SpaceSimCentral

@NeuralKernelYou need to look into stuff like this [url]http://www.blendernation.com/2011/07/01/the-shipwright/[/url] and [url]http://ship.shapewright.com/?name=BlenderNation[/url] can generate a lot of random rubbish looking ships with a few good, sometimes even great, looking ones popping out by random chance.it's doing it well consistently, then texturing them, giving them detail, making them feel real. Hard, exceptionally hard to do that part.Instead of clumping random "chunks" together I reckon you'd have better luck using shape grammars and L-systems to provide the rules to make the basic structure, then several stages of geometry refinement using whatever process you like to generate the texturing. Then you'd have to generate levels of detail for the geometry using some automatic refinement algorithm... or maybe that could be done along the way as the shape grammar/L-system is run?I dunno, I've thought about it a lot but I've never had the sheer volume of time it would take to do it.

Until there is an established aesthetic it's hard to say what kind of asset production method would work best. For "mainstream" science fiction style ships (stylized aircraft in space) procedural generation would indeed be very difficult to get working consistently well but it's far less of a problem for Rocketpunk or Fractal style ships. Rocketpunk spacecraft would all be Spheroids, cylinders and discs... the same way pretty much every car looks like a big box with smaller boxes fore and aft and most planes look like tubes with wings... there are really only a couple overall shapes that work well for near-future combat spacecraft. In any case... I don't know enough about the guts of the engine to really make any bold claims about what I think should be done <img src="'[url]http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//icon_e_smile.gif[/url] class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':)' />

'NeuralKernel' wrote:
Until there is an established aesthetic it's hard to say what kind of asset production method would work best.
Ah now we're talking two different things if it's production vs aesthetic <img src="'[url]http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//wink3.gif[/url] class='bbc_emoticon' alt=';)' />In my view, and this means it's not necessarily shared by all team members let alone the other coders, is that by the time an asset reaches the engine it should be in a compressed binary final format.All the creation, editing, modification etc should have already been done in Blender/3DsMax/Maya/Photoshop/GIMP/MSPaint/etc. It can have animations, decals, texture painting etc done in game and things like sub models for turrets/radar/etc with their own animations can all be attached too it but the actual base mesh, its basic textures and animations should all be done as that single chunk of data.So take your modelling thread, you'd do all those in Blender and export them with their textures and animations. You can use whatever tool you like to create funky / impractical / pop-punk / rocketpunk / steampunk ships and their insane wibbly-wobbly animations (this is criticism btw it's just hyperbole as example! <img src="'[url]http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//icon_e_smile.gif[/url] class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':)' />) but then you bake them down so that those animations are set in stone, that mesh is final and the hardpoint locations for sub-models are chosen.Lots of reasons for doing this, hard learnt from previous projects but here's a few:
Rendering performance - LOD generation, mesh welding & optimisation, texture merging all take time, are better done by hand and shouldn't be optional,
Loading times - Pioneer takes an age to load a lot of this is spent simply parsing the model and getting them into the games internally rendered format, the cache helps but it's still pointless and a waste of time, I should have written a tool that does this which people could run to produce a "game ship" formatted object but... I've been lazy and we have the new-model system on the way now.
...damn run out of time gotta dash now!
As for the games aesthetic not being set... well mostly no, but you don't have to worry about what it's not-set-as, you can define that aesthetic yourself, you might have to modify it to meet other people part way if you hope to get people on board with your preferred style but don't view it as a hinderance instead view it as your chance to guide the aesthetic! <img src="'[url]http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//icon_e_smile.gif[/url] class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':)' />Right, really must run!Andy

Don't worry about scaring me off with criticism, I go by intent and not specific wording when I decide whether to get upset <img src="'[url]http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//icon_e_smile.gif[/url] class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':)' />What I meant with my comments about aesthetics was that a focus on fuction over form would be easier to generate procedurally than a more stylized interpretation of Interstellar technology. A plain spheroid with a bit of procedural detail for RCS thrusters, sensor pods, weapon ports, etc... would be a lot easier to get consistently good looking than trying to randomly spew out stylized spaceplanes.In any event, I'm not going anywhere, even if Pioneer never turns into exactly the game I've always wanted it's a damn cool project I'm lkeen to help on in any way I can... seems I'm not being particularly helpful at this point, though. Hopefully I'm not actually hindering anyone's efforts with my ramblings! <img src="'[url]http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//icon_e_smile.gif[/url] class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':)' />

When it comes to aesthetics, don't worry too hard about it. It's a big galaxy, and will have several factions, each of which might well have a very different look. As long as the ship looks physically plausible (we probably won't accept a tall ship modified for space travel without a very good explanation) we will be able to find a place for the ship somewhere.In this respect, I'm a fan of diversity. It also makes the game better - working hard to prove yourself to a hostile faction because they have the ships that you like the best, or being able to judge the allegiance of a ship because it looks like their style, even if it's a ship you have not seen before. This is all good.(edit: Big, not bog.)

<img src="'[url]http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//icon_e_biggrin.gif[/url] 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="'[url]http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//icon_e_smile.gif[/url] 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="'[url]http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//wink3.gif[/url] class='bbc_emoticon' alt=';)' />

'robn' wrote:
Scripted models are going away - this has been discussed to death everywhere, so I'm not going to go back over it. However:We want a good-looking game
We want a very low barrier to entry for anyone who wants to contribute
We want a game that can be easily maintained, freeing us all up to make new things
If those are goals you can get behind, then you'll be happy. If you get stuck on a specific piece of technology, then you're going to be disappointed.
No more poloygons??? ):

'Spacelover' wrote:
No more poloygons??? ):
What?

'fluffyfreak' wrote:
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="'[url]http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//wink3.gif[/url] class='bbc_emoticon' alt=';)' />@SpaceloverI 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.