StarFire was created with the intention to provide a tool to explore the depths of the universe and its secrets in a playful, educational, and thought-provoking manner. In order to do so, the player must design his spacecraft in such way it fits his individual needs and play style, and most importantly, withstands the dangers that linger in the dark. As such, StarFire implements models based on science, and may also cross the border between reality and the paranormal.
I was forced to change a lot on element placing for the mount point concept to work effectively. Here I have created some basic rooms meshes you can use to build your ship by building around them. This is very different from what I had first in mind for this game, but this seems to give an interesting twist to the entire editor.
Interesting. Is this one whole mesh, or actually built from several smaller meshes?
it was made from multiple smaller meshes, probably around ~35-40 of them.
Figured it will be better performance-wise if I use larger parts. Plus this gives me the bonus not to look like blockade runner or other games in that genre :P
That sounds good, I was a bit afraid this thing was a single mesh we would have to build around. 35 parts is a lot more than I thought this would have and should give the game a lot more variety. Good point about the similarity to Minecrafts-in-space too :D
is this 3ds max becaus it looks like it(the fuzzy lighting)
the fuzzy lighting is called ambient occlusion and can be used on any 3D program as long as it is supported (i am using blender)
i am not saying you should do it but normally when i make something i make the mainframe of the one part(cokpit, engine chasy, ext.)out of one block, ball or triangle and then asemble it turning my object into 10 to 15 parts instead of 35-40. its less proccesing power needed.
Thank you for your input!
What you have just pointed out is what I recently figured out by doing some tests, and I also created some larger objects for this purpose: Indiedb.com Perhaps creating even larger objects than that may prove useful in terms of performance, but that happens at the expense of customization... There needs to be a certain balance and its tricky to figure out the right one.
It was intended to keep the parts as small as possible, so you take advantage of different materials (especially in terms of protecting the ship interior in combat), but it seems like this cannot be done without performance drops, unless using a voxel engine (the terrain of minecraft makes use of a voxel engine). I am considering creating my own "voxel engine" that creates a single 3D mesh out of two, but I don't think I'll be able to implement that very soon, or if that is even possible with the engine I'm using.