Well I figured i'd ask this and open it up for dicussion...how will on ship damage be dealt with?
Although I know it's early to be talking about it i'm just putting out there for discussion.

Are we going to do sprites and etc for streams and textures for damaged hull plating?
Or are we going to go with ingame generated damage using different chunks of the models and etc?
Mind you the method suggested on the bottom would really tax any game engine I think. (espeically in a large fleet of ships). Atleast to my thinking....

thoughts?

I heard the Red Faction 2 GEO-MOD-engine was quite good at that. they realistically let those models get holes in it where the weapon hits the target: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Faction

if one knows how to code this (if you read thru text they done that with so-called "hole 3d objects" which pop up on the target hit section and "eat" the model out by overlaying empty space on it and some dark debris texture around the edges. pretty neat idea in fact. sadly no other engine ever managed to copy that in terms of behaviour..

This would be a strictly cosmetic feature. It'd be nice to have, I agree. However, the 3D combat engine is a long way down the road, so none of this has been decided yet. It's never too early to discuss possibilities, though. Just don't expect any straight answers .

Aaaages ago we discussed something like that - having "invisible" parts of the ship to show weapon damage. It was proably in the staffroom or long-since deleted game development forums though. I *think* Jig said he was going to look into it, but I don't remember if he ever said any more about it. As Mike said, it's a looong way down the road.

Matress likes eyecandy.