T w e n t y S i d e d
Long-time readers have heard this story before. I decided to spend “a couple of hours” making something. Those hours turned into days. Pretty soon I was stealing hours that I was supposed to be spending on the blog. So to cover up my crime, I decided to write about the project.
I’ve said before that I was a 3D artist back in the 90s. The truth is that I wasn’t great at it. I’m like 85% engineer and 15% artist,You can really see this in my novels. so a lot of my work was very plain and literalist. It was technically solid and I was really good at shaving off extra polygons, but you shouldn’t come to me if you’re looking for something that will invoke a mood or a specific art style. I think I served my employer much better when I left behind the art world and switched to programming full-time.
A few weeks ago I came across this video, where ex-Mythbuster Adam Savage talks about making physical models for the Star Wars prequel trilogy:
Link (YouTube) |
At the five minute mark he talks about the process of adding greebles to the surface of a space station. He talked about coming up with “a story” for the thing you’re building. Like, a surface panel falls off, so that means the area under it gets these streaks of rust.
This is exactly the sort of work I struggled with. I’d make (say) a building or whatever, and it would be “too perfect”. Too uniform. Too simple. I’d try to add some detail (maybe some air conditioning blocks or whatever) to make it interesting, but it never felt right. I’d add detail in one spot, and then the rest of it would look more bare. So I’d add more. And more. And pretty soon I’d have this odd lumpy thing with a noisy outline that didn’t look or feel genuine. It was both too busy and yet still somehow lacking in detail???
I thought Savage’s “tell a story” approach was an interesting one, and I wondered if it would help me.
So! I’m going to make a spaceship and see what I get.
I didn’t realize I was going to write about this, so I didn’t save my first few spaceships. I just sort of took the default cube, smashed it into some other shape, zoomed out, realized my work sucked, and hit delete to start over. I was mostly getting used to Blender and getting a feel for what I wanted.
This is the only one of the early models that had the dignity of being saved to the hard drive before being abandoned:
After a few abortive attempts like this, I realize I need a different approach. I want to practice adding detail to a model. But there’s no point in doing that until I have a reasonable base to work from.
Now, obviously I should be working from reference images. I was worried that if I started with someone else’s images, I’d just end up copying their design. That’s an understandable concern, given my usual approach of brute-force imitation. But attempting to work blind is silly. Coming up with my own spaceship design is harder than coming up with decorative details to put on the surface. This is like building a house so I can practice painting the mailbox. I’m doing this the hard way for no reason.
So I need a reference photograph. I type random words from the collection of “space ship design outer space future mothership concept art”. I’m still not crazy about the results I get, but then I throw the term “Homeword” in the mix and I start seeing stuff I like. Eventually I assemble images of these handsome ladies:
I’m paying particular attention to the upper-left and center-bottom images. I didn’t bother to confirm, but I’m willing to bet all of these are from Homeworld.
Do YOU Remember Homeworld?
It was a real-time strategy game from 1999. The gameplay was nothing special. This was the heyday of the RTS genre. Legendary franchises like Age of Empires, Warcraft, Total Annihilation, Starcraft, and Command and Conquer were all active and popular in this time period.
Homeworld really couldn’t hold a candle to those titles in terms of depth and mechanics. It’s pretty hard for things like “terrain”, line-of-sight, fog of war, and high ground to have any meaning in a game that takes place in the void. The full 3D battlefield was good for making it complicated to order units around and keep track of where everything was, but none of that complexity translated into gameplay depth.
You started off every mission mining asteroids and using the captured resources to build military units. Then you’d fling your armada at the enemy and turn their fleet into charred metal.
At this point you’re supposed to gather up your fleet, pack everything away inside your mothership, and jump to the next mission.
Except…
Except the game allowed you to keep your fleet from one mission to the next. So once the battle was over, obviously the smart move was to spend twenty minutes mining the remaining asteroids and turning them into more ships. This was boring, yes. But this is obviously the optimal thing to do. And if you’re not the sort of person that’s compelled to optimize, then I don’t know what you’re doing in the RTS genre in 1999.
But then about halfway through the game I learned that it auto-balances. The more ships you bring with you, the bigger the enemy fleet gets.
This was a double trap for me. I’m compelled to optimize my forces, even if that means playing in a boring way. At the same time, optimizing is meaningless. I can’t just leave all these resources behind, because that feels wrong. But it doesn’t make any sense to gather them up because they don’t give me any advantage. I can either pointlessly waste my time doing something boring for no benefit, or I can end every mission plagued by the anxiety that I’m being lazy and sloppy by leaving all these free resources behind. I’m paralyzed.
And so I never finished the game.
Having said that, I still list this game as a “classic” and “one of my favorites“. Why?
Why would I call a game a favorite when I couldn’t even be bothered to finish it?
Because the aesthetics of playing this game are so good that the experience is burned into my memory. I would call the sensation of playing this game “euphoric”. I remember sitting there at my 15 inch 800×600 monitor, looking out over my gargantuan fleet of ships as they drifted in the void of glittering stars and radiant nebulae, listening to the angelic choir lament for a world they had never seen, and I didn’t even want to touch the keyboard. I just wanted to stay in that moment, enjoying that paradoxical sense of scale where my fleet felt simultaneously immense and yet impossibly small. These ships were larger and grander than anything humans had dreamed of building in the real world. The Mothership makes the Nimitz class carrier look like a rowboat. And yet she is nothing in the void. A joke. A fragment of a speck of floating metal.
