Arcen Games

General Category => AI War II => : x4000 March 10, 2017, 04:24:22 PM

: Recent Progress: Special Forces, Modding, And Explosives
: x4000 March 10, 2017, 04:24:22 PM
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/arcengames/ai-war-ii-0/posts/1828431
: Re: Recent Progress: Special Forces, Modding, And Explosives
: Draco18s March 10, 2017, 04:35:43 PM
That effect looks pretty slick so far.
: Re: Recent Progress: Special Forces, Modding, And Explosives
: x4000 March 10, 2017, 04:38:15 PM
Thanks!  What's left is mainly making variants for other ship scales, which is just a matter of tuning some variables in there.  And then I'd like to have variants for these in general, even within a given ship scale.  There's a random element to these already, but I'd like more.

It's a pretty big difference from the one-size-fits-all explosions that are in there now, and are ludicrously huge for a lot of ships while being pathetically small for others.
: Re: Recent Progress: Special Forces, Modding, And Explosives
: Draco18s March 10, 2017, 04:42:50 PM
You could also make "bits fly off."  Basically some generic shrapnel cuboids with the texture effect that animate outward from the dead ship.

Wouldn't matter a whole lot that the ship model itself isn't actually fragmenting as it won't be viewed that close up most of the time, but would add an extra level of detail.  It'd be cheating, of course. But cheating = performant.
: Re: Recent Progress: Special Forces, Modding, And Explosives
: BadgerBadger March 10, 2017, 04:43:52 PM
I was hoping we might get that bug where unity crashes on me fixed for the weekend :-( Hopefully for monday then?
: Re: Recent Progress: Special Forces, Modding, And Explosives
: x4000 March 10, 2017, 04:51:46 PM
You could also make "bits fly off."  Basically some generic shrapnel cuboids with the texture effect that animate outward from the dead ship.

Wouldn't matter a whole lot that the ship model itself isn't actually fragmenting as it won't be viewed that close up most of the time, but would add an extra level of detail.  It'd be cheating, of course. But cheating = performant.

That level of detail is likely to be completely invisible, to be honest.  That sort of thing can always be added by me or by someone else, as desired, but it's not something I want to approach right now.  So many little individual particles (for the shards) in a big battle tends to make for more CPU and pipeline work for shuriken than I'd rather have.

I was hoping we might get that bug where unity crashes on me fixed for the weekend :-( Hopefully for monday then?

Yeah... sorry about that one. :/

I was actually just about to write to you about that.

https://bugtracker.arcengames.com/view.php?id=19028#c45956
: Re: Recent Progress: Special Forces, Modding, And Explosives
: Draco18s March 10, 2017, 05:50:51 PM
That level of detail is likely to be completely invisible, to be honest.  That sort of thing can always be added by me or by someone else, as desired, but it's not something I want to approach right now.  So many little individual particles (for the shards) in a big battle tends to make for more CPU and pipeline work for shuriken than I'd rather have.

Oh I meant for larger things only. Golems, the ark, etc.
: Re: Recent Progress: Special Forces, Modding, And Explosives
: treyra March 10, 2017, 10:03:16 PM
Oh I meant for larger things only. Golems, the ark, etc.

There is something really satisfying in seeing a good death animation for that massive capital ship.
: Re: Recent Progress: Special Forces, Modding, And Explosives
: BadgerBadger March 10, 2017, 10:05:05 PM
As long as it's not my ship!
: Re: Recent Progress: Special Forces, Modding, And Explosives
: x4000 March 13, 2017, 11:00:02 AM
Makes sense to me.  For the really large ships, potentially I could just do some voroni fracturing on the actual models and have those pregenerated and able to fly apart when they die.  It would only be for things like starships, guardians, golems, and king-units, I think.  Maybe not even all starships or guardians.  But the amount of data would be reasonable enough, and it's the sort of thing that can be pre-baked at design time and then run in realtime for much cheaper later.
: Re: Recent Progress: Special Forces, Modding, And Explosives
: Draco18s March 13, 2017, 12:37:27 PM
and it's the sort of thing that can be pre-baked at design time and then run in realtime for much cheaper later.

Exactly. :)
I was thinking a single pre-baked animation-model, but some voroni fracturing would be even cooler.
: Re: Recent Progress: Special Forces, Modding, And Explosives
: BadgerBadger March 13, 2017, 12:51:26 PM
Certainly "Voroni Fracturing" sounds much cooler.
: Re: Recent Progress: Special Forces, Modding, And Explosives
: Draco18s March 13, 2017, 01:22:27 PM
(Oh, it's "Voronoi": there's another O in there. And it's called that because it's based on Voronoi diagrams (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voronoi_diagram), which I knew could be extended to 3D space--I've done Delaunay triangulation in 3D space, which is basically the same thing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delaunay_triangulation#/media/File:Delaunay_Voronoi.svg), but treating the points as vertices rather than centroids--but I didn't realize that that was how fracturing worked).
: Re: Recent Progress: Special Forces, Modding, And Explosives
: keith.lamothe March 13, 2017, 03:15:06 PM
I prefer Velociraptor Fracturing, as the implementation is more intuitive.
: Re: Recent Progress: Special Forces, Modding, And Explosives
: z99-_ March 13, 2017, 03:50:23 PM
I prefer Velociraptor Fracturing, as the implementation is more intuitive.

On top of that, most of the code can probably just be reused from RR.
: Re: Recent Progress: Special Forces, Modding, And Explosives
: x4000 March 13, 2017, 05:13:51 PM
I prefer Velociraptor Fracturing, as the implementation is more intuitive.

On top of that, most of the code can probably just be reused from RR.

Yep. :)

That's actually an implementation of voronoi fracturing right there, incidentally.  Some of that was pre-baked (for things that would have a ton of parts), whereas others were done in realtime if they only fractured into a couple of pieces at a time.  It's a multithreaded thing, so it was seeding the physics objects that was the biggest cost there.  In this case we'd be able to use a lot of the same ideas, and much of the same code.
: Re: Recent Progress: Special Forces, Modding, And Explosives
: Squashyhex March 13, 2017, 08:27:40 PM
There is certainly something inherently satisfying and final watching a large ship break apart :D