just wanted to get some feedback on this to see if there is some support to see something like the following in Season 3 or later down the road:
I fondly remember the starship damage model from "Bridge Commander" (great game) and "Legacy" (not a great game). When a ship lost its shields and got hit by weapons fire, the hull was scorched and might even break. Then there would be a physical hole and the inner guts of the ship where exposed. When special areas were hit, e.g. the warp coils, the ship would leak plasma, air etc. Just watch some of the Dominion War stuff from DS9 and you know, what I mean.
Yeah, I know, deformable geometry and dynamic texture painting does not come cheap and is almost impossible to realize on the server. So here is my suggestion of a compromise: Implement it as optional feature on the client side SFX only. It would not serve any purpose other than eye candy and would replace the 3-texture-damage-model currently implemented for those people who have two spare CPU cores to do the geometry and texture updates.
An alternative that could be realized even on the server side (so all players would see exactly the same damage on each ship and it could be persistent) is to allow for precalculated parts of any ship to break of. This has been used in "Klingon Academy" and can look even more spectacular than algorithmically created deformations. It could also be integrated into the new death penalty, i.e. for certain types of injuries there are specific damage graphics. The downside of this proposal is, that all current ship model parts would have to be revisited by the star ship artists in order to create "broken" versions.
So why should this feature be implemented if it is only cosmetics? Because breaking things is fun. Because of that, I still play "Bridge Commander" to this day. There is little that provides so much satisfaction than firing a salvo of photos into an enemy ship's hull after a fierce battle and literally tear it into pieces. That provides long term motivation, and that is something this game needs.
I would like to see the damage modeling they use now to show that the ships have been effected by the DP.
The damage would stay until either you use a kit to repair it or go back to a star base to get repairs.
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The damage would stay until either you use a kit to repair it or go back to a star base to get repairs.