With Vegastrike not releasing a new release .Dmg anytime soon, I figured I'd dive into this for a bit - I've been watching it for a while off to the side. The core design seems competent and sturdy, it's cool flying around seed-generated planets.
My main feeling is that aesthetic is lacking.
I found myself disappointed by the lack of ship variety after a couple of hours. Not to say there aren't seemingly a fair selection of ships, but more that the vast majority look very samey and very basic. I don't know if you have a set control for art standard and poly count, but I highly suggest setting one for the official releases. Some of the ships are little more than a cube object with some vertices pulled one way or the other, and minor texture quality. I realise this is alpha, but I feel that it would be best to set a benchmark for the official list of completed models.
The models themselves, for a large part, lack diversity. I came across countless 'triangle' shapes - some long and thin, some wide and squat. There were also a great deal of boxes. Aside from this there were the standard 'winged' ships, which followed a generic pattern for the most part. As such, there were only a few models that really caught my eye.
I don't find triangles and boxes bad in moderation, but they also need to be interesting. There was one triangle style ship model which looked interesting in terms of design - the basic shape was very regular, but it had decent texture work, and enough details to be interesting. I'd like to reference the Plowshare from Vegastrike:
http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net/wiki/Vessel:Plowshare
Essentially it's a big flying crate - a basic box design. But it's designed in such a way that it doesn't appear boring. It's distinguished from other models in the universe and so you not only recognise it on appearance, but you're also interested by it, despite the overall simplicity.
Moving on from ships - the planets are great, but even with very high detail the texturing appeared to be solid colours which was jarring at close range. I feel that the use of some basic detail textures would alleviate this. The city buildings were nice.
I fired my lasers a couple of times - the sound was disappointing - it was sort of flat and reminded me of a toy ray gun.
I realise that space is empty and vast, but this space felt lifeless. I found a single large craft, in the entirety of the two and half hours I spent playing, hovering around a space station. When the 'ship detected nearby' message popped up I was quite excited, but there was no indication of it until I was very close to it. I feel that you could up the amount of dynamism in the game - it felt as if I would be spending the game hopping from planet to planet to look at the interesting combinations that might pop up and apart form that - if I wanted to see life in the universe, I'd have to take a mission to find it - other wise it wouldn't spawn.
Other than that, my brief stay was fairly interesting and Pioneer shows promise.
Hey Primordial
Welcome to the SSC 🙂
Yes space can be a lonely place, but don't forget that the game does have an open invitation to the space sim community to get involved. Oolite was also once like this, now its filled to the brim with lots of cool add-ons in the form of oxps. Its my hope that Pioneer will one day have as many mods (pxps), adding lots of cool stuff to it 🙂
Welcome to the SSC 🙂
Yes space can be a lonely place, but don't forget that the game does have an open invitation to the space sim community to get involved. Oolite was also once like this, now its filled to the brim with lots of cool add-ons in the form of oxps. Its my hope that Pioneer will one day have as many mods (pxps), adding lots of cool stuff to it 🙂
To be honest, the most I could offer is some clumsy art design or musical tracks. I haven't 3D modeled in a very long time, and I came to the conclusion that I don't have the time, nor skill, nor patience, for it between writing and music and other stuff, so I stick to 2D primarily. I've already done some concept art for Vegastrike - which I'm not sure was ever accepted officially before my tablet broke. I'm getting a new tablet very soon soon, so I need to finish off a couple of things.
I can throw some sketches this way in the future, but I doubt I'll be able to make a serious or sustained contribution, and I'm not sure if there's a set list of things that you need art for with guidelines, unless it's all pretty open.
Yes thats about it, it is pretty much open. There is no guidelines as such, but this might help a bit https://github.com/pioneerspacesim/pion ... gn-process.
I would suggest that you look at the game and see where you could do something better in place of what is already there. If you want to contribute, be it 2D artwork or music or anything else you can lend your talents to, start a thread and post up your wips and/or you can go to git hub and post there.
Also have a look at thread for Git Hub info viewtopic.php?p=24418#p24418
Hope that helps you 🙂
I found myself disappointed by the lack of ship variety after a couple of hours. Not to say there aren't seemingly a fair selection of ships, but more that the vast majority look very samey and very basic. I don't know if you have a set control for art standard and poly count, but I highly suggest setting one for the official releases. Some of the ships are little more than a cube object with some vertices pulled one way or the other, and minor texture quality. I realise this is alpha, but I feel that it would be best to set a benchmark for the official list of completed models.
