Stellar Squadron is a sci-fi dogfighter set in space, well into it's development. So far we have already implemented procedurally generated scenes and 13 unique starfighters each with their own unique abilities such as missile barrage and charge. Most recently we have added procedural generation for the carrier ships appearing in the game.
Carrier ships within Stellar Squadron are very large star ships equipped with a multitude of turrets and a docking bay from which enemy starfighters may be spawned to attack the player and their allies. They most prominently occur in our Destroy Enemy Carrier mission in which the player is tasked with defeating an enemy carrier by attacking a collection of vulnerable hard points all while fighting off numerous enemy starfighters. Previously, the carriers used were identical and thus did not provide any variety between missions of the same type and so they were replaced with procedurally generated carriers.
The procedural generation in place uses a number of pre-modelled parts being connected together based on a grouping system. The grouping is determined by naming conventions on the part models themselves, each part has a number of connectors which are labelled with a convention indicating what compatible parts may be attached. The method for generating the ships themselves is then agnostic of the specific groups, enumeration during the process allows us to produce many controlled variations without revisiting the code. We also needed to established a symmetry maintaining system to ensure comprehensive looking results, this was achieved using a secondary grouping for symmetry and actually allowed us to slightly improve performance by duplicating and mirroring results when applied.
Some of the pre-modelled parts used in generation:
Finally here are some of the results!
You can also find video footage of them applied in-game here:
