CCP Myrkur wrote:Bienator II wrote:some ships explode in blue (which looks really nice) what decides which ships explode in blue?
So here's how this works:
There is a probability factor on the individual explosions, and there are 3 explosions in the explosion bucket for a battleship, one with a probability of 6, one with a probability of 4 and one with a probability of 1. This means that basically that last explosion comes one in 10 times a battleship explodes, on the lore side, we could say that the blue one is some kind of specific technology/state of matter on the ship getting ignited in a bad way, versus the others being regular thermal/explosive explosions.
That's roughly the rarity for most explosions on sisi at the moment, this may change. I'd definitely like to have at least one explosion which shows up super rarely, as in maybe 1 in a hundred ships is going to blow up that way.. but something like that would have to come in a later patch, due to time constraints.
Also, these explosions are not racial, but that doesn't mean we can't play with that where we want to, as the system can support it, we just feel this is a better start. We did however decide to go with racially colored explosions for the titans, just because as the pinnacle of ship size, that's pretty insanely epically cool.
Hey so I've been thinking... and that leads to crazy places...
Going for realism *gasp*
A.
Sound: Sorry for being a killjoy on this, but in practice, sound does not travel through space, and as such hearing an explosion would seem unrealistic... boring I know. But:
A1. Only the guys blowing up should hear the actual explosion sound...
A2. For the people doing the killing, as i presume there is a range for particles flying from the explosion. Those particles end up hitting or not the attacking, or nearby vessels, resulting in a 'hail-like' sound, which could translate on a technical level as the existing explosion sound, in a compressed time, at a lower volume. that volume and the pitch of the sound changeing based on proximity to the explosion.
A3. It would also be nice if that 'hail' would be modulated based on what it was hitting such as shield, armor or hull...
A4. When the ship starts to burn up, it would be nice the pilot flying it would have a growing number of subtle alarms and burning sounds
B.
Visual: again striving for that #realism (god damn it i did it again!)
B1. The idea of racial explosion color seems nice if there is lore to support it, but I am not that familiar with the lore so I can't comment on that.
B2. I would recommend a slightly different approach to the probability behind explosion outcome, based on ship content. In the sense that Capitals and Super capitals require different types of fuel to operate. and simply formulate an if statement akong the line of "if cargo = isotope X, Y, Z then Explosion A if X > Y and X > Z; else Explosion B if Y > X etc... Where as the smaller ships could be influenced by cargo such as volume of missiles on board and their type, large volume of EM missiles = blue explosion, thermal and explosion = red explosion and kinetic = standard explosion + more particles.
Lastly C:
Damage...
It would be really really nice, if things blowing up, would do some, not a lot of AOE damage, as in a titan blowing up would take the nearby frigates... in a 10-30 km range... where frigates blowing up just dint other frigates or, drop a shuttle to half. something of the sort... I know this would be a large undertaking to balance out for abuse and what not, but on can dream.