OK, I suppose I
was a bit vague in my last post.
I didn't mean that they should try to copy that design in all its glorious detail. I meant that they should look at it, and draw inspiration from it.
Some things I notice about the Rodger Young design (and this could apply to the Sulaco, or half a dozen other movie starships):
* It is not a big rectangular box, nor a collection of rectangular boxes. The ship has many surfaces set at oblique angles (not 90 degrees and not 45 degrees). There are of course some surface that are set flat either sides or bottom, but they are not the majority.
* The design elements are all different sizes. There are large components and much smaller components.
* The components are not "boxy," at least not all of them. Each individual piece is not the same width, height, and length. Some are long and skinny, others are broad and flat.
* The design appears to be built out of materials with structural properties. Is there a skinny piece sticking out? Then it probably has some kind of support member or truss holding it in place. Big pieces are mounted on strong structural members along the spine of the ship. Small pieces have smaller supports.
These, and many more, are all design patterns that are characteristic of things that humans build out of steel and plastic and lumber. When I design a ship in a computer modeling program, I think about what it would take to build the design out of plastic and glue.
like it or not, that IS how ships in WC3/4 looked. They didn't have all kinds of "useless details" hanging off the sides
Yes, and back in the Elite days, ships were made out fewer than twenty polys and hand coded in assembler. The ships in WC3 and 4 were built to the technology limitations of the game engine and computers of eight years ago.
Given current game engine technology, I think it is possible to stay within the broad outlines of the original designs while also making them look more detailed and believable. You can do quite a bit with just a couple thousand polygons.