While I’d like to see more hard sci-fi spaceship designs in games, scientific realism is a bit of a trap in Infinity’s case. It would just invite scrutiny that can’t be rewarded.
That said, you can get a lot of believability out of an admittedly unrealistic art style if you design ships that are internally consistent and follow their own set of rules.
I still think serious attention should be paid to Infinity’s ships’ internal hardware. All ships are supposed to have jump drives and warp drives, but we still have no idea what either looks like or how they’re supposed to fit into the ships we’ve seen so far.
You don’t have to invent a theoretically working jump drive (don’t try, you’ll just look silly), but at least come up with some basic rules for what they need.
How big are they generally relative to the ship? How do they scale as the size of the ship increases? Do they have a distinctive or recognizable shape (Distinctive is good, it’ll help Infinity stand out)? Do they have to be separated from certain parts of the ship, or do they need to be positioned in the exact center? That kind of thing.
Similar rules can apply to the warp drive, the impulse thrusters, the crew compartments, and so on.
This presents unique design constraints, which work wonders for creativity. You now have to problem solve to design a “working” spaceship, and the result is a more believable design.
Listing the colors and angles present in an art style doesn’t tell us anything about the underlying design philosophy. This is what leads to the “box with thrusters” criticism so often leveled. Besides the stipulations regarding paneling and greeble, there’s no reason to design anything other than a box (besides Rule of Cool, which doesn’t help the game feel any more believable). And if there is, it’s not really coming through.
This is the crux of the point I was trying to make in the OP. I didn’t express it as well as Timmon has here. I’d like to see space ship designs that have an internal consistency with thought given to the purpose of each component we can see.
It’s the difference between a game asset that is attempting to reproduce a real prototype and a model that is a work of imagination. The objects modelled on a real prototype have a consistency of style and reality that is rarely seen in assets that are entirely fictional.
What we often see when looking at the texturing of space ship is that the texture artist is trying to use all the cool looking effects he has available to him simply because they are there. When bump mapping was first introduced it seemed that every surface suddenly became bumpy and scratched just because the artists wanted to show off the engine’s ability to shade uneven surfaces. For real prototypes it’s usually the case that surfaces don’t have visible scratches and are very smooth.
Sometimes less is more. In reality we normally find one material that works and use that material everywhere. Hull plating is likely to look the same across a range of ships that have all found a certain material to be the most effective for the job of being the outer skin of a ship. There might be three or four basic types of hull plating materials (civilian, military armoured and military stealth), all would be consistent in terms of specularity and smoothness with perhaps just the colour of the paint job changing.
Another area where ships often looks bad is seemingly random panel lines in textures. This is again mainly a job for the texture artists to decide upon a consistent set of rules. Have a mechanism in mind for how panels are placed and attached to craft and apply it across all ships. I dislike the overly obvious panel seams that seem to be made larger than necessary simply to give a purpose for having a normal map. But if you decide that the technology of the universe results in highly visible panel seams, then it should be applied the same on every ship.
The last thing I will say on this topic is we plan to release MOD tools. Then the sky is the limit for those who wish to design to whatever criteria they deem appropriate.
This discussion topic has well summed up my thoughts on spaceship games problems. It is not just the form over function argument. It is also the conceptualization of what something is for. Many of the contributions in the past, make the assumption “magic” . This ends up creating an artistic design that doesn’t make sense given the expectations of the objects’ nature. I have often had this discussion with those in the forums as well as IRC in the past. I have concluded that for most, the desire to make an magic airplane overwhelms the desire to make a practicable spaceship.
We see the instance above in several forum posts that sort of miss the point. It’s not about “needing more rings” or “add pods” or the “rust is wrong”. It’s really about not having put any thought into a concept not just in design, form over function, but what one is trying to achieve. Is it a spaceship? What does a spaceship do? What is the artist’s or public’s expectations? If the public expects that spaceships are extensions of airplanes, then airplanes will dominate the design. There is no sense in this and people will bend over backward to somehow explain this logical fallacy. Examples of this are wings, sidedness, many many rocket engines. the list goes on. ProjectRho has spent a great deal of time talking about this subject.
Crayfish makes wonderful points but in the end no one will listen. Why? Because their expectation of a design trope is vastly different from the realities of the world. Something many of us escape. In the end, cookie-cutter spaceships, indistinguishable from other spaceship game designs will be churned out with thoughts mostly on, what seems expected. In the end, I’ll put up any industrial design artists spaceships against the vast majority of what I see in today’s “spaceship games”. Why? Maybe intellectual or artistic laziness.
