'Destroyed' Starship?

Help and Feedback Game Design Support
#1

I’m working on a Space exploration game and hoping to introduce some form of battle mechanics whilst in Space.

However - Because of the way my game is set; the ship is actually two entities: Exterior and Interior - This ship is spawned when the Player enters and is seperated to allow for free roaming in the Interior as well as flight in the exterior.

How could I go about creating an effect when the Ship is defeated in battle or ‘Destroyed’?

Ideally I want to avoid removing and respawning the ship due to performance complications.

#2

A few options:

  • You can weld parts together, and unweld them when the ship is defeated.

  • You can make a script that changes the ship’s material to for example corroded metal and adds fire particles to a couple parts when the ship is destroyed.

  • You can make a second model which looks like it’s destroyed and make it visible when the ship is defeated.

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#3

In terms of respawning // repair how would be best to achieve this?

I was thinking that if the Ship is ‘Destroyed’ then the Player would have to exit flight and go to a Repair terminal within their ship.

#4

I actually was working on a game with a very similar concept earlier last year, so I had to deal with some fairly similar questions.

View of the ship from the outside:

View of the ship from the inside:

Moving around ship while it moves:

In my version of the game, I placed an expanding neon sphere mesh + some plasma particle effects to create a space explosion. I deleted the ship mesh while it was obscured. Eventually, my plan was to add some debris floating around afterwards, but that’s not necessary.

For the interior, I suddenly increased the player’s client’s lighting brightness + added a white vfx UI element with increasing opacity. The effect was that all the sudden the world got bright, then dark, and then a reset button would pop up.

One idea I messed around with was spawning internal effects like sparks, small fires, etc inside the interior as the ship took on more damage - I feel it would make things more exciting. At the end of the day though ending the ship star-trek style with a massive plasma ball helps a ton with cleanup.

Best of luck!

1 Like
#5

I think it’s best to use this then. I’m not an expert at scripting, but you could make the original ship be invisible and make the damaged model visible after a certain amount of damage has been done.

The script could turn the transparency of a few parts to 1. The damaged and the original model can be grouped together, but the parts will need to have different names.

For example: Part (Ship) and BrokenPart (Broken ship)

The script will trigger after for example 5000 damage and turn Part’s transparency to 1 and BrokenPart’s to 0.