The models themselves, for a large part, lack diversity. I came across countless 'triangle' shapes - some long and thin, some wide and squat. There were also a great deal of boxes. Aside from this there were the standard 'winged' ships, which followed a generic pattern for the most part. As such, there were only a few models that really caught my eye.
ok, this is adressed at me 😉
perhaps a little timewarp will help.
pioneer has a strong resemblance to frontier, maybe a little more, so my first few ships was transcriptions from the FE2 geometry, i really simply wrote down the vectors and used mostly the same primitives the LMR offers as the original.
this to the simple fighter shaped eagle and some of the "boxes" 😀
i know some like them very much, only because of the fact that they are 99% FE2 (me to)
perhaps one day we will have two pioneer?
i mean i like the original ships, i would like them 1:1 pure without any texture.
but i see also this is a bit nostalgic and we need state of the art models for pioneer.
frontier is my leading guide, even if i like a lot of different things, i know people have different choices and i can only wish more modellers would flock in, it would enhance diversity. because pioneer is imo predestinied to be use in your way, it's ment to be customizable, well i see it like that, at least.
i would like even flying carpets, i don't mind, i loved the wide range of models for some very popular racing games from the late 90's, whatever you could imagine got wheels, that's cool, i like it.
we have a, let's say, very exclusive modeling system, it was the founders decision and i quickly fell in love with it because i recognized it's similar to how the models are made in FE2. old style, yes, so you will have to make a drawing for a complex model, write down the vectors and construct your model from tris, quads, tubes and bezier flats or cubes. it's exactly how it was made back then, especially the bezier stuff and i'm amazed what mathematicians can do with that.
it's a different "world" imo and they crash often enough 
but i love it, even if it's limited compared with state of the art, but i guess it was also to roll things back and start from 0 to see what can we profit of that.
but you can import wavefront and it shouldn't be no problem for a versatile modeler to make a good set of ships, most fear from the LUA and yes i can understand.
i guess animating the models is what makes the biggest headakes, but also this can be learned, imo just think what exactly a CAD software has to do to offer you the possibility to do it with a click of the mouse.
i really like it, sorry, it teaches to think. are you a modeller? 😉 (not especially you, the LMR ask's)
finally imo there are things you can do with scripted models you can't do with any other format, but vice versa the LMR has also limitations, so to me it's a question for what you decide.
and one thing is for sure, we can't have both.
btw, i'm a little disappointed that not more modelers dare to mess with the LMR, it's not that hard and you can only profit from it, imo.
i really wonder sometimes how little of the basic modeling knowledge is present.
i'm really not a crack or the best choice, i know, so i guess others should be able to and maybe do it even better.
theoretically with a scripted model you could make a head reading this text, acting on possible reactions of you and so on, this kind of dynamic realtime interaction you can't do with any other system.
because i don't have to premodel the shapes for the movement's steps, no, they could get generated by a dynamic (re)acting geometry, it's a different world...
but i see also the limits and i know many things would be far easier.
hm, wait i remember a big limitation, maybe i should roll this question up in the issue tracker, because we can't have texture islands in pioneer.
however, i know i can load the same .obj to (m)any viewing program, they properly display them and i can have texture islands and unified vertices, without any extra data, so there must be a way to achieve that.
i guess i wouldn't like a art standard, but leave this up to others, it's not my type, not my character...
i criticize often, but i only like to challange sometimes, it depends a little on how strong i classify one personally, so if i think one is good i like to see more.
really not, i would like to see a pioneer with a lot of models to exchange, no limits, no style guidance or something else, let the players decide, you decide, if you like something else, no one holds you back, do it. and if you can't, ask someone, whatever.
perhaps one day we have models that satisfies all, some like this, some like that, that's how i see it.
yeah, couldn't be more divided
but i like if someone likes something complete different even if i would ... but perhaps you think.... so 😆 😆 😆
space is vast and i would say...
but also you see phew, choices are really different and i love it, it couldn't be better
but yeah, tell us what you think that's only good.
😎
I don't like the plowshare myself (I have played Vegastrike) I just think it looks like a box and can't see anything interesting about it. I've never used it myself just don't like it sorry.
Most of the other models in Pioneer I would agree are basic but they are the first ones and some of the models that Gernot is currently working on like the Typhoon are quite good and very interesting.
The game is in it's early days but it's looking like one of the best in my opinion, I just wish I could code myself and help out but unfortunately I can't.
choices are different skodyn, i have no problems with that, vice versa i like it.
an i guess i can see what he ment, not especially the shape of it, more "see this is ugly, but nicely made ugly".
looks clumsy, but why not? spaceships really don't have to fulfill any conditions.
it has a lot of what is "classic" today, i guess that's what you or me dislike a bit.
...so i must find a way to texture the typhoon? argh, actually models like this get me to a limit, perhaps the typhoon i can texture, but for the imperial shuttle as example i see no chance until i can have texture islands on a smoothened (unified vertices) surface, else i can only make a simple projection on such a shape or i have to break it up, means split some vertices/edges, but this results then in hard edges.
maybe a reason why so many spaceships are boxes in general? i mean it's really easier to handle as something curved, in all relations.
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