Explosions

[FluffyFreak]

Currently this is a straight port of the Paragon explosion effect.

Things I'm going to change:
Reduce size of the textures (they're 1024x1024!), reduce number of textures (There's 64 of them == 32MiB on DISK!), change the textures used (PING Nozmajner), spawn multiple billboards for the effect(Worth it?)

Generally clean up the code too so that it loads as many textures as there are rather than loading a fixed number etc.

[robn]

Brilliant, I've been meaning to get on to that for a while. Thanks!

[bszlrd]

Can you give me a build I can play with the textures?

[FluffyFreak]

I'll try to take 15 mins this lunchtime to do some of those (easier) changes, might be able to do a build later tonight or tomorrow for you :)

[FluffyFreak]

Halved number of textures, reduced size to 256x256 (that might still be overkill!) from 32MiB to 1.8MiB on Disk, obvioously even smaller in memory.
Got a couple of ideas for spawning other billboards heading off in random directions but run out of lunch time to work now.

Will try to do a build later tonight for you Noz :)

[bszlrd]

Thanks :)

[FluffyFreak]

Well, that only took smashing my face against my screen for a while: grab it here :)

The files are named image0.png to image31.png, there's no flexibility on that at the moment but that's something we can discuss!

[bszlrd]

Oh, so it's a frame-by-frame animation. Neat! It will be interesting to animate.
For some reason I thought it will be billboard particles of several kind, without any frame-by-frame.

[FluffyFreak]

It is at the moment although I did think that adding in particles heading outwards from it might also look good.

Also this only works for a spherical explosion but the particle spawn might look better for anything that isn't spherical... like our spaceships ;)

In the future are we likely to want to have "destroyed" models of our ships left over? Drifting along for us to plunder for equipment / cargo / survivors?
Or the ability to target specific sections of a ship like just it's drives / life support /soup-vending-machine?
In which case having explosions which originate on the collision mesh and spawn particles (with their own frame animations?) would look better I think.

For now I think "this will do" has to be the rule ;) but it's a good idea to discuss it further whilst I'm working on it.

[DraQ]

It is at the moment although I did think that adding in particles heading outwards from it might also look good.

Particles and lots of debris.

Would be good to vary the colour temperature of the explosion (and particles) - from bright, bluish-lilac flash, to quickly expanding yellow-gold then darkening red.

Maybe an expanding transparent gas shell that could be illuminated by light sources.

In the future are we likely to want to have "destroyed" models of our ships left over? Drifting along for us to plunder for equipment / cargo / survivors?

I would definitely love that. First I have long since grown tired of ships just popping and disappearing in spacesims, especially that it doesn't make sense, second devastated wreckage can look cool and add to the perceived physicality of the action.
Not to mention, having the wreckage and debris tumble down to the surface trailing smoke and explode again would be really cool when fighting in the atmosphere.
I always loved when metal alloy debris did that in Frontier.

Or the ability to target specific sections of a ship like just it's drives / life support /soup-vending-machine?

Definitely. Waiting for the progress bar (shields/hull) to deplete isn't my definition of interesting combat and subsystem targeting and damage would open up both tactical possibilities and interesting soft failure modes for player.