Imploring you to stay true to your ship design

Battlescape
16

But almost all the aerodynamics on an F1 car are designed to generate as much downward force as possible for maximum torque, and grip in tight turns. It makes no sense at all design wise.

I was arguing against this point:

Well; they don’t. Saying you don’t care now doesn’t stop them not making sense. :wink:

*There’s nothing particularly wrong with using a form of cultural shorthand to convey the idea of what different ships are supposed to be good at from a glance. It works. I look at the M50 and immediately think ‘fast ship is fast’ (before bursting out laughing at it) so it does the job the designers intended. The issue I have is that designing things in that manner has always felt a little bit cheap to me, as though whoever sat down to make the thing didn’t care at all about the thing beyond that first glance, first impression.

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There are all sorts of things to consider when building ships: purpose, aesthetics, making sure everything fits and moves correctly, size…and now you want to toss in aerodynamics? Building ships is harder than you think and as I have already stated, including aerodynamics would greatly hamper development. Moreover, we cannot even fly in space as it is unless we hitch a ride on a Russian capsule, let alone zooming from here to there in warp and shooting things…so where exactly are you drawing the line? Aerodynamics?

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I think you two are speaking on different levels when it comes to purpose.

Zen I think is talking about purpose in game, whereas Naiba + OP is on a practical engineering standpoint.

Furthermore, Zen is places aesthetics above purpose, as apposed to Naiba, where purpose trumps aesthetics. Not that one is overtly more important than the other, only that more emphasis is placed on one but not the other.

I’m just stating this because this could go on for a long time without going anywhere. :stuck_out_tongue:

That said, it is important to note that in IB, as far as we know and as per the devs’ statements, realism rules except when it hampers good gameplay.

Star Citizen is unrealistic and laughably so from an engineering standpoint, which was briefly talked about above. However, it’s just a game, and has no effect on reality whatsoever. And who knows? Maybe in the future, the style of the ships will make perfect engineering sense because of this doo-dad technology or what-have-you gadget. The point is that this is a science fiction genre, and realism, along with aesthetics, is a highly subjective point just because it’s, well, fiction. Pure imagination.

However, when realism is stated in regards to sci-fi, it tends to carry with it the ideas and knowledge of today’s tech and theory applied to the future.

With that in mind, all that remains is to determine how much baggage we want to carry into our game.

So far, we have glorious 1:1 scale planets with realistic features, wind, proper planetary belts, REAL FLIPPIN NEWTONIAN PHYSICS (!!!), and with the last update, we have a pretty sweet drag system.

All of the above could have been short-cutted across to get to the core game play of IB. Small planets, ED style belts, and hard-codded per-ship flight models. Honestly, none of the fancy stuff we have now is actually needed for the style of gameplay that IB is planning to employ. But we have it, thank goodness, because of the mantra realism rules except when it hampers good gameplay. (and because we have a truly epic engine to play with. :slight_smile: )

We have the tools, why not make stuff with them?

Now, as a final note, I have absolutely no doubt that the current direction of the ship design is intentinal. Keith and Flavien aren’t wringing their hands screaming at Jan demanding what on earth is he thinking building tanky looking ships.

I’ll leave it up to you all to decided whether or not it’s realistic.

I personally am somewhat disappointed that we probably won’t get the KS concept stuff. Like the orange neon glowy Hellion/Helion :stuck_out_tongue: skin. Or the Hellion for that matter. But I trust the devs to push the game in the right direction.

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19

Well said. And I would like to point out that INS spent roughly 7 years to get this far yet it has only been a few months of implementing ship design. Not saying it should take another 7 years for ship design but taking the time to make great ships for a great engine will pay off. So if ships have to be redesigned then I have no problem with it. But short of building an in-game wind-tunnel, talk of aerodynamics is overkill. Although, if making ships truly aerodynamic meant having to redesign ships so they weren’t so blocky - I could definitely live with that - aesthetically speaking.

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To be honest, it would probably be easier to 3d print the models and get them tested in real wind tunnels to analyze the coefficients and data from that than it would be to create their own wind tunnel simulation. It’s probably cheaper from a man-hour perspective as well.

I would offer to do this, but alas I do not have access to a wind tunnel and I’m willing to wager not many do. :stuck_out_tongue:

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21

I’m a big fan of the ‘aerodynamic shield bubble’ idea that was mentioned around. The ship can be as blocky as wished, but its shield has a simple form (probably an ellipsoid or sth) for which there are known aerodynamic formulae. There are two advantages:

  • Calculating aerodynamics becomes doable with a general rule, while following real-world physics close enough
  • Aerodynamics stops being a concern when modelling the ship
    The second point doesn’t mean a ship shouldn’t look functional, on the contrary it justifies pretty well the tank + engines design of the SFC. The general shape of a ship is still of some importance, though, you don’t want your areospace fighter to look like a billboard.

