Ships are ugly looking

[PureFingMagic]

Just bought the game played the tutorial, seems like a cool game but the ships are ugly looking. does anyone think the ships look good?

[apocal43]

I like that look but understand people who don't. But part of the reason for lots of large, flat surfaces on the ships is that the textures aren't entirely cosmetic and technical issues with the engine make it much better/easier to not deal with many curves.

[Martyr_of_Kharak]

As Apocal mentioned, part of the constraints on how our damage model works is that the ships can't be covered in lots of extraneous details or it makes the damage textures look awful. I prefer the exact, positional damage effects to a bunch of useless greebling.

However, even if that constraint didn't exist the ships would still look mostly the same. It you look at modern warships, they are mostly made from large uninterrupted surfaces with as much equipment as possible tucked below decks to reduce their radar cross section. The game actually does calculate RCS from the appearance of the visual model, so more surface details means more radar signature. The ships are designed to look functional, and in most ways that just doesn't mesh with most peoples' conceptions of what scifi aesthetic is thanks to things like Star Wars.

[PureFingMagic]

I do appreciate the intense detail to RCS etc it is fantastic. I did not realize that there were technical issues to prevent it from having other surfaces. It is great gameplay and im looking forward to getting into it more

[Durendal.exe]

Originally posted by BD:

does anyone think the ships look good?

Yes. They're pretty in line with my own aesthetic sensibilities and they do their job of at once being spacecraft while heavily evoking real world naval vessels quite well.

[Peej]

Love the ship looks.

[ulzgoroth]

I won't say I find them aesthetically moving or anything, but they sure do get the job done.

If anything bits like the glass 'bridge' on certain ship superstructures bothers me a lot more than the general hull forms.

Originally posted by Martyr_of_Kharak:

The game actually does calculate RCS from the appearance of the visual model, so more surface details means more radar signature.

Interesting - so VLS arsenal ship loadouts will have at least a little lower profile than models with protruding turrets or similar apparatus.

[Hammerheadcruiser]

I like the ships a lot, they look realistic without being hyper realistic spindly solar panelled tubes

[Tuna]

Originally posted by JackOClubs:

They remind me of ships you might see in the Expanse. I'm just hoping somebody mods some Star Blazer ships for the game. The Gamalons had some pretty cool ship designs. I think the Japanese title for it was Space Battleship Yamato. Classic cartoon, which just means it's old lol. The tops for space ship battles, loved this show when I was a kid.

I will always suggest when people want to see something that you pop into the discord and check the mod dev channel out, we have lots of resources to teach you how to do it and people of all levels (including me, who had never touched unity or modding before) can learn to make some really cool stuff relatively quickly, if you have some spare time making mods for nebulous can be good fun and lets you get stuff like this into the game.

[Hobel]

Originally posted by BD:

Just bought the game played the tutorial, seems like a cool game but the ships are ugly looking. does anyone think the ships look good?

yes most are not beauties
I liked the ships in Homeworld better.

only the gameplay of NEBULOUS: Fleet Command
is simply unrivalled, I'm excited about what the future has in store for us, so the visuals are almost irrelevant.

[Dangerhotpants]

I really enjoy the style. They look and sound like the big, industrial war machines they're meant to be.

[Martyr_of_Kharak]

Originally posted by ulzgoroth:

I won't say I find them aesthetically moving or anything, but they sure do get the job done.

If anything bits like the glass 'bridge' on certain ship superstructures bothers me a lot more than the general hull forms.

Originally posted by Martyr_of_Kharak:

The game actually does calculate RCS from the appearance of the visual model, so more surface details means more radar signature.

Interesting - so VLS arsenal ship loadouts will have at least a little lower profile than models with protruding turrets or similar apparatus.

Ah, sorry if I misled you there a bit. Only the base hull has a finely calculated RCS, and it is calculated at build time and placed into a sampling data structure which can be rapidly accessed. Calculating the RCS is not extremely performance intensive, but it's definitely not fast and doing it potentially hundreds of times in a frame definitely called for optimization. Any equipment that significantly adjusts the RCS of the ship, such as illuminator dishes, does so via a stat modifier. The sensor mechanics consume the most frame time of any system in the game, so they need to be optimized wherever possible.

For the bridge windows, I do get that a lot. To me they serve a few important purposes beyond the wet-navy aesthetic: For one they provide an immediate and easily recognizable sense of scale for what you're looking at. Without them it's much harder to really get that sense, unless you're actively measuring them with the movement tools. The color of the windows also provides a convenient telegraph for the power state of the ship. These could be accomplished in other ways, but personally I just like windows.

[Twelvefield]

The name all of you are searching for but do not know is

CHRIS FOSS

Although John Berkey will do. Chris Foss, among other things, was the design inspiration for Homeworld, although his work goes back decades before that. He's been a major influence on 1960's and 1970's science fiction illustration art, every piece of which everyone has so far mentioned derives directly from the work of Mr. Foss and/or Mr. Berkey.

If you've seen Jodorowski's Dune, you know Chris Foss. If have not seen Jodorowski's Dune, you need to see Jodorowski's Dune. Oh, and that Guardians Of The Galaxy movie. Both of them. I heard he came out of retirement to do that.

[LeftPaw]

Originally posted by BD:

Just bought the game played the tutorial, seems like a cool game but the ships are ugly looking. does anyone think the ships look good?

