When reading this bit of your log today...
It made me recall my own interest in spaceship design and how I have attempted to understand it more myself. I wanted to share with you some tips based on how I have been learning! Even though I am sure you probably already do all of this.Josh wrote:To really nail procedural ships, it's going to take many more days like this. Not because I think procedural ships are particularly hard, but because I'm no artist/modeler, and I don't even know how to make a ship by hand, much less with formulas. Still, I'm going to cling to that belief that all things are simple until I can't cling any longer (and by that time, hopefully I'll have found the secret to ships). I did make some good progress today, and developed a few new tricks and insights that will help me in the end. I still don't have a good structural understanding of ships, but I'm getting there.
So...
1) Observe and study as many ships as you can. This may be painfully obvious, but if you find yourself stuck on what you know now, try going out and playing a space sim you have never tried before. Or...
2) To be quicker, try looking up spaceship art on the internet; I recommend DeviantART.com. This is a valuable resource for gaining inspiration on anything art related. Just searching for the keyword "spaceship" with the filter set to "popular all time" gives you a massive (if you scroll down and hit show more) list of interesting and intuitive designs. If you start to compare them all, you might see some reoccurring themes in most of them, and I know that's the kind of thing you need to look for with trying to code in ship design.
3) Ask a friend who might be good at drawing ships to make some sketches for you. Even with the above two methods, the best ship I ever designed was based on a friend of mine's quick sketch.
Like I said I have no idea if this helps, and I'm sure you know what you're doing Josh. I just wanted to take part in the feedback process and this is the first subject I feel I had some valuable input for. I hope reading this sparked an idea! And as always, keep up the good work!