FreeOrion

I saw a video on youtube that I thought was pretty cool.

Was something like this ever discussed on Freeorion? At least on appearances, EVE's approach to ship building seems like it's very forward thinking.

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I don't think we did. I like it.

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We talked about having mounts on ship hulls, and having parts be represented on the model, but pd objected to this quite strongly.

As for user-assembly of the base hull itself, without representing individual parts, the EVE method is quite similar to what GalCiv 2 allows, although EVE seems to have fewer parts that are designed to always look "cool" when stuck together, and GalCiv is essentially a modelling program with a diverse array of (not so) primitives. I think we discussed something like the GalCiv method, but pd probably preferred making artist-made models to player-made, and adding a GalCiv-like ship editor would be quite a lot of extra work that we don't need for v1.0.

As i understand it, what EVE is doing is entirely different. He mentions "... upgrading from this component to that component...", "... these aren't just fancy graphics...", "... different stats, different hit points..." which implies that each component has a distinctive abilities, and of course that you can visually gauge the abilities of the ship, since there are only 5 categories of "components", and any ship can only have one of each category of components, each of the "parts" is rather large and visible.

Since each of the categories of components has a particular position on the ship, they can be designed to look pretty cool together, since (what i presume is) the engine always goes on the end, and always connects to another category of components.

EDIT:

This quote from IGN confirms that the components are functional as i though, but looking back i'm not sure if if you mean something else or not.

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Unless I misheard the video, it sounds like the hull sections in EVE themselves have various number of slots in them, rather than directly determining everything about the ship they're put onto. I don't know how specific an EVE slot is (ie. can a slot only mount a certain type of weapon, so that the type of slots / hull section being present tells you a lot about slot / hull section allows a ship to do, or can anything go in a slot so that the hull section being present tells you little or nothing). But if FreeOrion was to have build-your-own-hull-model functionality, it wouldn't need to be linked to actual ship in-game performance. Design your own ship model with carefully designed snap-together hull model sections could be interesting while being entirely independent of actual ship function, much as it is in GalCiv. The difference between this and what GalCiv does is that the snap-together parts would be much more limiting, but would be designed to always look good enough to make pd and similar-minded ship modellers happy.

Which is quite hard(=time consuming) to do IMO. I think one of the basic questions is, do we want players to be able to gauge enemy ships just by looking at them, or do we rather want to make them use techniques provided by the game itself(detection?) to do so?

Sorry, i reworked my post after you read and started to reply to it.


Well, personally i think the idea is much more compelling if the modules indicate function, but it is true this could be used to differentiate different ships of the same size similarly to the handful of alternate sprites that earlier MoOs used. The other important difference between this method and GalCiv's is that it is, i suspect, orders of magnitude easier to implement.



But, is it not many times easier than the earlier idea of adding on the different individual components to the hull models that we discussed in the earlier design thread?

I don't remember anyone making a good case that it was bad to be able to tell what a ship does by sight... the case was made that it would be hard to do so. But nobody considered building ships out of a few large modules.

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Oops, I started a brainstorm by accident. My bad.

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Also of note is the editors in spore. While the creature editor is the most significant, they also have very simple vehicle and spaceship editors which I think are alot simpler to use for ship making then Galciv 2.

Simple to use.

Not simple to make.

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Sorry for the late reply...


It's not only easier, it would probably even work better because the "parts" are much bigger and more recognizable. But it's still considerably more work than having just hulls.


Well, I tried to

Unfortunately

I'm sure it would be more work compared to the work of making one hull... but you can combine the parts to make what is effectively a lot more hulls that would perhaps be practical to make individually.

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??? IMO, if these snap-together hulls don't affect their functionality, then how will we integrate the already agreed upon hull shape feature. And if they DO affect their functionality, it becomes harder to balance and the hull shape thing goes out the window anyhow. And all those components for all the races we'll have would be a lot of work and I don't think it adds that much depth, if any.

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Hull shape is a maybe.

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