Recent Progress: Special Forces, Modding, And Explosives

[x4000]

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/arcengames/ai-war-ii-0/posts/1828431

[Draco18s]

That effect looks pretty slick so far.

[x4000]

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.

[Draco18s]

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.

[BadgerBadger]

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

[x4000]

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

[Draco18s]

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.

[treyra]

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.

[BadgerBadger]

As long as it's not my ship!

[x4000]

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.

[Draco18s]

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.

[BadgerBadger]

Certainly "Voroni Fracturing" sounds much cooler.

[Draco18s]

(Oh, it's "Voronoi": there's another O in there. And it's called that because it's based on Voronoi diagrams, which I knew could be extended to 3D space--I've done Delaunay triangulation in 3D space, which is basically the same thing, but treating the points as vertices rather than centroids--but I didn't realize that that was how fracturing worked).

[keith.lamothe]

I prefer Velociraptor Fracturing, as the implementation is more intuitive.

[z99-_]

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.