This game filled me with a sense of awe. It made me want to write poetry. It even had moments where the experience was so overwhelming, I very nearly was willing to put up with the lame-ass gameplay.
What I’m saying is, I tried to finish this game more than once. I’d get sucked in by the sensory experience, and then I was slowly driven away by the mechanics.
Where Was I?
I seem to have lost my train of thought. What were we doing? Oh, right. Making a spaceship:
Like all of the art in Homeworld, this stuff is so good I’m ashamed to look at it. Using these as reference is an act of outrageous hubris. If I manage to hone my skills and become ten times the artist I was, then by the end I might eventually be able to craft something that looks like a rough draft of a knockoff of one of these ships.
Anyway, let’s get started!
Once again, I didn’t keep my first attempts because I thought I was working on a one-day project and I didn’t expect to write about it. So I have no record of the early stuff. But here is the first one I made that I thought was good enough to work with:
It’s not much obviously, but I think this is at least good enough that I can have some fun adding detail to it.
Great. We’re finally ready to start the project.
Now, Adam Savage was talking about working on really fine details like single windows and individual surface panels. That would be massive overkill for this project, and also much too daunting as a starting point. So I’m going to try to devise the ship in sections, and as I go I’ll try to come up with an explanation or purpose behind each section.
Actually, let’s stop and add a texture map first. The model doesn’t need a texture map yet, but I find I lose track of scale without one. If I add some windows then maybe they can help guide me. So I hit Google Image Search, find some random space-panel textures, and then hand-draw some windows:
You can see some dodgy mapping around the top and some seams on the side. It’s fine. We’re going to be throwing away this mapping – and maybe even the texture map itself – later down the line. These windows are our version of Banana for Scale. The eye tends to assume that space-windows operate on roughly the scale as their terrestrial counterparts.
Now it’s time to add detail / features to this thing. Unlike the projects I worked on in my 20s, I’m not going to add random bumps in an effort to make it “interesting”. Instead, we’re going to design the ship a section at a time, and each section will have a purpose.
I suppose the first thing we need is a place for crew members to live.
What comes next? Oh, that’s right…
BUT WHAT DO THEY EAT?
We need a place to store cargo. Now, in a real-ish life I imagine you’d keep all your cargo inside the ship, and you wouldn’t waste time with windows, since your supplies don’t need to be able to stargaze. But if we followed this logic then the cargo area of a ship would just look like a smooth, featureless hull. And when you think about it some more, that ought to hold true for most of the ship.
But I want to convey the idea that “stuff is stored here”, so let’s imagine these space engineers decided to store stuff in containers strapped to the hull:
Now we probably need some sort of housing for the magic widget that generates “modulated hyperspace waves”Also known as “blue particle effects”. and supplies the excuse that explains why our ship gets to go faster than light speed. I’ve decided that such a device needs to be round and have a hole in the middle, just because that will break up the ship outline a bit so it doesn’t feel like a flying wall.
I switch over to flat-color view to check my topology and it makes me laugh:
You can tell I’m an old-timer that hasn’t done this sort of thing since the 90s. This is SO low poly.Actually, the little rounded cargo modules aren’t too bad. That’s roughly the level of rounding / polygon density you might expect these days.
I felt like I was really going crazy with the polygon counts. When I built that hyperdonut in the middle of the ship, I thought I was being positively decadent by starting with a 16-sided cylinder.Back in the day, 6-siders were the norm, but you might go up to 8 if the curved surface was going to be really big. But now I can see how jagged it is. I think 32 sides – double what I started with! – is probably as low as you’d want to go. And you could easily justify doubling that again if this model was going to be viewed from anywhere closer than the view above.
I spent so many years fussing over individual surfaces and looking for ways to save a triangle or three. These days that sort of optimization just isn’t worth it. But old habits die hard. Asking me to ignore polygon counts is like asking an aerospace engineer to not worry about weight. Like, that’s the entire job, man!
What Did We Learn Today?
I walk away from the model for a day or so, and then come back to it and appraise it with fresh eyes. Several things stand out to me:
The straight edges on the top and bottom are very dull. That needs to be broken up somehow. We could go for a more organic shape, with the spine curving slightly. Or we could take those jagged shapes from the front and back and add more of them in the middle, sticking up from that otherwise boring spine. One way or another, the edges need some variations in height. Maybe something like this:
Pardon the freehand mouse-drawing. Hopefully you get the idea. Anyway, here’s the model with lighting enabled:
Also, this two-tone look is too plain. Looking at my reference images, I notice that three colors seems to be the magic number. A really common style is white + black + primary color. I think I need a stripe of color somewhere on this thing.
And finally, I’m not really happy with the scale. On one hand, I’m glad I held a consistent scale and didn’t “drift” as I added new material. Back in the day, I made that mistake a lot. On the other hand, this feels smaller than what I was going for. This doesn’t feel like it’s in the weight class of a “flagship” or an “aircraft carrier”. This feels more like something yacht-sized. Actually, it’s almost giving me “space bus” vibes.
You could fix this by shrinking the windows. Heck, I could probably fix it just by changing the texture mapping and not messing with the model itself at all. Either way, it needs to feel bigger.
Now, I’m tempted to throw the whole thing out and start over with what I’ve learned, but let’s delay that step. I’ll probably learn several more things in the next couple of hours, and I might as well learn them before we start the next model.
Before You Go
Now, I imagine quite a few of you are in a hurry to jump down to the comments and tell me that Homeworld 3 was revealed recently.
For the moment, I just want to make it clear that I didn’t know Homeworld 3 was coming at this point in the project. We’ll come back to this later in the series.
Anyway, that was a pretty productive “day” of 3D modeling. On one hand, I’m rusty as hell and I’ve forgotten half my skills. On the other hand, the tools these days are so good! My memory lapses are slowing me down, but these tools are making me more productive. I think it’s basically a wash.
I realize this spaceship doesn’t look like much. Try not to get too hung up on it. The project is actually going to take a turn and go off in another direction pretty soon.
Footnotes:
[1] You can really see this in my novels.
[2] Also known as “blue particle effects”.
[3] Actually, the little rounded cargo modules aren’t too bad. That’s roughly the level of rounding / polygon density you might expect these days.
[4] Back in the day, 6-siders were the norm, but you might go up to 8 if the curved surface was going to be really big.
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In theory, without using a specific ship as a reference image you should be able to build a rough one from your memory of other ships you’ve seen. As you noted, the problem with starting from a reference image is that the base design of the ship will already be done with specific details in mind, and so you either will be adding details that don’t fit the base or will simply be duplicating what they did, which would risk you doing it in an inferior way. So building a simple base from memory would probably help because your memory would leave details out but you’d get a viable base from that. Unless you’re like me and have no visualization skills, but at that point trying to add detail to an existing model is probably not something you should try [grin].
I have a lot of games like this, especially since I used to never actually finish games and so most of my favourites were games that I had never finished. Wizardry 8 is the biggest example of a game that I play every so often with a new set of characters but never finish and am unlikely to ever finish. I like the character interactions — randomly fired off based on a personality type — but ultimately get a bit tired of the combat and often think of another party to create before I get too far in any one game.
The emergent dialogue in Wizardry 8 is pretty funny. I chose this username after laughing about RFS-81’s reaction to trash mobs. (“Practice mode.”) I haven’t played the game in forever.
My favorite lines from the game were when my Burly character fell in love with the demon boss lady.
“She nice. For a demon.”
“Demon woman dead… Good! I feel better now. No more voice in my head.”
The funniest one I had was with I think the intellectual male voice and the shady female voice when someone died, and went something like this:
Intellectual: I regret their passing.
Shady: Can I have her stuff?
Even funnier because this order was NOT scripted, and is just the random activation of random characters and their standard lines when something like that happens. It didn’t happen all the time, but a lot of the time you’d get funny alignments like this that more importantly really reflected the characters you had created.
I am shocked, just shocked I tell you. /s
“space bus” or…
Young-class Long-distance Passenger Ship.
They’re part of an escort mission on level 5. It’s not as bad as it sounds though, since their AC is higher than most cruisers. So long as you take out the enemy destroyers before they get in range the mission is actually pretty easy.
Making the weak point an almost literal white-and-red big Bull’s eye in the middle of the ship wasn’t the smartest move ever by the designers, though.
The real annoying thing about that mission is that the ship travels just fast enough to outrun your high-maneuverability station travel speed, but too slow to keep up with your interplanetary travel speed. And there’s no setting in between.
I thought the dark-grey area was the cargo section, like sliding the trailer onto a semi, or a battery into a flashlight.
The actual thrust would come from the top and bottom sections, which also provide cool light trails that let the audience/player/viewer track movement more easily.
Yes, like Homeworld.
I really like the cargo sections. It think it’s a great example of how crafting a story goes both ways. When I see the exposed cargo blocks it makes me think that they are actually separate pieces that are moved into position by little tender ships. If you were to see the main ship without them that center section would actually be pretty thin with little doors to access to cargo containers. It even makes a lot of sense, I mean how long would it take to load enough supplies for a journey by hand. Way faster to just attach them to the outside in bulk.
Your first ship looks like my graphics card.
It must belong to the Mining Guild.
That was beautiful. You can’t hear me, but I am clapping so much right now.
Actually, one random question I had been pondering for Shamus in the Diecast is if he opened up Half-Life 2 and started directly at Highway 17, could he skip all of the non-mandatory buildings between the start and the bridge? I had a feeling his previously-described obsessive need to leave no loot behind would prevent him from skipping over all of this content.
I tried this a few months ago and it turns out you really don’t need much that the game won’t force-feed you anyway (like the rocket launcher), so it really is just pointless busywork to stop at every little house scrounging for crates. Well, not pointless if you’re enjoying the gameplay I suppose.
Am I the only one who was thinking “But…but…Din’t Paul already make a series here about building space ships? Couldn’t Shamus (ab)use that as a starting point?”?
Also, I definitely remember Homeworld fondly. While it wasn’t actually that great in many ways,the real 3D aspect of the maps did make a difference. It was mostly just a headache, but in some cases it provided strategic benefits. Compare and contrast Star Trek Armada, where “3D” boiled down to “2D with an option of going a little above or below the plane”.
> The truth is that I wasn’t great at it. I’m like 85% engineer and 15% artist
I really was expecting you to go “so I am going to procedurally generate the spaceship!” after that.
What brought me to this site initially was Pocedural city, so it would not have been that big of a leap. And if my memory serves, Paul has done some spaceship generation as well. I think it would be super appropriate.
On that note :
https://github.com/a1studmuffin/SpaceshipGenerator/
Sweet procgen spaceship generator!
Yeah, I worked on it for a while, here’s the first article in the series:
https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=47659
and all of the Blender files:
http://jhundts.org/ProcgenSpaceship/
I never got as far as actually programatically creating any spaceships though.
I just burned through the remaster of Homeworld 1 playing about a mission a night. And I would say I also read about the autoscaling, and tried to game it by collecting all the resources at the end of a level and then building up at the beginning of the next level. But that didn’t last, once you get past the first handful of missions the game tends to rush you at the beginning of each level. So you “can’t” actually come into a mission with a weak fleet and then build up. The first thing you do is fight a big space battle to claim some breathing space. So I just started maxing out my fleet at the end of each level, and that turned out to be fine. Sure the battles got bigger, but not really harder. I recommend ignoring the autoscaling. A maxed out line of capital ships, destroyers and heavy cruisers, will solve all problems. Plus it gets super pretty when there’s like 100 ships just lasering the crap out of each other.
Also, pro tip, the salvage destroyers are super op. Like so good. whenever you see an enemy capital ship, distract it with your capitals and send in your salvage guys to steal it.
Auto scaling doesn’t matter when you have 5 heavy cruisers through hijacking and the game only wants you to build 3.
It’s more that auto-scaling wasn’t really a thing Homeworld 1. It existed, but in that game there were only a few levels where there was any scaling, and even then it was quite limited in where it could scale the enemy forces up to.
Homeworld 2 on the other hand is where the devs went completely bananas. To this day I have no idea how that game was play tested. There are several missions that are unplayable without a mod that turns down the scaling.
I loved abusing the Salvage Corvettes in HW1. I was sad they removed that exploit in HM2 and replaced the with the Marine ships that pretty much suck at everything.
I finished HW2 once and haven’t felt like replaying it ever. I do want to play through cataclysm though.
No love for Homeworld: Cataclysm (now available as Homeworld: Emergence on GOG) in this thread?
Man, that game was so good. WE WILL NOT BE BOUND
Thank you!
Cataclysm was my favorite. The only one of the three I’ve actually finished. (Though that has a lot to do with my young self getting rather upset when formation shenanigans destroyed all of my capital ships in the first)
I really need to go back and play those.
One of my favorite bits is still how they went from considering themselves a mining clan, and by the end acknowledged that they had become a combat one. They really did a good job of having a narrative throughout their games. I miss having that in RTS games.
Just going to drop in to say I still love Homeworld, and even Homeworld 2 has grown on me in the intervening years.
Also, for the third time, when Homeworld 3 comes out I will have to buy a new computer to play a Homeworld game. (1, 2, and 3 -I was actually able to play Deserts of Kharak without upgrading).
A lot of the power is the aesthetic -but I think the gameplay must really depend on being the kind of player who prefers formations and maneuver to clicks per minute. The manual even states there are two basic ways to play the game -formations and attack postures that rely on the AI to do the target selection, or micromanaging every step.
I typically opted for formations, with probably half the ships in any given task force really just being escorts. Most of the orders I gave were to the heavy cruisers and to the strike craft. The Destroyers and the Frigates were mostly just set to escort the cruisers and shoot whatever the cruisers shot.
(Though in the campaign there was one major exception: the multi-beam frigate squadron would be directly controlled to put maximum ion beam pain on specific ships -oh man I loved getting the Dervish in the expansion pack…)
Yeah, you pretty much described exactly why I never finished either of the Homeworlds. It’s also why I didn’t stick too much with Sins of a Solar Empire. I love the visuals (and in Homeworld’s case – also the story), but the gameplay just isn’t for me.
Also, really looking forward to this new series!
Ah, autobalancing. The infamous feature that’s only fun if you learn to game the system in your favor. Like in Final Fantasy VIII, which gets considerably easier if you just don’t level up, so you basically have to stop engaging with the game’s systems to have fun. What a joy.
You know, at first glance I thought those were all shotguns from some sci-fi shooter like Borderlands. Perhaps you could start there as inspiration.
My thought as well. (Well “Halo-style assault rifles, not shotguns”, but close enough)
I think that’s kind of a classic approach to sci-fi ship design – take something mundane and use it as the basis of the hull design. Since shape basically doesn’t matter, you can justify almost any object you can think of.
Well, as regards autobalancing. Often I would agree. However, in this case we’re talking about a small faction trying to overthrow a sizable empire. They probably have more hypothetically available but not immediately in place. Of course, the longer you take (which, due to mission structure, means taking the time to scrap and mine) themire they can put in place.
It wont always make perfect sense but it’s more that the game doesn’t say this to the player directly. And I fully acknowledge this is fan theorizing. Part of the reason for it, was to prevent death spirals from resource constraints.
I like the Psilon eye on the front
edit: Can we please get it animated, so the red eye sweeps left to right?
I don’t think so? Pretty sure that’s supposed to be where the bridge is, and those are actual windows. Making them glow in a sequential pattern would probably be really distracting for the crew inside.
I know it’s somewhat orthogonal to the point of this post, but this Blender add-on is amazing for accomplishing greebles.
Random Flow
I’m totally confused about what “handsome” means.
In school, I learned that you’d use “beautiful” as a descriptor for women and “handsome” for men. Lately, I’ve been reading Fritz Leiber’s Lankhmar novels and he routinely describes women as handsome, but I don’t think he’s implying they look like men. And now those ships are “handsome ladies”.
You are correct that typically “beautiful” is more feminine and “handsome” is for masculine beauty. In this case I was messing around with conventions because talking about beauty with regards to ships can be a little funny.
In the west, ships are typically referred to as “she”. But these designs are flying bricks of metal and thus not very lady-like. Appraising their beauty is a little silly, so I described them in a slightly silly way.
Thanks for explaining! I knew that ships are women for some reason, I was just confused by the adjective.
So I guess Fritz Leiber* is just a weirdo. I probably would have gotten the joke if I hadn’t read him…
* Who, despite the name, was a native English speaker.
Handsome can be applied to women, but it’s fairly archaic to do so, and it typically describes a more…stately? sort of beauty. Even in older novels where women are being described as handsome, it’s almost never applied to the young woman who was just presented at a drawing-room, but rather her aunt who chaperoned her there (and got her voucher for Almack’s, if that gives you an idea of how old the book in question would typically be).
Well, archaic is certainly what he was going for. I think I understand the distinction a bit better now, though no one in the Lankhmar books is in any danger of visiting whatever fantasy version of Almack’s they may have.
I think ‘handsome’ is sort of a combination of ‘attractive’ and ‘sturdy’. Men usually want to be seen as sturdy, women usually don’t.
I think it’s more common in Britain/England, but “handsome” has been used to describe women that are attractive. I THINK that in general it’s used for older women who are not youthfully beautiful but retain some of the beauty they had when they were younger, and so have a more mature attractiveness, including lines and wrinkles (etc).
I remember an episode of Star Trek TNG where the crew has to deal with this cantankerous old guy who runs some sort of spaceborne junk yard. Troi is asking him for access to some of the junk and he says, “Hmph. You probably think I’m going to say ‘yes’ just because we don’t get many handsome women ’round here. (beat.) Well, you’re probably right.”
It’s a rare phrase, and I haven’t heard it used in decades. I can’t comment on its usage in the UK, but your theory that it refers to older women is an interesting one.
In the USA, my theory was that it was used to say that a woman is attractive, but you don’t want to admit to being attracted to her yourself.
But I don’t know. It’s very rare and I never really figured it out before it vanished from use.
Also in TNG – In the episode where Picard gets an opportunity to relive his younger years and make different choices (courtesy of Q), he gets a drink thrown in his face when he calls the mature lady coming on to him at the bar “handsome”. A word he thought was perfectly fine, but the lady clearly took offense to.
I wouldn’t say it’s wrong to call a woman handsome, but if it was raising eyebrows in the 90s, I can only assume it still does today.
In regard to the worry that you’re just going to copy stuff if you start from a reference, I find that you can get around that using negative examples. Find spaceship you don’t like and try to fix the design to something you like, when I was writing my thesis I would also correct undergraduate work and it made it really obvious what not to do when writing certain sections. By starting with homeworld, which is imo the gold standard in spaceship design, you might just be dooming yourself borrowing too much of the aesthetic and any deviation will look ugly to you.
Alternatively you could try to use low poly ship as reference and try to imagine what they would look like upclose with all the details.
Going to suggest you want to back up one step; before you try to design a ship, you need to know what job the ship is designed for.
Homeworld’s ship looks like a giant gun, because Homeworld’s ships are about shooting dudes. But our ship has windows for passengers to see the sights, and cargo on the outside like a barge, and a huge hole in the middle of the ship that’s going to make it really hard for the tourists to get around. There’s a bad mishmash of “boat” going on, and I think that’s part of the problem.
I’d stick with the combat ship (although, I mean, that’s me.) A combat ship doesn’t need windows, but you can still create the lighting effect; those are landing pads for the smaller ships, heavily lit from the inside. We don’t want cargo on the outside, but we still get our greebles because we do want really bulky armor; the more important the stuff inside, the bulkier the armor on the outside. Our giant hole is fine*, because we’re here to fight, not to make the crew’s life easier.
And one thing to keep in mind; nearly every real-world commercial ship has pretty paint and a name on it, to let people know at a distance who they’re looking at. If we ever have a boring spot, we can paint it with giant letters or numbers.
*(I mean, you want to armor that thing somehow; obviously the hole is for ventilation, so we can’t keep it inside, but we should probably put a grate over it. Unless we want to go full magic and have that thing automatically react to incoming fire.. Proximity-based hyperdrive?)
Er, it’s a spaceship. There’s not much airflow in space. That kind of cooling doesn’t really work.
Ventilation, not cooling. That thing’s radiating something that you don’t want building up inside the ship.
Oh yeah, that’s a good point. Too often I see people talk about venting heat in space so I didn’t twig that what you were saying was entirely sensible.
I think this is somewhat “unrealistic” on a space-ship – the distances involved in space means that ships are far more likely going to rely on some non-optical method of identification like a transponder of some sort. It might be done for purely decorative purposes, but it doesn’t seem like it’d serve a very useful purpose.
I think they do in real life, too, at least when they’re sailing. But you’ll still be in port at least part of the time.
Unless you ARE the port, I guess.
…oh, right. The names and numbers are for the crew, for the same reason school buses have numbers; at some point, this ship is going to be parked next to a dozen ships that look just like it, and you want your crews to end up on the right ships.
Yeah, by the time you can read USS FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT on the side, you’re already too close to avoid the wake in your little sailing boat :-D
Space ships will “realistically” fight from kilometers away, yet somebody will still paint “USS Enterprise E” or “Unsinkable II” on the side.
I mean, they’ve been painting logos on space ships in the real world pretty much since there have been space ships to paint, even when they were basically unique, there were no other space ships around to see them, and no one would ever possibly mistake them for another ship. People like a bit of decoration and to customize the places they work/sleep/live in. You could argue that it might get suppressed in a military or corporate setting, I suppose.
Depends on the setting and the worldbuilding.
Gundam, for example, tends to have Minovsky particles or some other plot nonsense that renders long range sensors nearly useless in combat, so you need to use the Mk. I eyeball instead. Part of science fiction is making excuses so you “have to” do what you wanted to do anyway.
There’s a youtube channel that seems exceptionally relevant to this post: Spacedock
Half the videos are in depth talks about the aesthetics of fictional spacecraft. What works, what doesn’t work, and why. The other half of the videos discuss spaceships like if they were real historical equipment in that universe. Here’s a few links of the former:
https://youtu.be/bfMbr3tFLDw
https://youtu.be/OO6NTx92J18
https://youtu.be/xZFbICl-xAI
BTW Shamus, you spell it “Homeword” above once. I’m not sure if that was a typo or not given the context.
This talk of spaceship design reminds me of Tachyon: The Fringe. There are two factions you can side with: the Galactic Spanning Corporation (GalSpan), and the Bora Mining Guild (Bora). Each faction has their own version of the basic ships (a scout, a light interceptor, a heavy bomber,…) and the ships of the two factions look very different.
The GalSpan ships look very sleek and clean, like flying iDevices, while the Bora ships look like flying rust buckets. Different people have different tastes, so some people (like a Let’s Player whose videos I enjoy) like the GalSpan ships whereas I am partial to the Bora ones.
Same thing happens in other games, of course, but Tachyon has a really clear divide between the two and in multiplayer matches it’s easy to tell at a glance which faction a ship belongs to.
I liked the ship design of one side, and the gun types of the others. BOOOH! Always making me choose between high-rate lasers or decent ships!
My comment fell into the spam filter. Sadface.
Honestly, I could see bolted on cargo containers being a thing (and thus subtle world-building), at least in a setting where space travel is so mundane and have been that for such a long time, that ships are made, ‘live’ and ‘die’ in hard vacuum without ever going down into a gravity well.
Like… space debris ablative armor, that also contains that spare whatchamacallit, that you MIGHT need one day for the gizmos aboard, or that rock you were within spitting distance of by space standards that MIGHT be valuable, or even the cheap & slow freight… but it’s simply no grand tragedy if it gets a few cracks or even is lost to a freak hit by something. Doubly so if that cheap bit of metal and whatever it contained stopped your ship from depressurizing days or weeks from ‘port.’
It of course makes far less sense in our current style of ‘every gram is somebody’s paycheck’ style space travel, but could totally see it as a thing for space-fairing civilizations, or even sloppy civilian stuff in a universe where anti-gravity stuff is cheap and common place.
I always liked the cowboy bebop trucker ship that are just a massive cargo with a tiny cabin in front. Really don’t need anything more fancy and I could see something like that being used irl (although I assumed they’d be self control).
https://youtu.be/_w1kG8z7bo8?t=870
There’s this old sci-fi movie from ’96 called Space Truckers, that basically have that same concept too. Long~ row of containers, basically towed by a tiny, tiny cabin you actually live in.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQOqLOErhZA
It’s not high art by any means, but for a sci-fi schlock effects fest it’s great. Some really great scenes and really funny if you’re in the mood for a stupid action flick. Really think that movie deserved better then it got, because it was an utter box-office bomb, and it still only has a 15-30% rating over on Rotten Tomatoes.
Anyway, yeah. Always liked that concept of the ‘space truck,’ so nice to see it having been used elsewhere, let alone something as famed & beloved as Cowboy Bebop.
If you had a system of space ports, where elevators / surface to space ships moved cargo into space and then dedicated space ships moved them from port to port, I think a system like this would make more sense than making a ship large enough to contain all the cargo.
There is very little friction so you don’t need to worry about cargo blowing off or creating drag. And it’s presumably easier to unload cargo that’s already outside the ship. I’m assuming a dedicated space-only ship is a lot more efficient than a surface to space ship too. You don’t need to spend much mass on heat shielding and reinforcement.
You’d need a good way to secure it that allows for deceleration and doesn’t get in the way of the propulsion. Perhaps you would just strap the cargo in a big ring around the middle of the ship
Modular cargo bay with detachable containers. Makes total sense when you don’t have to worry about air or water resistance.
Tie Fighter has a few different freighters with a definite “bolted on cargo containers” aesthetic. There’s the bulk freighter, which looks like a flat rectangle with a couple of shipping containers bolted to the long edges. Then there’s the modular conveyor, which has four vaguely conical cargo pods on the sides. There are others too, but their names escape me at the moment.
While Tie Fighter does have less utilitarian cargo ship designs as well–a Star Wars game can’t not have the Millenium Falcon, after all–the bolted-on cargo containers aesthetic is a good fit for a game with an extremely limited polygon budget. I’m pretty sure that the bulk freighter in particular is the answer to the question “How can we convey the idea that this ship is a freighter in as few polygons as possible?”
