First Impressions
Posted: Mon Jun 04, 2012 8:41 am
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: [url]http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net/wiki/Vessel:Plowshare[/url] 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.
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 
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? 
