T w e n t y S i d e d

Thanks for all your kind comments last time. And the helpful feedback. Even though they were a sensational success, we’re going to be taking a week off from tubes this time. Don’t worry! The beating heart of spaceship design will return! But while we’re waiting for the REAL key to amazing science fiction design that is comically oversized exposed black rubber tubing, I figured I’d try approaching from a slightly different angle. Instead of starting with blocky cubes and then adding a few round bits, let’s start with the round bits first.

Now, there was some consternation over terminology last time. I kept calling these round things “Lathes” which I thought was a time saving and cleverly descriptive strategy. Mystefied onlookers began to question if I meant “Cylinders” or “Solids of Revolution” or perhaps “Compound rectalinear hemi-toroidal faceted bounding nets” and while all of those are accuratethough I have some questions about that crazy “cylinder” idea my favorite suggestion was to call them eye-sores and move on.

Before generating any eye-sores, let us begin, as before, with a completely accurate picture of: Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Proc-gen Starship”

Paul Spooner likes programming procedural content and gaming when he's not busy with his day-job and family.

I mentioned in this week’s diecast (around the 18:30 mark) that I thought Rebel Galaxy would have been improvedother flaws not withstanding if it had some procedurally generated spaceships, instead of just the stock ones. If proc-gen is an unfamiliar term, Shamus has written a few articles on it. Okay, more than a few. Actually, it’s all he talks about when he has time to stop complaining about videogames, but you know how life is, what with work and family and sleep, who has time for obsessions?

So, why am I talking about proc-gen then? Well, it’s an obsession of mine as well, and a large part of what drew me to this site. I could go on about my own projects but I think we’ve done enough introduction, so instead let’s make apractically unlimited set of

procedurally generated spaceship!

The right way to start a project like this is to decide on a programming language, and some code conventions. Then you set up your development environment, and begin writing header files. No, wait, that’s not right. That’s how to… actually that’s not the right way to do anything. To design something you need a goal, not a set of processes. In this case the goal is to program the computer to be able to design and model spaceships, and that’s basically impossible if you can’t even…
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Procgen Spaceship”

Paul Spooner likes programming procedural content and gaming when he's not busy with his day-job and family.