My favourite “spaceship” design story is from Deep Space Nine. The designers forgot that Star Trek has artificial gravity, so they designed the space station as a ball of interlocking circles to produce spin gravity. Then they realised they didn’t need the circles, so they broke most of them to produce the semi-circular docking pylons.
When it came to making machines that don’t exist, I remember I would take an unnecessarily high poly cube or base sphere and grab verts(sometimes with soft select on) through the object to stretch and move rather randomly. Basically, you’re scrunching and stretching a piece of trash. The point of this is to see if you get an interesting silhouette, something that sparks your imagination in some way, then you start a new object with that shape as a rough outline.
After that, you continue as you do here. What is the main function(freight transport, combat, recon, support, etc..)? Does it need something else to support it? Is there a particular culture that Influences the placement of the bridge? Is there even a visible bridge at all? Questions like that.
It’s wierd you bring this up. I’ve started playing Kerbal Space Program again and because there are physics to be considered in that game, you’re often building around function rather then form, but the function tends to determine the form. Ships tend to be cylindrical(or at least along those lines) because 90% the time you need to get it to orbit on the top of a rocket. You need to build symmetrically because the center of mass and thrust actually means something in the game(try putting all your engines offset to the left and see how much fun it is to actually make the thing go where you want it to). And of course, you have to design around fuel, power, cargo, crew, etc so you need to have a good idea to start with what you want to do with the damn thing.
People have built really interesting designs and gotten them to space but they had to pull some interesting tricks to do so.
That ship looks exactly like a GTX 10XX graphics card with the fan in the middle and the gray with black lines: https://www.pcgamer.com/the-geforce-gtx-1070-review
Concerning poly counts and your decadent 16-sided cylinder, I’ve learned a trick you might be interested in. It’s called the “Screw” modifier, and it allows you to define a circular shape with a dynamic number of sides (and yes, the default is 16). You can even set the “render” and “viewport” number to be different, so you can work with a low-poly model and then have the extreme polycount when you go to make those sweet jpgs. I’ve found it works best to enable “Calculate Order” in the “Normals” dropdown at the bottom of the modifier, and then go to the object data properties (or “mesh settings”) and check “Auto Smooth” also under the “Normals” dropdown. Not sure why neither of these are on by default, but I get around it by setting up one object and then duplicating it to get more. You could even copy-paste between different instances of Blender!
Second thing, you really should post your Blender files so we can play around with them! Just don’t forget to go to File > External Data > Pack Resources so that all the textures come along. And then when you save the file, click the gear in the top-right corner and check “Compress”.
Looking forward to where this series goes! Gonna be sweet! These spaceships are already looking halfway okay!
How dare you sir? How dare you?!
On a more serious note I regret that Homeworld-style games did not pick up as not only do I remember it fondly but it’s probably one of my favourite RTSes and it did a lot of things in its own unique ways. It was a bit slower with a nice sense of scale and atmosphere. The carryover of resources and ships* gave it a sense of story rather than just a series of missions and avoided the warmup repetition. They added a 3rd dimension even though they only utilized it to a limited extent (and throughout the series you could occasionally “cheat” a mission because they forgot about it… Sins of a Solar Empire and Battlefleet Gothic: Armada games have some aspects of it in places but none of them quite captured the magic of swooshing between these majestic spaceships duking it out for me (if you zoomed in or followed a vessel that is).
*I think the idea of scaling was to actually scale the enemy fleets down if you had little resources of your own so as to prevent, or at least limit, the possibility of player barely scraping through several missions to face a giant fleet in the finale. Which, of course doesn’t change the fact that scaling did occur and it does ultimately work both ways and I personally dislike it as a mechanic so I can see why it would put you off.
Regarding difficulty scaling, I can see no reason why there can’t be a pair of settings for difficulty demarcating the upper and lower bounds for the enemy strength scaling. It’s, like, two processor operations for each map. You could run the calculation every frame for every ship and not even notice. That way, if you fail too hard, you get that feedback by running into the brick wall, and if you succeed well enough, you get to run away with victory, while also having the difficulty adjustment in the middle to keep things interesting. As it is, it seems everyone who implements difficulty scaling has those two ends unbounded, so everyone is playing with the lower bound in “story mode” and the upper bound in “nightmare”. If the game does success scaling, then you end up ping-ponging between the two, which seems like the opposite of what anyone wants.
I am personally not a fan of the “naval ship” in space design approach where a ship has a clear top/down orientation, unless it is something designed to also fly in atmospheres (which these kinds of huge motherships usually are not).
That said, while I do like the flair of realistically designed spaceships, they tend to get boring quickly. My favourite style is therefore a hybrid – something that evokes the idea of rotational symmetry (because in space there is no up or down) while still allowing for lots of deviation from that to give it more character. Something that hints at how impressive a feat it is to get this thing moving, without looking like it barely manages to not melt down the moment you turn on the engine.
Yes, I have a particular ship in mind, and it is not a widely-known one. As far as the large capital ship / mothership type goes, my all-time favourite design is the Sorcerer Class Dreadnought from Rebel Galaxy: https://rebelgalaxy.fandom.com/wiki/Sorcerer
Yeah, there’s a strong cognitive bias for humans to prefer recognizable objects, and the easiest way to do that is to use visual cues from known experiences, which is all to say that “spaceship” design seems to want to strike a balance between a hard-edged “Space Battleship Yamato” and a super-yacht on the “fantasy” end (depending on where the topia falls on the eu-dis scale) and Voyager Space Probe paradoxically blended with the V2 Rocket on the “realism” end. The Sorcerer DOES look like a cool example of that design style.
