The Empire has fallen and a New Republic is born out of the conflict. But in the ashes of civil war, yet another life stirs...
Starship Death Clones
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Description
A really quick upload showing some of the little details and finishing touches added to space-based death clones. Most starships which have death clone animations will utilize what you see here, as I created the asset to be copy-pastable to any part of a starship death clone where the mesh breaks into chunks.
YouTube: Youtu.be
I like it, but since everything else in the mod is bright neon thanks to the reshade preset + art style, maybe increase the size or the saturation of the effect to enhance visibility, it would be a shame to not see that effect in abundance on every deathclone.
I wouldn't go so far as to say it's neon but I definitely didn't want to go down the Chris Nolan road of desaturating everything into oblivion. Color is gooood.
That said, These death clone details really are very briefly visualized things. Since I'm making a push to try and get the mod out, I think this is something to be revisited later and released with any potential patches or something. I didn't want to devote inordinate time to this...I just wanted to put something together to make the death clones more interesting than just the "blocks" of a starship mesh all falling apart, if that makes sense.
Looks great anyhow, thank you for all your hard work!
Well hey even just the blocks falling apart would be cooler than some mods I have seen where the ship just goes "Pop!" in a fireball and is instantly gone when it dies.
Agreed!
For attention to detail you could localize the effect near hardpoints that burn after getting shot to bits and then when the ships deathclone breaks apart the damage inflicted outside will look like it had an effect inside as well. Just a thought, but spectacular work as always. PS do the animations occur that quickly or were they sped up for the sake of the demonstration?
This animation is done at actual speed. The Protector-class isn't a giant ship so the animation is quicker. The capital ships linger a bit longer than this. This ship is roughly the size of the Victory-class Star Destroyer, if that gives you a sense of scale.
Would you be opposed to drawing them out a bit longer? It'd be a shame for such attention to detail to be so fleeting
I might be able to slow down the animations in the XML code itself. If not, I think I will leave them. It gets actually pretty time consuming to go back and re-edit death clones one by one. I'd rather tackle other things first.
Lovely, the burn effects on the joints are neat, really neat
I always thought of death clones as a reward, especially on capital ships. Even if it's your own ship blown up, you "got" something. Nice work!
Very nice work, is that the shield mesh shader?
I love those fire effects too, did you make them?
Thanks! Yes, the fire particles are my creation. The actual "hot metal" effect on the mesh itself is simply the additive shader with a slight UV scroll applied. The texture itself was made in Phothoshop by simply using the "render clouds" effect to create a sort of mottled, fractal effect that ranged from bright orange to black. That way, as the additive shader scrolled the UVs over it, you got this kind of glowing ember effect.
Nice!
I always found it a little disappointing when mods with custom models don't have death clones, they're one of the coolest features in the game.
Having burning wrecks tumble to death in the background does so much for the atmosphere of space battles and I already loved the inlcusion of more death clones in ground battles in the previous incarnation of RotM.
Having dead bodies and burning vehicles from your last push towards the enemy base littered across the battlefield is just cool as hell.
Glad you think so! I did have to remove the persistent crater decal thing though... I didn't realize but EaW has a hard-coded limit on the number of decals that can be rendered at any given time. Most games have this, for performance of course, but the limit in EaW is actually quite low. Decals over the limit aren't removed "gracefully" either...they just disappear instantly. Firther, decals that overlap, as they inevitably do when there get to be several in contested places, tend to flicker...and it looks terrible :(
Thanks everyone!
Damn no detailed stone left unturned for this masterpiece huh?
Really love this. But are most ships going to be breaking apart? Or will some of them drift and explode after a while?
I ask because ships breaking apart in a certain way is a rather specific way to be destroyed.
I'm guessing it would be incredibly time consuming to give ships multiple death clones, for instance 1 drifting and explode DC and 2 ways to break apart.
Just me thinking out loud, i'm sure that would take ages to do.
Yeah, multiple death clones would indeed be a very time consuming process for several reasons. First, obviously, is that you'd have to animate each version. Second though, is that this in itself creates another challenge... Since you have to break the ships apart to animate each "chunk" as it breaks off...well you are kind of stuck with those specific chunks moving forward. So, you could animate those same chunks falling in different ways...but ultimately, it's the same four or five sections of ship that break off each time. To avoid that, you'd have to make a new death clone model for each animation, which is just more work than it's worth IMO.
However, not all ships will break up like this. For example, the larger ships don't really "explode" in this fashion. They do have parts that break or bend or fall over but the bigger guys more collapse than they explode like this...if that makes sense. It looks more like an ocean vessel sinking and breaking apart than it does a ship flying into pieces and blowing up.
Thanks for that explanation. And yes it made sense.
Looking forward to the next update!
So...big ship death clones are like...sinking of the space Titanic? Because that's kinda neat, actually.
Yeah, kind of. Though unfortunately with far fewer scenes of Kate Winslet's boobs.
...that made me warm and fuzzy inside, won't need that morning coffee after all... :D
Keep up the great work