if i remmember right the death animations are a coupple of explosions when the ships die, and dont get me wrong, those are quite suficcient. i would just love to see fire from leaking fuel tanks and huge amounts of smoke billowing out of recently destroyed ships
picture: this could apply to everything from the smallest fighter to the largest battleship.
another pic: it wouldent be 100% realistic, but it would look amazing. formations of fighters and drones lighting up as point defence systems pop them. large capital ships billowing smoke out of the engines after taking heavy damage. i have no idea how it would be done and it is probbably a lot of work for bling, but it would look really cool. it wouldent even have to be good, it could just be small markers where some sparks fly off and someone would probbably mod it in.

ravener96 wrote:if i remmember right the death animations are a coupple of explosions when the ships die, and dont get me wrong, those are quite suficcient. i would just love to see fire from leaking fuel tanks and huge amounts of smoke billowing out of recently destroyed ships

I'm hoping Josh can do a lot better as far as the graphic effects are concerned when LT ships die, ravener96. He is primarily a graphics man.

I'm sure he isn't satisfied with what he has managed to show us so far. I certainly don't want ships to die with a whimper.

some marks on the hull to show heavy hits would also be a nice effect.

like a long, glowing gash in your ships hull when you got hit by a heavy beam weapon which dragged along your hull.

doesnt have to be much, some (maybe bump/normal/displacement mapped) textures and i'd be fine.

Maybe someone can mod an interface where players can modify the looks of their ships, I would like to see (if possible ) the opportunity to trash my ship a little bit, like dings and burns marks etc etc, holes whatever you can imagine.

Smoke won't billow in space like that. In fact, smoke caused by fire pretty much won't happen at all - as soon as a fire is exposed to the vacuum, it'll go out, and poof, no more smoke - it'll all disperse into space. What's that look like? Depends on the circumstances. If you have an internal fire and a small hull breach appears, you'll get a jet of hot gas spewing out the side of the ship. If, on the other hand, a large hull breach is opened, you'll get one large outward explosion of gas, dust, and debris, which will quickly cool off to ~absolute zero as it expands rapidly into space.

If you want more interesting effects, we could come up with stuff like ionized plasma leaks - a cone of ionized plasma or gas expanding out from a point on the ship, and maybe an electrical arc shooting through it like so: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6GiIVze2Tac Or perhaps ignitable gas that expands outward from the ship and then is quickly flared by an ignition source. But to really have any awesome effects, you require gas, and gas expands very rapidly in space to the point where it doesn't stay together as a gas.

Basically I'd prefer if ship damage effects look more sci-fi, and less 1942 battleship on fire.

fatmop wrote:Smoke won't billow in space like that. In fact, smoke caused by fire pretty much won't happen at all - as soon as a fire is exposed to the vacuum, it'll go out, and poof, no more smoke - it'll all disperse into space. What's that look like? Depends on the circumstances. If you have an internal fire and a small hull breach appears, you'll get a jet of hot gas spewing out the side of the ship. If, on the other hand, a large hull breach is opened, you'll get one large outward explosion of gas, dust, and debris, which will quickly cool off to ~absolute zero as it expands rapidly into space.

If you want more interesting effects, we could come up with stuff like ionized plasma leaks - a cone of ionized plasma or gas expanding out from a point on the ship, and maybe an electrical arc shooting through it like so: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6GiIVze2Tac Or perhaps ignitable gas that expands outward from the ship and then is quickly flared by an ignition source. But to really have any awesome effects, you require gas, and gas expands very rapidly in space to the point where it doesn't stay together as a gas.

Basically I'd prefer if ship damage effects look more sci-fi, and less 1942 battleship on fire.

ravener96 wrote:it wouldent be 100% realistic, but it would look amazing.

we are talking about a game, almost nothing in it is realistic

i think enemy starfighter did (does? is going to do?)this pretty well https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_qugamtyfM and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0TOlKYrz3t8

I'm not asking for 100% realistic. I'm stating a preference that we make things look more sci-fi and at least pay some heed to what might happen in space. If Josh decides to do something to make damage look interesting, I don't think it matters in terms of dev time whether he goes with the atmospheric-pressure damage graphics or fast-dissipating gas in a vacuum graphics. So I'm not sure that "It will never be 100% realistic!" is a counter-argument to anything, or even a supporting argument for anything. I have a preference; clearly you have the opposite.

edit: The one clip of sustained damage I saw in the second video was of puffs of smoke trailing behind a fighter, and there really wasn't much in the way of expansion or dissipation. I personally dislike the way that looks.

Just as a personal preference, I would be OK with gratuitous "movie fire" space explosions in LT combat. Rule of cool wins here for me.

But I'm the nut who'd like planets to orbit and rotate, so you should instantly dismiss anything said by someone so inconsistent.

So far that I recall no one has seeing a space ship blow up in space, so no one really knows how fire, smoke and explosion will behave in space.

Flatfingers wrote:Just as a personal preference, I would be OK with gratuitous "movie fire" space explosions in LT combat. Rule of cool wins here for me.

Yes please

Flatfingers wrote:But I'm the nut who'd like planets to orbit and rotate, so you should instantly dismiss anything said by someone so inconsistent.

I'm only half a nut, Flat. I want rotating planets but I'm not interested in them orbiting.

Kambalo wrote:So far that I recall no one has seeing a space ship blow up in space, so no one really knows how fire, smoke and explosion will behave in space.

But there were experiments conducted on different space stations which give us a pretty good idea.

Cornflakes_91 wrote:

Kambalo wrote:So far that I recall no one has seeing a space ship blow up in space, so no one really knows how fire, smoke and explosion will behave in space.

But there were experiments conducted on different space stations which give us a pretty good idea.

Could be but, what kind of fuel are we talking about on these spaceships designed in this game, nuclear fuel, ionic fuel, gas, diesel, water, liquid gas?

I'm at a loss here, sorry if this gets really rude. But I'm very confused as to why anyone is trying to back up their preferences with anything other than "this is my opinion." Flatfingers, for example, is right on in saying "rule of cool works for me" - that's an argument that simply states a preference and doesn't try to pretend anything about the science of the issue. Where I'm getting angry is "well we've never seen a future imaginary spaceship actually explode on video" - implying that we shouldn't even try to get physics to look right. We KNOW what it'll look like. If you want to imagine a huge dump of ionized gas getting an arc through it before it dissipates, we KNOW what that will look like. If you want to imagine a nuclear reactor melting down in a huge flash, we KNOW what that will look like. If you want to imagine a half-dozen jets of superheated gas streaming off a ship before cooling and dissipating into the surrounding space, we KNOW what that will look like. And none of it looks remotely what it looks like in an atmosphere, where smoke lingers.

So to reiterate, I'm happy with people saying "I prefer x." That doesn't bother me at all. I'm not happy with the appeals to ignorance and the faux scientific knowledge being pretended to.

With that rant out of the way, I agree that the game should look cool! I disagree that smoke trails are the best way to do that. EVE planets, for example, were revamped in terms of "geology porn" - taking what looks pretty and highly exaggerating it for effect. Josh could easily do the same with ship explosions in a way that still makes more sense than pretending, graphically, that they exist in an atmosphere.

Hmm...