I’ve spent all day working on damage textures, and they work, even if my amateurish texturing makes them suck a bit. I’ll get proper artists once I’m sure how the game will look and play.
Rather than doing anything cleverly procedural, I’m defining set damage sprites for each ship that layer on top of the ship once it’s been hit at that point (see below).
There is a combination with some of them of being a static texture, and having a particle emitter on them which makes it look better when the ship is moving (hopefully running away at this point).
There’s tons more code to write and tests to do before I become convinced that this works and looks ok. I’m not happy with it yet, but it looks better than the ship remaining spotless until it suddenly goes bang and dissapears. It’s also very expensive in CPU/GPU terms so the framerate nosedived a bit. It’s still way over 120 FPS in debug, so I’m not worried, plus I havne’t made any obvious speedups yet. Don’t forget I have a decent PC, so I’m aiming to ship a game running comfortably over 100FPS on mine, so that it handles 60FPS for lower end machines.