Design styles; background; tactics

[Ryder P. Moses]

It occurred to me while trying to put together certain game models that there's really not very much design spec for any of the factions or anything; aside from vague textual references to background and the examples of a handful of "correct" ships it's hard to derive the aesthetic of an entire race from (and occasionally, to even figure out which they are).

I've seen a total of... three ships described in detail, and seen maybe four or five presumably "right" vehicles to draw inferences upon the design of the artwork for the entire game from. And right now, I'm trying to design an Aeran starbase with nothing to help me figure out what the hell an Aeran structure looks like but two fighter ships. Neither of which are very enlightening. I'm trying to decide whether to even bother starting with a Forsaken ship, given that there's no information on them anywhere I can find whatsoever. Worse, even the specific ship specs given aren't useful - when I'm told some detail about an object, I've got no context in which to determine whether that's a vital aspect that has to be preserved at any cost or just a neat-sounding detail that got thrown in at the last minute, which is negotiable if it ends up making my life difficult or making the model ass-ugly. And were I to ask for specifics every single case it'd take me months to get anything done, wasting both my time and everyone else's.

So what I was hoping for was a codified design spec that made clear and 'official' what each race and faction is supposed to look like. There's a few points in this that need elaboration:


1. Aesthetic for each faction. Yeah, Aera are curvy and smooth while Terrans are square and gray and Rlaan are... whatever they are. But that's not very specific. What is it in an Aeran ship that makes identifiably an Aeran ship? What are the design styles for different classes of vehicle- interceptors, civilian vehicles, and capships must all look somewhat different, how?

2. Strategic and tactical emphasis for each faction. The races must be different in their approach to, well... all sorts of things in some ways. And that affects design considerably- if, say, the Aera have a reliance on high-performance fighters and bombers and use capital vessels in a support role, designers'd know to give Aeran ships big fighterbays. If Highborn warriors rely on sniping from standoff ranges and evading their enemies, that has a big impact on design versus a ship armored and optimized for close-range brawling. How ships of various races and factions interact - what they do - is about the most important detail for creating anything for the game, and there's really very little of that out there.

3. Technologic distinctions. There's vague references to one faction having "better" or "worse" technology in a generalist sense, but that doesn't do much good when trying to envision a ship as the sum of its parts, and makes designing ships sorta like, well, trying to recreate a sensible WWII tank while not being sure if gunpowder had been invented yet or crossbows were still the rage. I get that the three factions are largely similar in a lot of ways, using most of the same outfits and modifications (which seems to partly defeat the purpose of having all these disparate factions, but oh well), but there are differences. What does an Uln reactor look like compared to a Terran one? Are the guns built differently?



There's been some trouble throughout the project in trying to keep a consistent style and controlling how ships look. It'd save everyone on the art end of things a lot of grief if it was finally nailed down what it is that we're supposed to be making. Maybe this stuff is out there, buried in some broken-linked part of the Wiki or the forty-fifth post in a year-old thread, but if it is it needs to be put somewhere where people who haven't been in on the project from the start can access it. And if it isn't, it needs to get written up- or made clear what is and isn't already set in stone so that we can sort it out ourselves.





Note that this is a call for compiling a generalized information database. Help on the specific cases of the stuff I'm doing would be nice, but thus far it hasn't been forthcoming and unless a month-long PM question-and-answer period about tediously specific things like whether a box needs to be chamfered or not sounds like a good time to you... well, you get the idea.

[jackS]

You raise a very valid point that it is overdue that such be put together.

http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net/wiki/Artstyle_guides will be the eventual home of what should suffice for what you are looking for. There's nothing of note in them yet (all but one are entirely empty), but as they are filled in, that's where you'll find the info. (That, and when the guides are filled in, a link to the artstyle, modeling guides and wiki model list, will be stickied at the top of the art forum).