine maps would need altering.

third way is probably the "best", I was thinking of having an invisible mesh, a tiny bit bigger then the base mesh, and applay burnt textures with an alpha map only to it, have maybe 3-4 degrees of burnt textures and applay them to this mesh as the hull % goes down.
main advantage of this method is the option to use only 1 texture for the whole ship(good for ships with 2+ textures), decide what resolution to use, as well as not needing to have shine maps.

as I said I would like opinions, maybe there is even a shader solution for this that I'm not aware of...

hm, i'd love to have damage on ships, but i don't think doing it via texture is the best way to do it.
having 3-4 damage textures per ship would still add a lot of textures to BMPman and would look a bit odd, if you have 2 big ships broadsiding each other with their starboard sides and then see that each portside takes also damage.
plus, more then scorchmarks wouldn't be possible with the texture solution, maybe minor scratches, dents and small holes in the armor if one makes excessive use of normalmaps.

adding the damage to the model is imo, at this point anyway, the way to go. despite the ****load of work it adds to the modeling process.



@JGZinv: detailboxing is basically LODing small detail on the ship.

[Dragon]

Decals once were in FSO, but got removed due to bugs. It'd be great to have them back, this time properly implemented.
Perhaps the material system will allow reimplementing them. Yet another reason I can't wait for it.

[mjn.mixael]

 

You were praying that someone would bring this up... again?

[yuezhi]

...i haven't been here long enough

[Rodo]

I cannot offer any other ideas about how to acomplish this, but boy, if this gets in code some day it would be glorious indeed.

[Woolie Wool]

Decals were in the code twice and both times removed due to their propensity to severely break things.

[Droid803]

I think he means geomodding.

[Trivial Psychic]

Destroyable submodels = Can be done right now but uses up subsystems-per-mission count (if that is still an issue) and takes a lot of effort on the part of modelers.

Damage Decals = Has been implemented before with many drawbacks but has serious potential for the future, especially if normal maps can depress the scorched area to simulate hull damage.

Add Either of the above to persistent surface explosions.  This would cause (for properly flagged weapons) continuous explosion effects to hug the hull near the damage point to give the appearance of fires burning from oxygen in the hull.  The effect should look like damage effects seen in the Babylon 5 episode "Severed Dreams", on the Roanoke and Churchill.  I suspect that something like this could be accomplished through scripting.

[General Battuta]

We already have mega glowing trails for beam impacts, though...they appeared in BP2, at least, didn't they?

[redsniper]

I thought they were in MVPs now.

[Nuke]

what about scorch maps?

essentially its a way to render decals directly to a texture, and then use that texture in the fragment shader to "burn" the underlying texture. these maps only need be updated during collision response. of course it will only look right if polygons all have unique (not shared) uv space.

1: fetch a list of all polygons that intersect a set radius around the point of collision
2: using the impacting object's flight path as a frame of reference, rotate vert positions of those polygons into its local space so that +z is the direction of impact. scale and translate the points so that the the impact location is at 0.5'0.5 in the x y and that the projected radius goes from 0 to 1 on both axes. store the x,y coords as uv data.
3: set the texture to the burn mark bitmap (which can be defined on a weapon by weapon basis. this should be transparent anywhere that isnt burned, and should be fairly dark in color. texture should be clamped))
4: set render target to the scortch map
5: draw polygons in uv space (use polygon's own uvs as vertex position and the uvs generated in step 2 as texture coords), they should blend properly with existing content in the scorthc map.
6: use scortch map in the fragment shader to "burn" (probibly multiply against) underlying textures

wheres valathil when you need em?

[Nighteyes]

Battuta: glowing trails are indeed in mediavps right now, what I want is a way for the black burnt line they should leave to show up

Trivial Psychic: spewing particles from weapon impact points is possible, its also possible to have particles spewing from destroyed subsystems, the script M!M did gives you the option to do those things, this is not what this thread is about.

I was mainly speaking about black burnt places on the hull, something along the lines on what Nuke suggested, but IMO asking for every single polygon to have UV space is a bit much... as most ships are mirrored doubling texture efficiency

[Nuke]

I was mainly speaking about black burnt places on the hull, something along the lines on what Nuke suggested, but IMO asking for every single polygon to have UV space is a bit much... as most ships are mirrored doubling texture efficiency

that is an issue. though ive always a proponent of having multiple uv channels, so that unique space mappings can co-exist with space efficient mapping. and many other mapping techniques (such as normal mapping) would benefit from that feature (also being able to generate normal maps for ships that have uv mapping which would make normal mapping problematic, like older models). of course aside from that limitation, the technique has promise.

[assasing123]

I would love dynamic geometry, maybe using some new GPU function, but i m not tech savvy enough to understand if that is possible, just thinking, something like how tesellation adds more polygons and modifies geometry of stuff in real time assuming the GPU supports said function, also...


there was this old game i used to play a lot called carmageddon 2, it is pretty old yet when you collided or whatever, your car would get pretty wrecked and twisted, not sure how the game did it, but to me it always seemed to be the best ever car crashing modelling system ever, properly modded you could get crashes to be way more realistic than any other game. (albeit most people would actually mod indestructible bricks on their tables)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ezhDwAbw6Co

[Nuke]

carmageddon is awesome. i think they just used deformation matrices to accomplish that effect. this is likely limited by the same thing that prevents us from translating subobjects.

[zookeeper]

I'd also like to note that there's some underpinnings for -damaged submodels (just like -destroyed) in the engine, and it might be easy to finish said feature.

[mjn.mixael]

wut. -destroyed already works.