[Bobboau]

well imagin waching a mara getting cut in two by you're fighter beams
or the arms of a Sathanas getting sliced off
or a huge hole getting riped into an orion
Geo-Mod would be cool

[LtNarol]

well, would the arm truely be sliced off or would it just no longer look like its attached and float on with the rest of the Sathanas in the same direction, speed, and still fire?

[Bobboau]

sliced off, floating away, if it had any smaller turrets on it they might still fire but it doesn't fire the big one

[LtNarol]

how would the engine support this?  2 pofs created out of 1 just like that? not using the debris code and debris models...and what would happen if an orion got slashed just in front of the engines?  how would the game handle that?  the engines still going while the rest of it fighting?

[Bobboau]

hows this it determines all polys that have been cut through, then it determines if the right polys have been cut through to seperate it
then it creates another ship object and moves the center of mass to the center of the rendered polys,
then only render the polys on each ship that it should and have some generated geometry to cap it

[##UnknownPlayer##]

The simplest approach would be something akin to a deformed mesh but a little more complex - you grab the centre of the polygon hit, make it a vertex and push it into the ship then build 4 more polys from this point to the remaining points of the vertex. It wouldn't look good initially, but it would be a start.

[LtNarol]

Originally posted by Bobboau
hows this it determines all polys that have been cut through, then it determines if the right polys have been cut through to seperate it
then it creates another ship object and moves the center of mass to the center of the rendered polys,
then only render the polys on each ship that it should and have some generated geometry to cap it

well, if you think you (or the rest of the team) can pull it off, by all means that would be great; but i have a feeling this is gonna take a lot more coding than everything else combined...and in order to make it more acurate, you'll have to do something for subsystems as well, so that a portion of a ship cut out without the weapons subsystem wouldnt fire its turrets, likewise if an orion got cut apart just before the engines, the front half would drift instead of continue flying in a straight line (this would also require coding for drift, more work).

The drifting i think should be handled first, as it is more immediate and can be used for other things as well.

[Bobboau]

ya, I'm just blowing smoak, I have no Idea how to implement this, and it seems that geomitry modifications are extreemly dificult to do with the type of data structure models are held in

[LtNarol]

thats what i figured...

[KARMA]

i have never played-seen redfaction, i only have caught some words about making holes on walls or even destroy entire buildings...a geo mod like this i presume it will require a development "geo mod oriented" of the code, so it isnt strange that it will be " a little problem" to implement geomodding on an engine not studied for this purpose

but more important i'm not sure it will be  so useful applied to a space sim....i'll try to explain:
a "full geomod" could have a sense on big ships or space station, but not all the parts of a ship have the same importance... because ships are objects and not environment, so heavy geometry modifications should work taking care of hp of the ship and the relevance and the role of the area destroyed (engines instead of hangar bay for example..), so it would be probably done better by making some ships of more destroyable subobjects

a "light" geomod could have more sense probably, just a dinamic and geometric way to simulate some kind of damages like collisions or explosions:
i can think of something like the deformation tolls included in most 3d modelling packages, like even truespace, don't know if it is possible: a 3d grid (a cube for example, but why not a deformed  a sphere..) include our model, we deform the grid extruding or intruding a point, then the deformation will be proportionally applyed  to the model using intensity and direction as parameters
in this way we could simulate for example explosion/collision damages:
the direction of the deformation of the 3d grid is determined by the direction of collision or of the missle, the intensity is determined by the strenght of the collision or by the power of the explosion, then a multilayer texture is applied to the deformed area to simulate damages or burns
to reduce the amount of geomods we coul set the deformations to happen only if the ratio between strenght of damage and mass of the ships is over a certain amount, so a light missle may deform a fighter but not a capship. others parameters and heuristics may be occur to deal with some point  like resiliance to deformation, range of deformation,  multiple deformations and so long.
a problem could be the polycount, what for example a geomod that will affect only a single big face of the model?? that face should be subdivided to apply the geo mod, but it will increase the polycount

