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Topic: Space Junk (Read 5172 times)
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Mr.__Fwiffo
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I love YaBB 1G - SP1!
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Before I ger started, SC2 is my favorite game. Has anyone noticed how every space game leaves out space junk? Every time a ship gets blown up, there's space junk and many other things like that.
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FalconMWC
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Umm.... Well, that is true, but ever wonder why the vindicator is bigger than a planet? Or a six person Shofixti fighter is about a fourth of a planet?
Answer - Because its a game.
It does not have to be accurate down to the details. While a little extra would be kinda nice, this would require more than a tad bit of work. Are you planning to have it like asteroids that can be pushed around? Or just extra graphics for the explosion? Of course, if you add that, then why not include other small things? I guess the answer to all this is that it takes too much time and its not worth it enough. I am sure though that if you made a mod that made it possible - i'd download it.
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Fossaman
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Deep fried Lemur, anyone?
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I have seen a couple games that actually DO have space junk, and each has a different solution to the problem.
Aftermath, by Madgap, does it with little cargo crates that pop out of blown up ships. This sort of counts, right?
Transcendence, by George Moromisato, does it by leaving wrecks behind of the ships that blow up, and by having little sparklies that show up when you kill things. These get in your way for a short time then disappear.
If you think about it, UQM/SC2 do have space junk, they just choose not to display it during battles. You simply collect it as salvage after the battle.
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Crowley
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One of the reasons undoubtedly is that calculating and keeping in memory the remains of all the ships you've blown up would quickly build up too many calculations for the processor to handle. It could work for a game that uses a separate and disposable "battle arena".
Freelancer did have all kinds of cool special areas in space, including some debris fields left by major battles.
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Deus Siddis
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Crowley, how could forget to mention good old starflight? In it, every destroyed ship left a field of junk behind, from which goodies could be harvested. It might have been the first, come to think of it.
Basically, debri only makes sense if you're going to collect it. This was a major thing in the battlezone games, and others where battlefields became mining fields.
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« Last Edit: March 08, 2005, 03:05:57 am by Deus_Siddis »
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Megagun
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Moo
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Total Agnigilation! ^^
If you didn't get that joke, you're not a true fan. 
Some games DO have junk fields, just for the prettyness... Like Freespace 1 and 2.... Actually, those junk fields in that one are more or less nessecary for the story... At least gives some nice dialogues.. 
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Mr.__Fwiffo
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Oh! I forgot about salvaging blown up ships. I didn't know there were some games out there with junk fields. 
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Arne
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I was thinking of having this for my project. To avoid the space getting overcrowded with junk though, I thought of the following solutions:
0. Not having it.
1. Having it disappear.
2. Having it disappear and making up a story about space parasites.
3. Giving it monetary and scientifical value so it is likely to be collected.
4. Having Melnorme warp around and collect pieces with a certain age.
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Arne
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Yak!
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Hmm, yeah I could have an updated list and a static list. Since I have space friction ('air'), things will slow down, and once a certain threshold is reached the debris is moved to the static list which doesn't get any processor time for moving... or something like that. Still need to do collision checks though so I guess my quad-tree wannabe structure (or linked list structure) has to support two types of lists.
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Fossaman
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Deep fried Lemur, anyone?
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Option five: Have the space junk get sucked in by gravity sources and destroyed. It would clump naturally, also, even away from gravity wells.
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Deus Siddis
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Option six: Have the debri appear as burning wreckage which eventually consumes itself, and disintegrates (disappears).
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Mr.__Fwiffo
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I forgot about the debris salvaging the Vindicator does. I have also found out that there are games out there that acknowlegde space junk. Debris does get vaporized in the atmospheres of planets. But what is the universe mostly made of? Answer: Space; an infinite void with a few spots of galaxies. Even galaxies consist mostly of space. The chance of space junk being destroyed is very low. Option Six suggests that the destruction of a starship causes a combustion of all the materials the ship consists of. This is probably true and I'm glad that someone mentioned it.
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Arne
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Yak!
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Well, I do have space friction, similar to air friction, but normally fire needs oxygen to burn, and I doubt ship armour is very keen on burning, and why would ships burn and asteroids not?
Much better idea than my 'space parasites' though.
As for using gravity, that would require some leet pythagora code which is very slow on the CPU when you got many objects. Possibly, with static gravity sources, I could make a table with grav-vectors for each grid. Another solution for many particles is clustering, but there''ll probably be L points where stuff gradually accumulate anyways.
(For my project I skipped planet collisions and gravity, however, since the slingshot gameplay is rewarding I've snuck in some G weapons and black holes)
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