Hi.

For ships and stations I would use a decal system to show damage. This is pretty cheap and effective. For catastrophic damage a mesh swap accompanied by particle effects would be nice, dust and debris drifting off etc to highlight the level of damage. Even sparks, fire and smoke.


I had an idea for my own space game for asteroid deformation. Because their shape is simple you could get away with deforming the mesh without some of the problems involved with more complex models.

I was planning to generate my roids procedurally for variety. Each one would have a `core` radius ( a percentage of its total size) when you mine or shoot the roid you indent the verts at the location by the magnitude of the impact creating a crater. You simply stop them being eroded when the verts reach the inner radius, this prevents the problems inherent with systems like this (such as people carving holes in objects or cutting parts off which becomes very intensive!), while allowing the player to have fun blowing holes in stuff.