A rather simple and probably easy as pie to implement suggestion is to be able to export any in game model for 3D printing. Why would you want to print out a model of the ship you have spent months with on crazy LT adventures? Well I'll leave that up to you.

Hyperion wrote:A rather simple and probably easy as pie to implement suggestion is to be able to export any in game model for 3D printing. Why would you want to print out a model of the ship you have spent months with on crazy LT adventures? Well I'll leave that up to you.

You know, that is an awesome idea. Josh has stated that we should be able to import and export ships for others to use. So it should be possible to take the mesh of any generated or hand crafted LT ship and convert it to the appropriate 3d file type and later print it. This could also become some sort of side business for Josh if he wants to charge for 3d printed ships from his game.

If not, then making the meshes available to everyone is still a great idea!

I highly doubt Josh wants to get into the 3d printing thousands of custom models and physical products business and headaches that involves. Just throw it out there as a freebie because no one else would dare.

BFett wrote: This could also become some sort of side business for Josh if he wants to charge for 3d printed ships from his game.

Charging for that would be unenforcable without removing access to LTSL and thus modding.

How else could you keep people from programming exporters?

Cornflakes_91 wrote:

BFett wrote: This could also become some sort of side business for Josh if he wants to charge for 3d printed ships from his game.

Charging for that would be unenforceable without removing access to LTSL and thus modding.

How could you keep people from programming exporters elss?

I've never attempted to export a game asset which wasn't a standard mesh to begin with, so I don't know how difficult this would be for someone to do. How does charging for a service become unenforceable by allowing people to look at the scripting language? Isn't that like saying that if someone shares all of the LTSL of the game someone else can build a compiler for it and 'pirate' LT?

The meshes are generated by the (openly readable) LTSL code, therefore letting the game write them to a file is fairly trivial.
Reverse-engineering an LTSL Interpreter+graphics engine is something else entirely.

^ what dino said, LTSL provides direct access to the meshes, without any encoding or compression.
Thats basically giving you .obj files which every modeling program can read

So (and I apologise in advance because surprise, surprise this starts with Elite Dangerous ) but there is this company who are making some models for ED:

https://eucl3d.com/

They "partner" with games and come up with models based on items from the game. I guess it would depend a lot on demand but I'm sure there might be someone out there with a 3D printer that could knock up something similar! I suppose the issue is with the PG content of LT will there be any standard ships to make models of?

I will be interested in any additional merchandise Josh decides to make available, Philip.

Just what Victor needs: a machine to print Collector Edition's Goodies. One PG-Goody at a time.

Philip Coutts wrote:So (and I apologise in advance because surprise, surprise this starts with Elite Dangerous ) but there is this company who are making some models for ED:

https://eucl3d.com/

They "partner" with games and come up with models based on items from the game. I guess it would depend a lot on demand but I'm sure there might be someone out there with a 3D printer that could knock up something similar! I suppose the issue is with the PG content of LT will there be any standard ships to make models of?

Well the idea behind it was that any ship or station or whatever you make in LT could have the model exported to a file that can be printed without needing to go through a 3rd party.

Not everyone has a 3D printer.

The majority of people has to go through a third party, and if its "just" a makerlab

Cornflakes_91 wrote:Not everyone has a 3D printer.

The majority of people has to go through a third party, and if its "just" a makerlab

I don't have one, Cornflakes. They do look like an interesting tool. I was rather impressed by the work Sky was doing with one for his Hexy build.

I would still like a 3d Printer and the tools necessary to sand/polish/paint the model. I would love doing that. That's a bit of a distant dream, though - but someday I'll get ahold of one and finally make 3D printouts of some of my models.

Talvieno wrote:I would still like a 3d Printer and the tools necessary to sand/polish/paint the model. I would love doing that. That's a bit of a distant dream, though - but someday I'll get ahold of one and finally make 3D printouts of some of my models.

you could just go to shapeways and get your stuff printed from them, prolly cheaper unless you want to print ridicolous amounts of models