Replacement at destructiuon

[Anonymous]

posted on June 16th, 2011, 3:28 pm

Last edited by Anonymous on June 16th, 2011, 3:31 pm, edited 1 time in total.

While talking with another member about a mod, The question arose as to weather or not a ship could generate a supply when it was destroyed.  As far as I know the answer is no.

For this reason I wanted to post my ideas thinking that maybe the devs would be interested.

First off, the idea was consirning fighters and a fuel supply.  We were thinking that maybe, a ship could contribute a certain supply when it was built, and take away that supply when it was destroyed.  What would be required for this to work would be a replace weapon that was triggered when a ship died.  The addition or redaction of supplies when a ship was destroyed is cool and all, but what if you could replace a ship with something else when it was destroyed? 

I was thinking about explosions and how they are handled in a2.  What if you triggered a replaceweapon when a ship was destroyed, and instead of simply blowing up the ship model, you replaced it with an animated hulk of debris that slowly floated around.  This hulk could serve as simply a cool piece of eye candy, or you could even make it so you could harvest supplys from its remains.  Like say you built a cube, and it was blown up.  Its remains could be floating around and the remaining radiation could be harmful to any species other than the borg(or maybe race specific resource extraction ships hardened against radiation of this kind) and the borg could return and 'mine' half of their resources back that they used on this ship.

It might not be very balenced that way, but it is just one of the cool things you coluld do with destruction replacements.  Honestly, you could completely do away with the storm3d explosion system, and in its place put a complicated series of animated destruction models to simulate the ship breaking appart, and losing pieces which in turn blow up.  It would look really cool.

Anyway, just a thought.  if nothing else it would be a great line for modding.

posted on June 16th, 2011, 3:41 pm

The problems I see with debris or remains floating around would be:

a) as the game progresses this would get more and more confusing as the it gets impossible to keep track of your ships in between all the remains.

b) this would very soon slow down the game dramatically since it requires a lot of processing power.

There is a replay of ray where he tries out a debris mod which illustrates these 2 problems perfectly.

posted on June 16th, 2011, 3:53 pm

You can generate supply when a ship is destroyed. Just set destroyedbiomattercost to a negative value

A weapon classlabel or set of commands that triggers upon unit death is on todo as far as I know

posted on June 16th, 2011, 5:42 pm

You can generate supply when a ship is destroyed. Just set destroyedbiomattercost to a negative value

A weapon classlabel or set of commands that triggers upon unit death is on todo as far as I know

cool

The problems I see with debris or remains floating around would be:

a) as the game progresses this would get more and more confusing as the it gets impossible to keep track of your ships in between all the remains.

b) this would very soon slow down the game dramatically since it requires a lot of processing power.

There is a replay of ray where he tries out a debris mod which illustrates these 2 problems perfectly.

a)I can see it getting a bit confusing, but if you only left a small portion of the ship left, to where you couldn't really make it out to be a ship, it wouldn't be too bad.  a portion of a saucer and a nacelle with a cloud of debris wouldn't look too much like a ship, and I think t would be cooler than it would be confusing.

b)I don't think so. Because the way in which the engine handles explosions atm is already resource intensive, getting rid of that completely and simply replacing a ship at death with one that has much less detail and mass, which will eventually disappear...  It might be slightly more for some ships, but i think overall, it would be less than it is now.  Consider a borg cube again.  If you simply broke it up it with a replace weapon, leaving at least 1/2 of the model out, it would be much less resource intensive than breaking apart every triangle in the model like it does now.