I’d be interested in what the particular ship is that you have in mind.
Oh you misunderstood. The Sorcerer is that ship. Sorry for not phrasing that clearer.
Slightly offtopic: you were talking about a lack of AAA horror games, and that all innovation is happening in the indie space. This reminded me of Duskers, a game that made me experience one of the most bone-chilling experience in my gaming career, and it was just a robot that got stuck on an abandoned planet.
And then you talk about Howeworld, and I immediately remembered the existential dread from Homeworld: Cataclysm. Being a single speck of dust (even if you command a fleet of dozen spaceships) in the vast nothingness of space against space monsters was an incredible experience for a teenager me.
One of my other favorite blogs on the internet (Twenty Sided is one too!) is A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, and he did a pass at ship design as well: https://acoup.blog/2019/11/29/collections-where-does-my-main-battery-go/
To save a read, if you’re going for “realistic” then real ships are cramped and utilitarian first – whatever’s the main purpose of the ship occupies the real estate, then supporting systems, and then crew spaces are the last priority. Crew get stuffed in wherever crew can fit. If it’s a warship then the propulsion system takes up the first spot (to make the ship move) and then the armament takes up the rest (to kill things) and then support (ammunition magazines, armor to survive retaliatory shots, fire suppression) and then finally some crew spaces. For a cargo ship, you get the cargo storage spaces first, then any provision for loading and unloading them, maybe any defenses that are setting-appropriate, and then finally crew accommodation.
I rather like Halo’s ship designs, or those of the Expanse – they follow these principles. The main armament of their warships are essentially railguns, so a very long straight chunk of the ship is dedicated to this weapon. The whole ship will align to point that weapon at whatever needs to be shot. Then there’s secondary armaments that can swivel to cover arcs; engaging targets of lesser importance (or annoying fighters that can maneuver faster). Carrier ships whose primary weapon is their fighters are covered in hangars instead.
My first look at this ship you’ve got doesn’t show me any armament, so I’m assuming it’s not a warship. The side-bulges don’t imply enough cargo space for me to think it’s a cargo ship. My eye goes right to the big ‘warp core’ and thinks ‘engine’. If the engine is the dominant element in the design that leads me to believe this ship is an explorer:
– Primary is the engine. We need to go far, and to do so before supplies run out, we need to go fast. Lots of engine in the design.
– Secondary is some storage. The design shows an amount of storage to my eye that says “we can feed our crew for a few months”.
– I also see sensors (?) in the silhouette above and below the bridge/deck/cockpit. Again, reinforcing the explorer feel.
– Crew spaces seem to be somewhat emphasized with the many windows and viewports; this sort of makes sense on an explorer where a real consideration has to be made for keeping your crew happy aboard for a long period of time, and they can’t count on shore leave.
I read through the article, and was both informed and entertained. Very cool study!
I think your analysis is correct if, as my suspicion indicates, the ship Shamus has designed is based on the ISV Armstrong from his (short?) story Fall From the Sky. http://peripheralarbor.com/FFTS/ffts_ps_V02.1.morning.html
Which is indeed an exploration vessel!
Similar to the story thing constraints can be good as well. There used to be this rule in the StarTrek design bible that said there had to be line of sight between the warp nacelles. It’s completely arbitrary but it forces interesting compromises. Your warp core thing is a bit like that.
Can’t believe nobody has mentioned Battlestar Galactica: Deadlock the RTS/Turn based hybrid Space Fleet Battle Simulator that somehow manages to take the ship designs from the old 70s Battlestar Galactica AND the 2000s reboot, then shove them into one game/campaign – and it is embedded into development of the story and it is glorious. There are no ‘Modern’ Cylon ships except DLC so they’re mostly all the old lot.
The team who made it had previously made a space ship combat game but they got the BSG licence and did good.
Each ship has its different sides damage tracked (Max 7 ships for the player to control) and maneuvers + positioning is vital + can be used to avoid missile attacks which is something that Homeworld didn’t really have for obvious reasons of scale and its age as a game.
If we’re talking about ship design, then Battlestar Galactica is a great contender – a lot of the ships available in BSG: Deadlock are effectively different sized or variations on the two main Battlestars, or a couple of new designs, but they do have their uses in combat. They have to actually function as part of the battle design or have differences slightly more nuanced than ‘rock-paper-scissors logic’ so a lot of the ships are introduced or configured for varied practical use.
Battlestar Galactica: Deadlock is very close to being Total War with Spaceships – in a good way.
I don’t remember Homeworld, but Mandalore Gaming did recently introduce me to it.
https://youtu.be/MQvk5QpHD2Q
Dunno if you’re a fan, but Noah Gervais did his usual brilliant analysis of Homeworld; it was apparently one of his favorite games. Well worth a watch if you have the time, dude is brilliant:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SALZWWPMKIA
Just now I happened across a rather good online random spaceship generator: https://ship.shapewright.com/. The ships all look quite nice in a way that’s not too far from the look you’re going for, though at perhaps a slightly smaller scale. As a bonus, it can export the model as a VRML file so you can play with it in Blender.
On a semi-related note, I actually know one of the main guys who created Homeworld. :)