In playing this game and contrasting it to other games such as Freespace, Homeworld, Homeworld 2, et al, I've begun to wonder, why do ships explode the instant they hit 0%? Most other games have ships spin off for a few moments blazing before they finally bite the dust, and I think it would make it really cool if we could watch our kills spin crazily spewing smoke and debris before finally exploding. So, it can in turn be made to seem that you'd have to hit a critical spot to disable a subsystem, or do critical damage to an engine, with only a few moments before it went critical, not instantly.

Also, this lends itself to the "ejection seat" excuse of respawning, giving pilots time to eject (this is of course done automatically). Also, it takes away from the Space Quake feeling, for a number of reasons:

1. In shooter games, you always expect guys you kill to die immediately. It takes a bit longer here, differentiating it on both a psychological and graphical level from FPS games.

2. You have time to escape the blast radius of ships, particularly larger ships as they rip themselves inside out through the explosions tearing down it's hull, and this in turn adds to the adrenalin factor in both PvP and PvE, as well as just looking awesome.

Just my 2c.

Edit: decided to put a sequence of a dying ship together from Homeworld 2, to illustrate my point: http://homepage.mac.com/dimpfinator/.Pictures/ProlongedExpl.gif
It's only 4 frames, but it shows 2 ships dying, one who's engines are hit (second frame), and the other which spirals into oblivion. Forgive my poor camera skills and low number of frames, but you should get the idea.
If it doesn't work well with safari, then just open it up in Preview, or something.

[stamp of approval]

Keep track of the fighter's vector and rotation when it dies, and have it continue with those attributes until it dies. Different damaged areas can result in different debris patterns, and explosions. A ship damaged mostly in the engine section tears itself up faster than a ship damaged mainly in the cockpit area. So engine explosions are larger and more violent, where explosions that start in the nose are slower and smaller (until they hit the engines, which makes the final large explosion).

what would be realy cool is if ships didn't explode at all, but rather became derelect/debris objects. that way a heavy combat area like sedina B-8 would be riddeled with the batterd hulks of destroied ships. obvioulsy the debris objects would have to go away eventualy (perhaps they have a life span of 1 or 2 houres) and they should be low detail objects (similar to 'roids in texture levels) so as to keep lag managable.

also a grappler or tractorbeem could be made that allowed a pilet to "salvage" a wreck, the result would basicly be like mining a 'roid but the wrecks provide stuff that one would expect to finde in wreckage instead of ore. Additionaly the existing mining beams could be used inseted of creating a new beam.

failing this the whole longer death animation is also cool.

Here ya go Seldon. A Kudo! PLEASE input this.

wishes he had a stamp of approval to stamp this with

/me loves Seldon's idea

Bigger explosions for small ships, too. :-P

I wouldn't even mind if the ships didn't entirely tear apart. if there was an initial explosion that left the ship drifting through space like a chunk of the capship, burning and spraying gases.

yeah, definitely. this would be an awesome addition to the game!

I also really dislike getting killed by the proms that I just blew up... If they burned for a while, I could get away so my poor centurion doesn't get engulfed in the prom's massive detonation...

this whould allso help vs hive queens (in a vult witch is fast enuff to just about kill a queen at close range with no damage) insted of the explotion allways killing you no matter what health you are on (at the ranges i use anyway) it whould as well as looking cool give you time to get away from the blast.

When your ship hits the 20-15% damage range. Your ship starts having mini explosions. Something that might enhance this action is that your ship starts falling apart IE loosing health. This feature could be futherly enhanced by making the ship harder to drive when it hits that damadge level. For example, the engines might take longer to speed up and slow down and ship movements could become slow and jocky in movement.

When this is combined with the delayed explosion idea, you get really good effects.

Perhaps there could also be a function where the camera shows your ship speed out of control and fly all ovre the place before you die. Many flying games show your death: why can't VO.

hmm, mabie the losing healh whould not work, it whould give rise to people just shooting you to that then running wile you die, allso it whould destroy any light ship who is willing to take a good hit to get close then out fly them up close you'd be dead before they where (yeah granted that happens often anyway wile using that tactic..)
and making it jerky whould basicly lose you the fight once you hit that level.

but i love the little explosions idea that whould be brillent and if there was some little dissadvantage that could be put in that whould be great, something like that speed up and slow down idea whould be perfect.

I think that losing health is a bad thing™. However, I certainly wouldn't mind seeing ships have systems that you can damage/disable, such as engines, nav, weapons, sensors, boost, engine power, etc. This could also give rise to weapons designed to damage susystems rather than do raw damage.

Yeah the fact that the wireframe damadge diagram shows nothing accept where you got hit is a pain in the ass.

Like if your engine part got hit, you might have speed problems.
If the gun port gets hit, then the weapon might drain more battery or might reload slower or if it gets hit enough, then it goes from red to black and the weapon becomes unstable thus making it a dangerous thing to use.

Perhaps if it is unstable it might self destruct doing damage or fire one large blast that drains your battery and never fires again. Imagination would be useful in dealing with this sort of complicated matter.

If this happened, then all ships would need more armour for protection against attacks making the idea of disabling a ship possible: shoot the engines enough, they start burning, they are stuck there as a sitting duck. Of courses this would be a stupid idea unless you used my Remora idea.
http://www.vendetta-online.com/x/msgboard/3/9758#112341

~Cpt. Overkill~

Nice suggestion, Harry. This would be very, very cool indeed if implemented.

I could see it being part of the "graphics update" supposedly taking place sometime in the future.

Perhaps they could also combine this with a "emergency beam out" button, functionally similar to ejecting, that transported you immediatley back to your home station. That way you could avoid a small xp loss for death or something cool like that.

I still think a short-lived escape pod would be cool. When your ship hits 0 health, you get popped out of your ship so you can watch it explode, and then you get transported back to the station. There doesn't even need to be a graphic for this, so you won't be vulnerable.

For that idea to be realistic, we would have to double the size of all of the ships to let the pod fit.

I think that he's more referring to an ejection seat with all the modern amenities like warp on it for the light ships, not a pod, per se...but as he said, there wouldn't be a graphic for it.

wasn't referring to either a pod or a seat. Just the simulation of one for the pilot.

Because if your ship had some sort of cool death sequence, then it can't just be first person, because you wouldn't see anything interesting. But if there were a way to "pop" the camera out of the ship and have it travel "up and away" while watching your ship get blown to pieces, that'd be cool. A couple seconds after the ship finally explodes, the view does a *shimmer shimmer* or whatever and you're back at the station.

But there would be no pod or seat model, nor an external animation of a ejection sequence. Just an invisible camera that flys away so the player can watch the death of his or her ship.

CrippledPidgeon,

if thr death sequence is longer than at the start of it you could swithch to the drop camera mode. i think your sugestion was that this hapen automaticaly. i definately think that would be cool. no point having a cool death if only your enemoes can enjoy it.

Drop a camera, target it on the ship, then zoom it away like it's going at 300m/s until it reaches 3000m (or thereabout) and PLOP!

Buy back last ship?