Will burning and other visual effects be added to ship damage?asked by Bacon of War
TL;DRBurning and smoke effects on detaching debris are already possible and wanted, and they're looking at heat-driven damage over time in a controlled way, though nothing is promised.
We already can do a lot of that kind of burning and effects work. So when something detaches, it can trigger the effects to play and we can add fire and smoke and things onto the debris. We definitely want that vision of the Titanic breaking apart and the fire and the debris falling out. So that's where I'm always trying to push towards.
We've also been talking about driving similar behaviors in the actual flow of damage, where your component could reach a critical level of damage that isn't so critical that it explodes, where it's actively taking damage over time. You need to shut it off or cycle your systems to address that. So we're beginning to look at how we might actually implement the concept of... But we're doing that in sort of a controlled approach, because Star Citizen is big and just introducing something like that can get crazy. So we're looking at it more in terms of how does the broad scale of heat lead to the behaviors that we want to see in ship destruction, either explosion or failure or possibly the fire state.