New blog from our art lead

But they hold a lot of clout, politically! You can’t just bypass the OC without expecting some kind of consequence.

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Erhm, correct me if I’m wrong here, but while spheres and cylinders are the most industrial shapes for holding fluids, I’m pretty sure box-shapes are actually way more handy for most anything else?

I mean, that’s why almost all boxes from the one my phone came in to cargo containers are roughly box-shaped, isn’t it?

I just want them to be easily distinguishable, one faction from the other two, or do I have"face blindness" when it comes to two of the factions.

I prefer the ships being little identifiable but awesome, than easily identifiable but generic.

You could make all SFC ships a bunch of cubes, the centauran folks a bunch of cuban cigars and the deltan ships a bunch of triangles, but that would suck. As long as you can still look at a ship in close proximity and not confuse it with a different ship or fail to identify which faction it is, I don’t really care.

Being able to identify a silhouette isn’t really that important in the scales IB will have. You will most likely get the ship name/type in your scanner long before its in visual range, and customization would mean that just knowing what ship the opponent has wouldn’t be enough to tell you much about what to expect. Maybe he modified his heavy fighter to be faster than a light fighter, maybe his freighter is an armored tank, and so on.

Precisely. There needs to be some visual differences in general silhouettes / detail and textures , but (in my opinion) I rather like the idea of subtle differences at times; where a keen eye can tell the difference say from a mig 29 from a F18. It’s definitely going to be a creative juggling act.

This tends to work best in universes where the technologies underlying the design are very well defined. Modern fighter jets, WWII era warbirds, airships, launch vehicles, tall sailing ships, etc. have all looked very similar despite their differing manufacturers because they were each operating with basically the same technology and under the same conditions.
This is why I suggested that you should really nail down the technological requirements that apply to every ship in your universe, perhaps even designing standardized versions of internal components. It will allow you to have that “subtle variation from an established norm” that you’re talking about, and it will arise naturally from the in-universe lore.

But also consider the scope of Battlescape. The INovae team isn’t that big, and at the level of detail you’re committed to, chances are you aren’t going to get that many ships in the game. Better to aim for variety among the ships that do make it in. Players will have more to look at, and it will suggest that there’s a living, breathing world beyond the Battlescape solar system that is the source of this variety.

I disagree with your last sentence, though the rest I agree with.

I think with space, the idea is that there isn’t a living, breathing world beyond the solar system - that’s just the nature of space. Retaining the beauty of the silence and emptiness of space is key for the atmosphere… just my opinion. I personally want this game to feel ‘realistic’, and as far away as anything Star Wars-esque as possible.

Films like Solaris, and of course A Space Odyssey go quite far into the whole empty universe setting, which to me feels believable.

There will be enough empty space in battlescape. Space between planets is vast and the only sign to your eye that you are in a solar system some million kilometers from the next planet will be the bright star.