<img src="' http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//icon_e_biggrin.gi f"' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':D' />

OK, aesthetic may have been the wrong term... plausibility as a guideline for visual style is good, I was wondering more about how much technological plausibility should be integrated into ship apearance. For example... radiators... the game tracks several kinds of temperature (hull and weapon) but none of the ships I've flown have any radiators I can see. My designs nearly all have radiator panels as a core design element and I wonder if I'm just wasting time adding superfluous geometry that will have no bearing on gameplay. Another aspect to basing the designs on dumping heat through radiation is that the hull will pretty much always be largely convex... you don't want radiators shining on other radiators... but at the same time you want to maximize surface area relative to volume... though not so much that armour becomes impractical...

Thats the sort of thing I mean when I talk about the aesthetic, not the shape of the tailfins or sleek vs lumpy hulls.

You have to remember that Pioneer is alpha - it has a long, long way to go before it's even close to being a complete game.

Radiators are a good thing. One of the things to do one day is something like this, and it won't hurt to think about what effect that might have on aesthetics.

Erring on the side of real physics is probably safe.

Ultimately, realism means that every ship model should be a convex hull with a variable brightness and color based on temperature, maybe with a colour gradient to represent a warm and cool side... at least for the simplest LOD. There aint no stealth in space, after all and for thermal detection/management purposes you will always form a convex shape <img src="' http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//icon_e_smile.gi f"' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':)' />

The other thing to remember is that it's also a game and that what might please some will put off others.

Having the option to play either with all the latest computerized gear or as a crusty old luddite who uses a slide rule won't scare people off, IMHO. Keeping the options open is a good thing, and there's no reason that the presence of a procedurally generated "thermal silhouette" using the ship model's vertices as a point cloud would interfere with a player that doesn't care about the physics.

My biggest fear (back to the title!) is that Pioneer will dumb things down in an effort to try to appeal to a wider audience than is realistic. Frankly, I think the sort of people that are interested in this style of game tend to be people who already have at least some understanding of how real world spaceflight works... and I think that too many games in this genre think treating us like "idiots" equals more "fun". Compromises ARE needed, but I think that those compromises should be things like an optional Autopilot, not a simplified flight model, to use an example already working great in the game.

Oy! Less of the "crusty".

Ah, a slipstick - I had one of them once, a long time ago. An excellent tool!

I have a box full. They're good, but not useful for working out orbits. You need six significant figures to make an accurate transfer orbit. The absolute best you'll get out of a slide rule is four, usually fewer.

They're an old, fond memory for me - back at school, all I had was a slipstick and a book of tables.

No pocket calculators around back then - just as well I wasn't working on orbital stuff - heh.

You can fudge things and fly by "instinct" well enough with the deltaV and thrust of a typical ship in pioneer. I do use the autopilot, but for exploring I like to just keep my velocity below about 2000 kps between planets... near rocky worlds I stay below a dozen kps, gas giants about 60...

Completely manual flight, its EXTREMELY frugal with reaction mass and with a fuel scoop you can just jump from gas giant to gas giant. The downside is that it takes forever to get anywhere, but whats the rush? Its a game, after all, why worry about keeping to a schedule <img src="' http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//wink3.gi f"' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=';)' />

No more poloygons??? ):

What?

You must have missed the memo. We're moving to voxels. Cubes are so much cooler.

Bleurgh! Cubes are so outdated, billboard clouds are where it's at! <img src="' http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//wink3.gi f"' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=';)' />

@Spacelover

I dunno where you go the impression polygons are dead, everything is triangles in the end, even robn's cubes.

When you model in quads, that's really two triangles, the split edge is often out of your control and when you export it into another format they're often split into their constituent triangles. When used in Pioneer at the moment all quads, for example when they occur in "obj" files, are converted to two triangles.

So slightly confused by your question.