Medium Civilian Station WIP

[Howard Day]

Technically, they're modular, and can be replaced at any time. You don't ever actually see this happening, so it's something I sort of forgot. It's a valid criticism, but I'm not sure what to do about it at this point. I'm leaning towards "Ignore it".
Oops...

 

[Death]

Technically, they're modular, and can be replaced at any time. You don't ever actually see this happening, so it's something I sort of forgot. It's a valid criticism, but I'm not sure what to do about it at this point. I'm leaning towards "Ignore it".
Oops...

Either ignore it, or change the orientation of the cargo boxes so they're perpendicular to the plane of the rest of the modules. It's not absolutely necessary that all of the triangular "wedge" allowed to a station module be filled up... though I'll grant you it might look a little silly with that big "sail" look.

 

[Plasteel Skull]

Delving into that kind of details is unnecessary, I guess. Amazing job so far -- this station -- can't wait to see more. Are you going to show us textured versions of these after you've finished with modelling?

 

[Howard Day]

Right - done some more work on these modules - and I've gotten a good ways along on the Hydroponics module. The cool grain, flowers and grass are all done by a simple method of layering planes. Each plane layer has a speckle pattern on it, and when they're layered, they simulate thousands so stalks of wheat, or whatever. Anyhow - comments are absoluely welcome, as are name suggestions for the Ship Sealer. Crazy Chris's, or Looney Bob's, or something along that line. Also - would it be too ostentatious if I have a rotating sign or something?

 

[Delance]

Looking pretty good.

 

[AD]

Right - done some more work on these modules - and I've gotten a good ways along on the Hydroponics module. The cool grain, flowers and grass are all done by a simple method of layering planes. Each plane layer has a speckle pattern on it, and when they're layered, they simulate thousands so stalks of wheat, or whatever. Anyhow - comments are absoluely welcome, as are name suggestions for the Ship Sealer. Crazy Chris's, or Looney Bob's, or something along that line. Also - would it be too ostentatious if I have a rotating sign or something?

With all that stuff the bottom portion is looking a little small and stubby...

Also, would a grower necessarily have more than one crop per module? Would it make more sense to have different kinds of crops in different modules? It would seem to me that because of their size, each dome will have a *very* low yield. though it might be ok if they're just feeding their own station.

 

[Howard Day]

I believe the plan is to have these hydrophonics farms growing GM foods that take a great deal less time to grow per crop. And since you don't have seasons to worry about, you can pretty much grow year-round. The only drawback is that some of the more influentially rich planets don't like the GM Hydrofarm stuff. This is fine, though - most outer mining stations and outposts don't give a crap. So buying food from a station - which is cheaper than a planet - to deliver it to a mining station would be a good route. Buying it to deliver it to an industrial planet....not so much. Anyhow, I've finished the module - and it clocks in at an astonishing 10K polys. This drops to little over 5K if I remove all the planes making up the crops. These will most likely be a LOD anyway, so this isn't much of a worry. And they just look so damn nice when you're close up. Also, I turned off the anti-aliasing, to give a better feel for what these will actually look like in game. Still pretty, I think.

 

[BradMick]

As I said on ICQ...SEXY! that does so many awesome things it's not even funny.

Also, I'm sure we'll have at least up to 4x AA in the game, right? So, rendering with anti-aliasing isn't that much of a 'lie' so to speak heheh.

Brad

 

[Plasteel Skull]

It's beautiful. I have some suggestion for hydroponics module -- what about making one of the domes larger, than the other ones? This option is shown on attached picture.

 

[Cargoman]

Howard , amazing work !
Would making the "arms" that the cargo modules lock onto a single "under" arm
instead of dual "side" arms be a possibility . I was also invisioning them as
Sea-land containers , so being able to swap them out is interical to thier use .