It would be great if the shield itself was slightly visible when looking close enough and paying attention, for example with a small deformation at the edge of the bubble, around the ship. If there ever are atmospheric effects (shut up, let me dream) the shield would be used as the source of the mach cone, condensation, reentry fireball and such…

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Would be neat to see what happens when the shields fail while at high speed in combat in that situation. :wink:

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Wait, what? Who left?

25

I actually dislike Elite Dangerous’ aesthetic, the ships look unimaginative and weapons are sort of bolted onto gimbaled ports and don’t follow any of the ship lines and curves. Star Citizen somewhat suffers from this too, weapons don’t look like they belong to the ship and look like they bolted weapons on civilian ships. There’s a general sense of “make it because it looks cool” rather than having a marriage between design and lore.

I’ve always been in favor of the Homeworld style, particularly Homeworld 2 and the latest Deserts of Kharak where weapons are part of the vessel, integral to its entire design and often the thing a vessel centers around. If you make weapons too small (like in EVE Online for example) you will end up looking at the ship and finding weapons nothing more than T-Rex arms - surely to grab your attention (heh) but ultimately dwarved by rest of the ship.

What i’m saying is not in terms of “bigger because orc likes big axe” but more in the sense of the scale of importance and attention. This is a game about spaceship fights and weapon models should definitely be part of the entire ship design, perhaps even what the ship is center around.

This one shows how the entire design is centered around the main gun. It has 4 sentry guns to defend against small pesky harassers but just by looking at it, without knowing anything about it, you understand its main role - frontline long-range assault.

In contrast you may look at this one and figure out that it’s smaller, as it has the same (single) sentry battery, and has a bunch of antennas, relatively larger engines and no main gun leading me to guess that it is probably some sort of scout/exploration vessel.

I hope the above two examples are good enough to explain my design language - it’s not about bigger weapons. It’s about telling a story about a ship: where it came from, why it exists, what is its role and how it works. You can let the player see and understand this at a glance with good design or let the player be confused as to what it’s suppose to do with bad design.

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26

Agreed.

That ship reminds me of this RL example:

A-10_Cross_Section.jpg1800×1167 137 KB

The A-10 is built basically to haul that big gun around. Literally, that’s why it’s designed that way.

That’s one of the reasons I’m hyped about the current direction for the bomber. Regardless of whether or not it’s origin was a mining ship, it screams that it has gobs of armour and bombs. Which is exactly what you want when flying a bomber.

I 100% agree that ship design should be centered around it’s function. Followed closely by ‘rule of cool’. :wink: But the rule of cool shouldn’t supersede the function of the craft.

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While I totally agree with keeping designs authentic to INS’s vision, I wonder how the other faction will contrast in design…

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That depends on what you’re trying to communicate. I believe the Astralis faction favours form over function, somewhat like an MacBook Air where they create a single-form structure and incorporate all the functions as part of the hull rather than greeble-filled modules. This would indicate a very specialized mentality where each ship serves only one function and is very inflexible (like not being able to swap weapons or modules). With comparison to other factions that can modify existing ships for different purposes (ship variants) the Astralis feel like they design an entire ship from scratch for every particular role. This indicates that each ship should be more expensive but that much more powerful at their intended role. From just the aesthetic i remember, it could translate into a faction that has more expensive but more powerful ships as part of the game mechanics and balance.

In comparison the current faction can have ship variants based on the same hull. One might have some modifications that favours missiles, another can have ECM capabilities with a reduced firepower, etc… Astralis could have a Fighter that would only work with plasma cannons and a bomber would have to be a completely different ship with different charactersitics and behaviour as opposed to a slight variation on the same platform.

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Has INS ever posted a style guide for their ships? or are they keeping it internal?

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Yes, they did, that’s was Gene’s job…

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Looks like they’ve taken down the guidelines and the blog for obvious reasons. I wonder if they will post a new revised version.

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INovaeGene, INovaeAndre and INovaePanu all left the development team a few months ago. This is presumably because the Kickstarter didn’t bring in as much money as was hoped and so they couldn’t afford to keep them on.

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33

I really, really wish Keith would talk about that.

There’s a lot I could say, but if INS wants to keep it all under the rug, then so be it. I’m not happy about it, but I’m sure Kieth, Flaven, et al aren’t either.

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There isn’t any sweeping things under the rug. I cannot talk about it regardless of whether or not I want to. I understand some of you are unhappy about that but there isn’t much I can do about it.

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Yes. Unless the people involved want to openly state their situation then it remains completely confidential for the good of both parties.

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