APOCALYX is a...

free Game Engine based on OpenGL (MAIL) (SITE) (FORUM) (BLOG)

Monday, August 18, 2008

Spaceship modules

The simple modules described yesterday permit to assemble in a modular way any kind of starship necessary to the players of MekaWars.
Since the modules must easily connect along their sides and, at least in a first release, all the modules share the same shape, there are only a few regular polygons possible. The easiest to use are hexagons and octagons, in fact equilateral triangles and squares leave only a few free sides after connections, while pentagons can't build linear structures.
My first choice fell on octagons, because leave more sides free after any connection between modules.
The second step was to model those modules and, as usual, I played a little with Wings3D. This screenshot shows the result: a simple octagonal model that I can slightly modify to differentiate other specialized modules.

In Wings3D, it's possible to attach textures on models, of course. The texturing tool passes through several steps and it's not easy to master but the final result, as shown in the screenshot, is quite acceptable.

Since the game will feature several races and nations, it's easy to change the aspect of the modules modifying the attached textures, even if they are all octagonal.
Another possibility to differentiate the races may be also to assign a particular regular polygon (triangle, square, hexagon, pentagon and octagon) to each of them. Players must be careful to choose their preferred race also on an architectural basis, in fact to build effective spaceship based on pentagons should be very tricky.

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