Melty hull = easy coolness?

[GaeasSon]

Dear Schema, this would add some serious coolness to combat and SHOULD be dead simple to implement if I properly grok your code just from playing.

When a hull or hardened hull block is sufficiently damaged, it is destroyed. The block is set to "empty".

I suggest that instead of "empty", the block be replaced with a lava block. The lava block itself is easily destructable by the next damaging strike.

The practical effect is that once I pierce shields and rake antimatter or missiles through my enemies ship instead of a ragged tear, there will be a ragged tear glowing and molten in places. How cool would that be, for what I suspect would be a few minutes coding?

 

[legalrick2]

Lava in space? you mean -273° ice rock?

On the serious side, how would this be practical? or realistic?

 

[Moph]

Personally, I think this is quite a nice idea.

Also, things don\'t instantly freeze or go down to -273° in space. As you should know from school, there are three methods of heat transfer. Conduction, Convection and Radiation. Since space is a vacuum, there is no Conduction. There is no Convection. Heat is only lost by Radiation.
You would freeze sooner if you crammed yourself into your own freezer at home than you would if you stepped out into space.

You would however constantly lose heat from Radiation all the way down to around -273°, but that would take some time. And definitely wouldn\'t happen in a quick combat scenario. So, thinking about it, the hull would actually stay molten for some time, longer than it would on Earth, since there are no particles around it (other than itself) to conduct or convect the heat away from it.

The only thing unrealistic about the idea would be that lava is molten rock, rather than molten whatever-material-the-hull-is-made-from... the glow would in fact be very realistic.

 

[The Last Baron]

You totally made my day. Great idea, too.

 

[dezgard]

I have to say this is a nice idea maybe a new molten metal block could be added just for this and it damages you if your close :P that way people making a hole in your ship to steal it will have to make a bigger hole damaging more of the ship :P less for them to steal.

 

[GaeasSon]

Heat transfer doen\'t seem to be a thing at all. Ice never melts. Lava never cools. Each seems to be its own \"element\". You may notice that lots of asteroids have molten cores that stay that way even after they have been exposed to space..

I was just tuning my suggestion to be the greatest coolness per programmer hour.

It\'s not practical. It\'d just make destruction prettier.

 

[Zokir]

The idea is like what happens when mechs get hit with lasers in MWO.

 

[MichaelSeph]

Yeah, so around a hole in your enemy\'s ship, there are overheated metal chunks, from the lasers.

 

[Pirate_Ray]

molten/glowing edges around impact sites of ships sounds nice, but why not like this:

when you get hit right by for example a missile, you have a hole which will have a damaged border around the hole.

lets make it so that instead of being just a damaged border right away, the damaged blocks damage visuals glows for like 10 seconds and then go as they are now, and if possible add a radius in which you can/will be harmed when close to the glow. say 2 block radius.

this way any block that gets damaged by any weapon the damage visuals will glow for a moment and then go to be just damage visuals.

this makes it realistic without having to add a seperate block. also when the block is destroyed it is destroyed, no reason to let it become a molten hunk a junk.... especially since replacing a block is much harder then just slapping on a timed texture....

i made a example of what i mean to give a visualization of the concept:



ps, how to place images between spoilers or embed it?

 

[BDLS]

I like it. A temporary change of state for the damaged blocks to emit that orange light would be a nice addition as well.

 

[MichaelSeph]

Yup, and it\'s all realistic.

The answer to your PS question, guess it\'s solved from our chat before :D

 

[Dequire]

Why not make it even more realistic? Not over the top, but just having damaged blocks actually looked dented or partially destroyed, rather than just have some black specks appear on the texture. The hit box wouldn\'t actually change, but the model itself would appear dented, scratched up or melted. Perhaps the damage type would change depending on what type of damage it was. Physical impact, explosion or laser.

 

[Pirate_Ray]

dequire, that would be step 2, first step one, get some simple texture stuff going on, the 3d modeling part comes later :P since that would be 10x harder.... both in creation and client hardware.

 

[EpicFailLord123]

why don\'t i expand on your idea. lets say ypu fighting another ship . said ship fires a torpedo at you. you see a flash of orange light as it hits, then a cloud of smoke particles followed by about half the destroyed blocks worth of molten appearing blocks, thwn a huge burst of fire all flying away from the crater in all directions.

 

[Pirate_Ray]

the impact flash could be done, same with smoke particles upon impact, just look at ships exploding/overheating right now... but the flying away debris.... not so much.... not yet anyway.

but even better, add the flash to exploding cores as well instead of some smoke and poof gone....

 

[0utcast]

This would be a LOT harder to code, but instead of destroying blocks, when you use Missiles or Dis-Intergraters the blocks go flying everywhere, the blocks are still damaged, but they fly everywhere also destroying some blocks.

However it would cause a LOT of server lag and it would only work with missiles.

 

[GaeasSon]

I still dig a suggestion I saw here a while back that the game include a \"structural\" block linked to the core in a single tradition. you can only add blocks within 10 blocks or so of a structural block. When you sever the tradition of structural blocks, the blocks attached to the severed part become a seperate entity.



...so flash, then particles, your thrust drops by half and one of your engines floats past the view screen.

 

[EpicFailLord123]

the blocks themselves would be very large particles
that structure block idea needs to be implemented.

 

[FlyingDebris]

Lava doesn\'t neccesarily cool down instantly, and antimatter releases a huge amount of energy compared to conventional weapons. So the radiation that is now being taken in or s in the hull of the ship (which is a serious concern when leaving earth orbit in real life) could, potentially, melt it. Heat is also known as Infrared radiation, so, since there is no atmosphere to stop it from hitting the ship, the star, if close enough, would incinerate the ship.

 

[Pirate_Ray]

ah so they would be visual, nothing else, i like that though it needs to be something general at a impact a general particle emiter activates which depends on size depending on impact force.





structure block sounds very nice but very hard to implement.