Building Damage / Destruction / Capture visual clue

[Matei]

We need some graphical indicators that a building is damaged, probably some smoke/fire particles.

We also need a graphical indicator that a building is being captured.

[michael]

Rubble (in place after a building collapses) ticket here: #1166

[Aurélio A. Heckert]

A damaged version should be made for each structure, to be more natural and beaut.

[historic_bruno]

Replying to aurium:

A damaged version should be made for each structure, to be more natural and beaut.

IMO it would be better to do this with propped particles or shaders, though that would never be quite as good as custom made meshes. The problem is we need multiple levels of damage, we have a lot of structures, new ones are being added and some are still being modified over time. So it would greatly increase the work required of artists if they had to create damaged versions and maintain them over time.

[Aurélio A. Heckert]

I didn't think on multiple levels of damage, but may be important to represent this. The huge work is real, but we may solve with this strategies:

• Create 5 levels of generic smoke-and-fire animation to be added to any building, even if that has no damaged version.
• Create when possible a damaged version for each building and its 5 levels of smoke-and-fire animation if that apply to the building.

I believe that one damaged version with variable smoke-and-fire may provide enough meaning with less work.

[wraitii]

Bumping for interest

[elexis]

Backlogging due to lack of progress.

[scythetwirler]

This would be great for Alpha 22, bumping for visibility.

[Imarok]

refs r18939

[wraitii]

With health variants, automatically adding fire to all damaged buildings should be trivial-ish. Obviously this should probably be in the templates, ideally.

[Stan]

We only need to add prop points for the flames particle. That's a simple task for beginners. I wonder if with a little tutorial it could be advertised as such.

[wraitii]

I believe the graphical effects on destruction should be set by the actors themselves using the newly implemented variants.

However, capturing currently has no visual effect. This is a little problematic. The attached patch makes structures blink when they are being captured, so that you get a visual clue. Additionally, the blinking code could be used to highlight a structure in the GUI easily. It does not replace the shading color code but goes alongside it. However, we should probably support different blinking for different players in that case, which might get a little more annoying with this implementation (is a component worth it?)