Leaving bullet hole marks on the actual model is a technical limitation that's not as easy as it sounds. One of the problems being when you have a 3000+ poly character model that LODs down, it would have to sort through the poly list every frame to determine on what poly's to place the decals (coders, correct me if I'm explaining this wrong
. This eats up a fair amount of CPU time with the way our system works and isn't practical for us (especially when you shoot a machinegun over a guy and he takes like 20 rounds). So we want to put that CPU time into other things, like AI, physics, higher detailed models, etc.... Actually there's only one game I know of that I've played that places the bullet holes accurately on a model, and that's Rogue Spear (I'm sure there are others, but I haven't noticed this on any other fps yet). Actually no quake engine based game I've seen shows bullet impacts on they're non-brush models.
Another solution is to swap a piece of the skin out on a part of the model to show the damage. But this would be a generic looking damage skin, and again this really isn't feasible due to technology limitations. You'd have to make damaged skins for every piece of every model, and keep all those damaged skins loaded into memory all the time (else the game would hitch as it continually loads a new damage skin). This eats up video memory and would mean we'd have to lower the quality of our existing skins by making them smaller to make room for those damage skins. Again, we opted for the greater detail and higher quality skins.
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Latuh fuh U,
Benson
benson@2015.com
"We don't introduce or cause bugs in the game, we merely find and bring to light the inadequacies within the code."
-regarding level designers
06-13-2001, 10:11 AM
p. But yes we have different impact effects for different material types.
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