While playing Rogue Squadron 2: Rogue Leader for Gamcube, I found that it would be WAY cooler if tiny pieces of the ships would be blown off (I mean literally. I know there are little things that make it seem as though that is happening, but not really) instead of shooting at one ship the entire time. This could be employed on other games too. I know Red Faction does this with the environment, but it would rule to play a game with swords and be slashing Orcs to pieces or something. Please post any comments. The Fantasy Action/Adventure is the Best Genre

Blade Of Darkness (and probably some other RPG action games as well) has something like this.

You can literally hack of a limb, pick it up, and clobber the hapless previous owner on his head with it.

after a while, without an efficient way of dispoing of all of these body parts, it would be a serious memory hog

You could use a 1000 block memory card or have them disappear.

The Fantasy Action/Adventure is the Best Genre

yeah, you could *just* find the point of impact of the weapon on the target mesh and cut it accordingly. then store the cut off part as a new object in your GameObject stack/vector/list and give it a relatively short time to live.

obvioulsy there''s lots of overhead there. it could be optimized with some pre-definied cutting-off points / main model sub objects, like gibbing in quake seemed to use.

if you want to start getting really advanced / incur massive overhead you could give each object knowledge of the functional aspect of various parts of it''s mesh. then when you lop off the radar array or the NPCs left arm, you lose specific functions in that respective game player.

you could make that a little easier to handle by giving each damagable game object several invisible geometric primitives for the collision detection instead of a single one. and tie each primitive to a sub-section of the model-mesh. if sufficient damge is taken in one section you could make it fall off and update the object to lose that funciton.

-me

quote: Original post by black_mage_s
after a while, without an efficient way of dispoing of all of these body parts, it would be a serious memory hog

Volition ran into this very problem.
In the initial design doc for Red Faction, they had
wanted to make the environment completely destructable, and
they figured they could do it. during the engine design
phase, they discovered a problem with the boolean subtraction
method they used- it would create more faces to add to the BSP.
so if you were staring at a wall, it was one face. shoot it with
the rocket launcher and it immediately becomes 8 faces (for the
concave hole looking alteration to the wall). shoot it again
and you''ve got 16 faces, ect.
They ended up limiting the ''geomods'' as they eventually called
it, to 128 per level. in addition to this- making a wall
''geomod-able'' in an open hallway, where a number of other
rooms of the bsp are in the PVS, it would cause the game to
have crazy side effects.. including locking the entire system.

however, with what the original poster is suggesting, it wouldnt
be too difficult to implement. Since you''re talking about
deforming a model and not an entire BSP it''s much simpler.
You could simply have, say, 8 mesh''s total for your ship or
whatever. track damage to that particular mesh, then eventually
destroy it (or cause other nifty things like uncontrollable drift
if you blow off a wing).

Anyway.. thats just my 2cents.. its a good idea though, i''ve
seen it in a few different games from a variety of genres so
it''s definately a workable idea.

-eldee
;another space monkey;
[ Forced Evolution Studios ]