If y'all remember from last devlog, I promised that:
So, I have good news and bad news! The bad news is that I was out sick much of last week with a nasty post-holiday-cold, so I wasn't super productive then. The good news is that I was able to bounce back this week with MAJOR breakthroughs on ships!!!LindseyReid wrote: ↑Fri Dec 01, 2017 7:41 pmMy plan moving forward is quite exciting: between now and the new year, I want to jam on generating a complete bomber-sized ship.
Forgive me, this devlog is going to be very photo-heavy and very word-lacking.
I started the whole ship-building process by gathering tons of reference material. Josh has a small library of sci-fi art books that I scoured and marked pages for inspiration. I also created a Pinterest board of fighter ships, which I filled with my favorite art from Artstation and wikis for games like Eve and Freelancer. I then spent a short amount of time sketching on paper what an extremely basic fighter ship looks like, and broke it down into its basic shapes and parts.
Spoiler: SHOW
I then built that extremely basic ship in code. Given this base, I then started adding randomness to it and tweaking the min, max, and average values for all of the bits of randomness. The randomized variables on these ships include wing position, wing rotation, wing size, number of wings, body shape, body size, warps applied, and more. Half of my work is coming up with boundaries to push as far as randomness goes, and the other half is tweaking the parameters for the randomness so that every ship has the chance to look unique, while still coherent.
The algorithm that I ended up with at the end of the week is pretty different from the one I started with, and is much more likely to create crazy-looking ships. After some discussion with Josh, I decided to separate the fighter algorithm into two: one that makes tame ships, using code from earlier in the week, and one that makes crazier ships, using later code.
Here are the three Imgur galleries of ships that I generated over the week.
LT Ships 12.13.17
LT Ships 12.14.17
LT Ships 12.15.17
I hope y'all are liking these ships so far!! ^^ DO give me feedback on them. I'm curious to see what y'all think, especially shapes, patterns, and ships that you want to see that the algorithms aren't currently generating. Feel free to send me things here on the forums (I mainly stick to the devlog threads), on the IRC, on Pinterest, or on Twitter @thelindseyreid. Inspiration is a huge part of this process. ^^
Please note that due to a little Christmas vacation, my next devlog will be on Friday, January 6th.
Thank you,
Lindsey Reid
P.S. I posted several new tutorials on my blog this week!
P.P.S. my cat lol