[Nico]

Originally posted by LtNarol
I think craters and dents are more appropriate for FS2, actual holes could cause some problems, just imagine what would happen if a ship got carved into 4ths by a couple of slashers, yet remained at 20% hull, it would look very very bad if all 4 parts continued to fly in one direction at 1 speed, and otherwise working together.  

damages and HP would have to be dealt differently. Anyway, if you ask me, the whole concept of HP for a spacesim is obsolete. I hate the whole thing, it's stupid, why does this last maxim **** in the middle of nowhere ( the commander's bathroom, OMG!!! ) would destroy the demon ( well, I know shivans bathrooms are different, but still ).
for the differnt flying parts, well, the thing would be to set a "core", just a coordiante in space in what you think would be the main part of the ship. when a ship loses a part, the only one that stay "online" is the one containing this core. easy

[##UnknownPlayer##]

Here's an early compromise idea for geomods - have a model that gets mapped onto the hull like a decal to be blasted or warped metal.

[Nico]

there's also the boadicea/iceni method, but never ask me to make such a model

[KARMA]

Originally posted by venom2506


damages and HP would have to be dealt differently. Anyway, if you ask me, the whole concept of HP for a spacesim is obsolete. I hate the whole thing, it's stupid, why does this last maxim **** in the middle of nowhere ( the commander's bathroom, OMG!!! ) would destroy the demon ( well, I know shivans bathrooms are different, but still ).
for the differnt flying parts, well, the thing would be to set a "core", just a coordiante in space in what you think would be the main part of the ship. when a ship loses a part, the only one that stay "online" is the one containing this core. easy

perfectly agree, i liked wc prophecy for this reason: you take down engines and bridge and the ship is dead, but this can be done with modular ships, something like: you take down a single module and the ship takes some damage, you continue firing to this module the ship takes no more damage, you blow the majority of the modules the ship is dead, you take down one or two critical modules the ship is dead, the pissing would be to make all the destroyable modules:p

[LtNarol]

I think that the engines should be the "core", or the reactor subsystem if a ship has it.

[##UnknownPlayer##]

Well, in the source it would be possible to modify it so that after engines are 'disabled' repeated hits on that area result in core explosion. Or, engines have to be hit with a certain amount of force to prevent the reactor just shutting down and instead blowing the ship up.

[LtNarol]

I am against dumping the HP for the simple reason that it would screw over some sexps severely, plus I dont want to be chipping away at a fighter peice by peice for a hour, although HP makes fs2 someone unrealistic.

[Nico]

Originally posted by LtNarol
I am against dumping the HP for the simple reason that it would screw over some sexps severely, plus I dont want to be chipping away at a fighter peice by peice for a hour, although HP makes fs2 someone unrealistic.

I was thinking: "in general". Never meant to do that for FS2. Btw, the prophecy way is still too cheesy for me, I have nice ideas for that... oh well, one day, maybe...

[LtNarol]

Originally posted by venom2506


I was thinking: "in general". Never meant to do that for FS2. Btw, the prophecy way is still too cheesy for me, I have nice ideas for that... oh well, one day, maybe...

I realize that, but still, HP is the simplest way, and i really dont think that GEO modding will be done on FS2 simply because of the shear work load it would require

[KARMA]

but wouldn't be possible to have a "general hp" like now and a "core hp"? then a lot of combination could be done, like, if core gose to 0 ship explodes, if general hp goes to 0 ship explodes (but ships may have an enormous general hp), core(engines) may be different than "thrusters" or in alternative if core hp goes under a certain limit (20%?) ship is disabled
personally i like more as said the "modular" capital  ship, except for it will be a pain to be builded, ship consists in different subobjects with one or more of them that are main subobjects (core), single subobjects can be destroyed and successive hits on em will have no effect, if a subobj is destroyed the ship remains operative, except for functions related to the subobject itself (if you destroy a turret, the turret stops firing), if the main subobject(s) is(are) destroyed ship is dead