WYRDYSM GAMES

Hello,

I have an idea which I would like you graphics designers to give a try:

Design a ship and then make it look damaged !

For example custom sprites could be used to make some tiles look damaged.

The tiles themselfes could be modified to look damaged...

Or special damaged tiles could be created which could be layed on top of them...

Also perhaps special effects tiles/graphics like electricity or sparks going off in a gif animation or so could be nice/helpfull.

Perhaps these tiles could later be integrated into the game as a special "damage feature/functionality/tiles" (just like weapon tiles and doodads).

To create the illusion of holes the programmer of the game could later do special processing to the tiles... the tiles underneath would be cleared where there are holes in the upper tiles... such operation could be difficult but not impossible

Bye,
Skybuck.

Well damaged sprites already exist to some degree, though I'm not sure if they were sw or not. As for layering damage effects, I have a theory which I haven't tried but it should work. It involves laying down damaged sprites, making 'patches' to cover the holes and make them look like normal sprites, then modifying the hit box size of those patches so incoming fire destroys the patches first, exposing the 'damage'. You could add explosion or gas leak gifs that are hidden by the patches. Also I've added bodies to the debris of my ships before. Just look up gta and you can get all sorts. Hope that helps and if I come up with a working model I'll post it.

Hidden damaged tiles underneath and the normal tiles on top is a pretty good idea.

I just had another idea which would work the other way around, so why not both eh

The other idea is to include bullit holes/marks on top of existing tiles.

The tile creator or perhaps the same creator could set certain point on the tiles where holes are allowed.

To prevent holes from popping up in the midst of space

Unfortunately, bsf doesn't work that way, unless you use AoE weapons, and make a damaged sprite by breaking apart a existing sprite(make the parts you want to break lower in HP, and watch holes appear) though It'd be a lot of extra effort for just a few damaged sections/bulletholes.

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Yeah it would be a lot of extra effort... so perhaps software can analyze the sprites and automatically figure out where bullit marks/holes could appear and where not to save the artists a lot of work... this would be future enhancements to the software

Though it would be nice to see some demo's/experimental work to see if it would be worth it or not

I'm no expert at coding, and what you are suggesting would be to use a external application to calculate this, but it would be better to integrate it into BSF, also, I have some understanding of GM and this would require a lot of extra coding, not to mention testing, and not breaking the game, which modifications to any code, can quite easily do so, thank GM for that.

Though the idea, which has been brought up a couple of times, is great. Its not that easy to implement, certainly not in the way you are now suggesting. The easiest way to do this, is to do it in the method in my previous post.

EDIT: Also, this should be in general, not in custom ships.

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Nothing is forever. It can't be. 'Cause everyone changes.

Whether they want to or not, they need to change. Myself... Even you!

One way to implement it in BSF is via a DLL which gives a lot of power in general.

The sprite's filename could be passed to the DLL, plus perhaps a diameter of the intended holes.

The DLL then loads the sprite and analyzes it, all spots which could contain holes are returned... but I guess this would return to many spots and would require to much data to be handled.

Another idea could be to limit it to some polygons and see if the point is inside the polygon or not...

So the sprite is passed to the DLL, the DLL should remember it, the DLL should construct a suiting polygon for around the sprite like a convex hull.

Later during runtime/gametime if a bullit hits the sprite the DLL is queried to see if it can place a bullit hole at the bullit position near the sprite...

If it can a bullit mark is placed there otherwise not...

However maybe this feature is overkill since ships are zoomed out a lot... so first a little demo to see if it would be good or bad would be nice

I guess it's overkill

Instead of doing a convex hull, the sprites pixels in a diameter could be checked as well... if a certain percentage of it is present it could be filled with a hole... and return true...

wouldn't this introduce extra lag to the game, I'd prefer it to be stable and have less features, then having a game full of options, but which can't even all be run smoothly even on a mid tier pc.

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Nothing is forever. It can't be. 'Cause everyone changes.

Whether they want to or not, they need to change. Myself... Even you!

@ADM agreed smooth running gameplay is preferable to fancy features which can be easily replicated by placing a damaged ship sprite underneath the shiny undamaged ship.

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"I put no stock in religion. By the word religion I have seen the lunacy of fanatics of every denomination be called the will of god. I have seen too much religion in the eyes of too many murderers. Holiness is in right action, and courage on behalf of those who cannot defend themselves, and goodness. " Kingdom of heaven.

Also relies on us using a reasonable language that isn't, y'know, GML.

Probably not going to happen at any point in the near future.

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that waffle about implementing in game was, well, waffle... it would look pretty awful as well, either that or take up a whole load of processing and graphics space

i had the idea to make multiple layers to represent damage ages ago, but i couldn't be bothered to actually do it, as it would mean atleast two or three times as much work =/

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There is no OP, there is only more boosters...

I guess that would mean your BP entry having upwards of 24000 sprites...

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nuqDaq yuch Dapol?

haha no fortunately... this was before that. for my ifnc fleet. my idea was to have the damaged layers slightly smaller than those on top (damaged round the edges) so that the top layers would get destroyed first. whole thing falls down if you use explosive weapons though

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There is no OP, there is only more boosters...

Sounds like you have some experience with the "damage layer" idea vidboi... maybe I try it myself sometime once I figure out how to load custom sprites just as a test

But I can imagine that you might mean that when a whole wing of a ship is destroyed by some intermediate connection/joint that the whole wing "falls down" and explodes and creates double the ammount of tiles being destroyed !

So are you "saying" that that was the problem ? To much tiles perhaps ? Didn't look good ?

Or is there any other problem with it ? Extra processing could be prevented by checking main tiles health or so... and "tagging" damaged tiles as special tiles later on...

So from the sound of it the current software is not suited and needs to be adopted a little bit... or is the whole idea bad and nobody gonna use it anyway ?

loading cutom sprites is easy, just make them as a .png or .gif file, then simply drag and drop themn into the shipmaker window or the group arrange window. simples

and yeah, that is a problem. with two or three times as many sprites, if the ship was destroyed you'd get a really annoting debris field, which nobody likes

the other problem is that it'll slow the game down. two times as many sprites means two times as much memoory that has to be stored, two times as much graphics processing and two times as many trigger checks for hitboxes etc. on the sprites, which all slows the game down a lot. once you get over about 600 sprites the ship won't load at all, which i've discovered from experience =/

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There is no OP, there is only more boosters...