I would've shot a big enough hole in the fuselage that I could've fallen straight through...
Cue gags about that being in game already in: 3, 2, 1...
Because from the perspective of people who do know a fair amount about game development and who have actually paid attention to the evolution that has happened over the last couple of decades, so little of the stuff CIG tries to hype up is actually anything special.
Nah. That only happens to the people who don't know a far amount about game development and ho haven't actually paid attention to the evolution that has happened over the last couple of decades. But it's not their perspective I'm talking about.
The damage system isn't too far from the baking approach you described, except it keeps the alpha in a separate map with its own UV layout, does some decorative stuff like after-glow etc.I had to do that once and we ended up baking the decals onto the RGBA-Texture of the affected face. Worked fine but of course only for simple meshes, and it strains the texture memory budget. And with today's triangle throughput there's the question whether it's not actually easier to deform geometry and not mess with decal transparency effects at all.
There's some neat stuff you can do by tesselating the mesh, esp. rather visceral projectile penetration simulation. And if you have a complex physical simulation model driving this, for example a tank's reactive armor performance model, you can do neat things like calculate the effects of a sabot shell impact in real time and show what happens to the turret crown. And the computing power required is in your PC these days, it's no longer just companies like Evans and Sutherland having the neccessary hardware
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AFAIK, but I don't know this for certain, IL-2 does this by having extra textures with alpha mapped holes in them. So when you shoot the wing, you can have this type of damage simulated in various spots but it's not *exactly* where the bullet impacts. They also do have regular bullet impact decals too, you don't get to see the insides of the wing structure right away.
I have to disagree with you there. Much of what gets done in SC has been done before, and credit to the people who did it before. It's still exciting when you go from not having it, to having it, and there's a sliding scale from total reinvention to drop-in turnkey solutions, the answer's usually in the middle. While I take offence at the idea that all this is is "adding an alpha channel" to paint-over decals, it's also ridiculous to assume no one's ever thought of accumulating alpha in an offscreen buffer.
Pretty much, yeah. Well, hype built on top of nostalgia and a severely skewed perception of the state of gaming, but that's really more of a foundation than the actual fuel.