 

[Howard Day]

Well, I don't think I'm going to make one of the hydroponics pods large than the others. Honestly, that brings up too many problems. Firstly, the crops are using a very small set of textures - one that wouldn't scale to the new size of the dome. Secondly, the polygon count would go through the roof, and it's bad enough already.
Thirdly, I really like the assymetric look it has going on right now - it feels somewhat organic, and rightly so. I wouldn't want to ruin that. And after all these reasons there's one big one - that these modules are getting quite large - perhaps too large.I'm going to have to scale some of these back if I wat to maintain that "backwater" feel.
Anyhow.

 

[Death]

In general, I think you might want to consider steering away from making any one module stick out all that much farther from the "spindle" of the station core than the edge of the hangar module's landing platform, at least for backwater stations.

Of course, it's your game, not mine, making my opinion worth about exactly what you paid for it: nothing.

 

[Howard Day]

Absolutely. I'll be working on another set of smaller modules soon. Most notably, Fuel Storage, Habitation Rings, and other smaller, out-of the way type modules. I might not have mentioned this, but the larger, more ornate modules will only be seen around central systems, and prominent jump routes. That said, there are quite a few stations that will end up fitting that bill, so these won't be completely uncommon.
I plan on using the WC2 Supply depot as the blueprint for the habitation rings, and some fancy capped cylinders for the fuel storage. I'm also going to start putting together the other station tops and bottoms.
Then on to texturing.

 

[Plasteel Skull]

Another idea might be to model some in-construction versions of all made station modules. These could look a little bit like unfinished Death Star in SWep6. I mean steel/titan frames of future domes, commodity containers only partially completed/covered with armor... If the backwater look is what you wish, than a partially finished station (maybe because of cut funds, maybe because of rare building component transport arrivals) would be something to consider. I guess it shouldn't be that difficult to model these unfinished modules either...

 

[Howard Day]

Ooooh. I like that. Might be fairly easy to do, as well. Hmmm.... Anyhow - it'll have to wait.

 

[Ijuin]

Absolutely. I'll be working on another set of smaller modules soon. Most notably, Fuel Storage, Habitation Rings, and other smaller, out-of the way type modules. I might not have mentioned this, but the larger, more ornate modules will only be seen around central systems, and prominent jump routes. That said, there are quite a few stations that will end up fitting that bill, so these won't be completely uncommon.

Quite. The small out-of-the-way stations would probably not have hydroponics, and no refinery unless they were near mining areas (asteroid fields, etc.) IMO.

 

[Howard Day]

Exactly. In all likelyhood, most stations you run into will just be tiny little space hotels/outposts. I've attached a few new modules and the like. Also - a couple of demonstrations of the smaller stations. Something to note: the small habitat stations don't have anywhere on the rings for a docking bay. I'll be making a smaller dock bay that attaches to the underside of the station (Like Perry, only not as large)
Enjoy!

 

[Plasteel Skull]

It is great, how this module design gives you a multitude of possibilities when it comes to base construction! It is almost a sure thing that with enough module types, some main pylon shape/size/texture variations we are not going to see two completely similar bases. And that's really good.

Also you can use this working idea further! What about doing several types of some drayman/cargo-container transports with the same module-based principle. Beside some ready ship models there can be some ships combined from main hull (bridge, crew compartments, basic cargo hold, engine...) of i.e. 3 different shapes/sizes and many different kind of modules attached to it telling us, what this particular transporter is built to ferry. And this will give you a wide range of ships to populate the space with.

 

[BradMick]

Eh, I wouldn't want to stray to far from established designs, If we really needed more ships to populate the universe, it'd be best to just design and model them, or pull from the game itself. Or at least that's my opinion.

 

[Plasteel Skull]

Eh, I wouldn't want to stray to far from established designs, If we really needed more ships to populate the universe, it'd be best to just design and model them, or pull from the game itself. Or at least that's my opinion.

You know, it was just an idea. I am no ship-model-quantity freak so it will be enough, when there are some 200 different transport types .... just kidding . If you feel, you've got it right way, do it that way. Modelling Scarab is somehow a step in that direction, I guess, since it will be already a second player non-flyable transport ship in a game besides Dryman (at least of those I know about).