PROJECT IN WORKS: Spaceship Mesh Generator for SINS

Hahahahaha! Yeah.

I would love to custom make myself the Galactica, Eclipse, or even a Terran Battlecruiser from Starcraft. Yamato cannons FTW!

Erm, helio, you weren't referring to the sporn, now were you? 'Cause that could easily be done with any sort of mesh designer, lol.

How would ships evolve?

Perhaps you could make it so when you get to level six, the mesh changes. (can't believe I just said that but....must...post...must...help...)

An spore-esque in-game ship/building editor would be AWESOME!!! Something for Sins 2.0, perhaps.

Unfortunately, a ship creator doesn't go well in real-time games. Designing a ship takes a while and that will give you problems when an enemy fleet decides to take advantage of your inattention. Of course, this could be avoided by quick-saving the design every time it is changed, so that you can fight that invasion fleet then pick up where you left off on that new dreadnought with enough weapons to end the war in a day.

I have to agree. Just being able to design and build my own ships would put Sins over the edge of complete awesomeness, into sheer and utter awesomeness worthy of the best game of all time ever. That would make Sins perfect, and reflect the pressures each side faces. The battlefield would be constantly evolving, with people designing ships to counter enemy ships and exploit weaknesses and those people designing ships to counter and exploit new weaknesses. Basically, Sins would resemble war as we know it, with each side changing and evolving in response to changing situations. No battle would be fought twice, even on the same map with same start conditions and same factions. The possibilities available would be endless, and Sins of a Solar Empire could truly be called the most epic game of all time.

actully, thier is an RTS in beta right now that does ship diesinging VERY well.

Shattered suns.

However, you can't controll what it looks like.

And that is the problem. I would love if you could shape your ship, adding parts to it to change how it looks and add HP, armored areas.

Basically a lot like Galactic Civilizations II, except bigger, easier to use, and a lot cooler outcomes. There would be no pre-defined classes, with only a limited number of hardpoints. The limit would be how much money and supply you were willing to spend to build it.

Undoubtedly, the build menu would need a serious revision, because there would be no real classes, however it would be worth it.

We could have massive dreadnoughts as big as moons laying siege to planets with massive amounts of weaponry, with ships even bigger backing them up against the enemy fleets. The enemy may even use kamikaze drones against these ships as a cheap and quick countermeasure, so the ships may require escorts equipped with flak cannons to destroy those. Basically, there would be no limit to what would be possible with this system.

In short, IT WOULD BE EPIC!!!

Thats why we mod.

Yes, modding does it much better, but the sheer accessibility of an in-game building engine for spaceships would get the ball rolling, and those who regularly use XSI would see a thousand new prototypes to get their creative juices pumping...

I remember some of the first Electronic Arts games,

Pinball Construction Set, and Racing Destruction Set...

You could build the playfields and/or play in them as you saw fit, and you could make evil double-ramps with ice in-between to trap players with no traction...

So to be sure, Spore can't stop others from making Construction Set type games, but they will give it a good try...

All above posts refer to the stray thought of:

If SINS had a Spore-style engine to create spaceships... ...it would get way out-of-hand very quickly!!!

...Then the post was hijacked for evil purposes... Mua ha ha ah aaaha ahhh....

Basically ship creation for dummies?

How long would it take you to create a working beta of this project? I am keenly interested in this due to my lack of skills with this level of programing.

Am I the only one that thinks this is a solution in desperate need of a problem?

It's quite easy to make a basic ship mesh in any modeling program. It's much harder to make one that's optimized, UV map it, and skin it. This would simply flood the community with unskinned, buggy models, when what it really needs is people that know how to do it by hand, skin, and properly export these models.

It would also encourage the worrying trend of model replacement mods over gameplay changes. God knows what would happen if every CAN THERE BE A READING RAINBOW MOD or CAN THERE BE A HOMESTAR RUNNER MOD half-assedly got off the ground...the signal:noise ratio of the community would be absolutely destroyed.

EDIT: I guess what I'm trying to say is we need more quality and less quantity.

Kitkun: Yes, and I'm the dummy (XSI crashes my computer)
Kaworus: What features do you want???
Carbon: Here's a UV mapped flying saucer made with the program I started writing yesterday... ...files made by my program could be imported into XSI and you would get a head start and save yourself a few hours on each ship... ...think about it...

Saucer Attack!!!


Usually programs I make get totally packed with features, and the ability to melt fifty different shapes into a single, solid shape is a very powerful feature to have...

Blake's 7 called, they want thier high quality space ships back...

(if you don't understand the refrence look it up, its probably on wikipedia).

well if you can meld 50 shapes into a single shape you might want to pick a different example. those saucers are basically just a distorted cylinder and two cones, and even a basic modeler could easily reproduce them in a few minutes

i'm not saying the idea isn't unsound: certainly we need more people in this community for it to prosper. but i think the direction is the wrong way to be taking it. instead of computer-generating basic meshes, people should be writing tutorials on how to model, not only the basics but how to optimize them and UV map them. the modding tutorial stickied in this section is rife with grammatical errors and is near-incomprehensible, and damn if I can figure out how Sins does weapon hardpoints. there are really a lot of things that would help this community out and i just don't see the use for something like this when even the basics would allow people to make well optimized, complex meshes by hand and be proud of their work.

Blake's 7 can have their ships back, I'm building a new fleet every day... :LOL:

After only two days of coding, I've put in a few algorithms that make the ships much better, and I can build SINS quality fighter meshes at this time...

Would you like to make a Wraith Dart from Stargate Atlantis???


How about a solar-windmill??? (now it's getting silly)


My program starts with a sphere, and mutates it with algorithms that are compounded on top of one another, producing a single, complex, curvilinear form.

so wait in simple terms what is this?

Not very useful. To me at least.

It looks like a really, really n00b mesh maker. However, if its as powerful and easy to use as Helioforge says it is, then it may make modeling a lot easier and quicker, allowing people to spend time on other parts of their mod.

Carbon: Who says that this is a solution looking for a problem? If Helio can make this do everything XSI MODTOOLS can do quicker and easier, then I wouldn't say its a solution looking for a problem so much as a pretty frickin sweet modding tool.

It can't. Modelers know there's a lot more to modeling than basic meshes. While this is great if someone wants to make a mod for themselves I hope to god none of the major teams start adopting it as a replacement to a real modeling tool. Even if the program UV maps the models it creates, there's a reason people still do it by hand. Skinning these things is going to be impossible.

Perhaps it could be as simple as the Warzone 2100 unit designer...anyone here ever play that awesome game?

In simple terms, I can make SINS meshes using mathematics (like on NUMB3RS)

Carbon: turn your flame down (it's been on a couple of weeks now)...
In the past month you attacked several modders: Mcandrew420, MajorStress, myself

I'm making this because XSI crashes my computer, and I want to do SINS meshes... Also, if you import my output into XSI, then you can do more stuff, that's a good thing... ...It's not a replacement for people who like XSI, but it does churn out meshes...

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Carbon: as punishment for your repeated flames of other modders, you are hereby forever denied access to my MINE ABILITY CODING (I hear you weren't able to make them)...

You are right about one thing: It won't do everything, nothing fancy like KOL's, or TEC repair bases... ...If it's relegated to making FIGHTERS, I'll still be happy with it...

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A picture of drinks and chips for everyone else:

nice
im still lost on xsi a friend sent me a model and i have no clue how to do the rest of it like the mesh and details

As long as it isn't Vasari-flavored...