The previous attempt to do something similar was by Smivs, a decade or so ago. He had an alternative texture for damaged ships showing laser scoring. But the scoring on every ship of the same model was the same, and the damage appeared in the same place whether one had been shot in the front or the back. He found it quite unsatisfactory and eventually gave up on it.
Ok I understand. This is related to the fact we try to display damage based on one single number: maintenance level
What if we took the list of damaged equipment, and assigned a tile of the ship to each of them? That would require the tiles to be replacable one by one.
It could get even better if Oolite's damage model could tell which tile of a ship has been worn down/damaged.
But meanwhile I understand the core code has noone to change it.
I'll try and document that sidewinder shader effect, i'm a pretty bad coder though so i think they way i'm doing it isn't that great, but it's not much more than mixing in some extra textures into the final colour output from the shader, i think the chipping away paint was achieved with just a regular 'grungy' texture and sending it through a step function to act as a brighness cutoff so only the brightest pixels were drawn onto the ship, then the brightness cutoff point was lowered as the ship needed more maintenance so more and more of the grunge texture was drawn onto the ship as the maintenance level increased
Thinking about non-shader ways to do this - don't the ships have a "shinyness" property or something in their materials definitions in their shipdata.plist? maybe a js script to read in that number, modify it and write it back depending on the ship maintenance level or something might work to dull the ships paint or something?
Playing around with a refreshed Astrofactory. Not sure I fully like this yet. The asteroid and dock are OK I think. But still thinking about the dome.
Edit: Actually, I think I found out why I was struggling to get a "glass" look on the dome panels - "smooth = yes" was active. Turned it off, a bit of a tweak, and here's the result:
The dome panels are reflecting light much more convincingly now!
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Alien Systems