I don’t like the idea that much. I would even go in the opposite direction: A ship should fall apart into two separate grids if it is cut in two parts.
Hi. Just jumping in. I've voted they are both bad. I'm not even sure why. I do not really understand the things underlying. Most of shooting games have hitboxes related to 'head' 'leg' and so on. Every destructible thing is composed of say 10 to 100 "blocks". Simple entitites. None of these games that handle damage a very decent way does allow the player to design his own objects, with possibly any random configuration of essential and crazy numerous non-essential blocks. At the moment, EGS is handling damage block by block, and I just understood that was a (maybe "the") major performance issue. I can run Battlefield 5 perfectly fluid in full hd with high settings, but EGS does lag/not render/ in a word suck from time to time. It's an alpha but... hey !!! So simplification is a must. I don't see any interest in allowing the player to restore every block 1 by 1 depending on what took damage. It's pointless and irrelevant, and a pain in the arse. As probably the way the repair bays do work. Just define a bunch of attributes every built structure has and apply global damage functionalities. So it will have global hull, core, thrust (might be segmented by direction), oxygen, fuel, food, things like that. Not more than 10 attributes for the whole ship. At the "compiling" of the ship blueprint, these function-specific hitboxes should be determined. And not changed afterwards. The whole ship's body should be simplified to : 1) rendering which is almost 1-to-1 block designed. That model is the design game entity. 2) hitboxing which should not exceed a certain amount of zones, and a certain amount of attributes. That simplified model is the real-game entity. I do love the building side of the game but I don' think it's reasonable to keep it full steam for "live gaming". I'd think of a new way of approaching the game, as being able to switch to creative mode not only by console commands, but as a stock feature. This to modify existing assets without having to destroy/spawn them. I mean, the block-by-block thing is great for designing, not for playing or repairing. And when exiting "edit mode", the structure has to be recompiled. I don't even know how the game is working, and I'm not litterate in these things. But learning / realizing it was all calculated block by block all the time... Guys you have to change that. Alot of early backers will probably shout at what I said, I don't know. But let's be realistic. You can wait for 2040 and Tier 3 computing technology to have it run smoothly. But currently, a Core i7 + nvidia 1080 gtx + 16 gb ram gets 'low memory detected', 24 fps's on just hovering a large build, close-to-one second lags in combats. Man, if only I f'cking knew it was all the time calculated block by block. You guys are crazy !
The damage issue has been addressed in the thread. Merging would only apply up to a certain point, when a ship has sufficient damage to "break in two" it is at the last stage of combat, and just like with structural integrity, ship chunks could be formed (and merged) when it's blowing up/ coming apart. But having a ship holding together with huge missing parts is quite immersion-breaking, and totally useless regarding performance.
What Hummel-oWar mentions here is the only way to do this. With the primary suggestion you also get the added problem of distribution of the model to all clients. With Hummel's suggestion you could have larger outer hull segments, like block size 8x8 or something that you could put together as complete hull units.
One problem with merge blocks is that if a merge block gets destroyed they become two separate entities again instead of one. Whats to stop a turret from aiming at a merge block to separate two pieces of structure merged together. I'm thinking Space Engineers type of merge blocks that links two entities into one but being two still. Unless your talking about merge blocks that wields two pieces together then I don't know somehow gluing two ships together is not a good idea unless it is done right.