I love um. Big metal space tanks. I'm not a fan of all these new fancy looking alien type space craft you get in most games these days, spikes and bubals stuck all over them like some half arzed Christmas tree.

The one bad thing with the ships is the lack of AA, those jaggies are awful. Seeing how they are basically just boxes in space they should be jaggie free.

[Twelvefield]

As I mentioned, Chris Foss was at the beginning. This would be in the early 1970's, just prior to Akira Matsumoto, who designed the Yamato ship you are thinking of. Foss was working out of England at the time, making dozens of these spacecraft paintings and selling them to book publishers and magazines. His style focussed on angular panels, organic shapes, and massive surpergraphic "decals": stripes, numbers, etc.

I don't know how much Western SF was being brought in to Japan, but like anything post-war it had to be a lot. I really don't know if Mastumoto knew Foss personally, but I can't see how they would have avoided each other's work.

You look at early 1970's spacecraft design, and you see a big shift from the cigar-rockets of the 1950's and 1960's. Star Trek was important as well, too, but the ship designs aren't as ultilitarian or militaristic - it's a special case.

Science fiction was becoming more militaristic, an echo of WWII and a mirror of Viet Nam. You see utilitarian forms in spacecraft modelled after fighter planes and warships. You also see ship markings resemble "Dazzle" paint on battleships.

Then you get to Star Wars. Ralph McQuarrie took the lead on that, although he was familiar with Foss, John Berkey, Syd Mead, Dennis Muren, Douglas Trumbull and others who were shaping the look of Western SF in movies and TV. The focus was on making filmable* designs that were cost effective and appealing to look at: again, utilitarian militarism, something that Alejandro Jodorowski refers to as "NASA-chic".

In Japan and the East, there was a lot of work to catch up to what was being done in the West. However, studios like Toho worked very quickly to come up with shows that matched and superceded Western output. I mention Toho in particular as I know that during WWII they made domestic dramas like soap operas and historical features. After Godzilla, they made a lot of SF and fantasy: this was a common directional change for many Japanese studios.

I'm not all that conversant in anime. All I know is that they saw the Western designs and adapted them to Japanese audiences. When that proved to be successful, they quickly advanced their own art style to make particularly Japanese shows. Even so, the sources from West to East in the 1970's are similar, even if they were very different in the 1950's and '60s.

*The trick these days is "filmable". Back in the model-making era of SF movies, rounded ships were difficult to shoot owing to hull curvature on large models going in and out of focus as the ship "moved" relative to the camera. If you curve the hull, you need to get rid of the greebly detail so that the ship stays in focus. If the hull is flat, you don't have that problem so much. By way of example, the Sulaco in Aliens was supposed to be a basketball in space with engines, something like what you see in Avatar. However, it was faster and cheaper to simply make the Sulaco a flying slab. How cheap was it? They only put detail on one side of the model.

Today, you can make anything in Blender and it's a ship. Interesting, though, that most artists will follow the Star Wars etc. playbook and make models that are "filmable". For one thing, they are more recognizable on-screen than a mashed up ball of antennae or a cigar with solar panels (sorry, Terra Invicta!). For another, as the game dev has already pointed out, they are simpler to deal with operationally, either in "filming" or in their function as destructible targets in the game. No Starship Enterprises need apply here.

[Twelvefield]

Ridley Scott grew up in an industrial part of England. One of his favourite memories was of the factory next door that emitted smoke that smelled like cinnamon toast. Seeing as England is not the world leader in cinnamon toast manufacture, I don't want to think about what the Scotts were breathing. Pictures of the area show sooty brick houses surrounded by a playground of slag heaps. Apparently, Ridley Scott as a boy climbed over these every day to get to school. I cannot imagine.

I know that Ridley Scott is/was an accomplished illustrator, and his own sketches for Blade Runner incorporate a lot of the English Industrial Revolution mashed together with Asian influences of many kinds. I read how he described the set of Blade Runner as a "proscenium", which is the large, ornate, arched frame set-piece for an opera that surrounds the stage. Considering that they were building sets while the script was still being hammered out, his vision was stronger than his storytelling at the time. In the same interview, he regrets making the sets so elaborate, and thinks that it takes away from the narrative. Considering that for a while Blade Runner ("Dangerous Days") was going to be a one-room script - where all the action took place in a single room in a house - I guess I can see where he would say that, although really, the shortcomings of the Blade Runner story are so overshadowed by the magnificence of the visuals.

In the notes that I've read, Scott and Mead knew each others' strengths and they designed the look of the film accordingly. I think the most telling aspect is from Philip K ♥♥♥♥ (PKD, since STEAM won't let me say ♥♥♥♥), who a few days before his passing praised the film by saying, "You've taken what I see in my head and put it all on screen!"

That 1970's futurism really shines out today, considering that we are beginning to live in that future. It's definitely interesting to see. I know that some designers - architects, urban planners, fashion people, etc. follow books and movies for their inspiration, but you have to keep going back and back to find the sources for all of this stuff. For example, HR Giger was fascinated by ancient Egyptian motifs, and in his notes he freely gives examples. Where the Egyptians picked up that stuff... I wish I knew.

I know some about Edo-era Japanese art, in that they perfected woodcut press techniques to mass produce art and literature. Imagine if the Gutenberg Press could do colour pictures, that's how massive a jump that was. The limitations of woodcut create a certain stylistic sensibility that lends itself extremely well to comic book art and animation - a very necessary economy of line. I would love to learn how to do woodcut properly!

The Edo period in general seems to feature clean strong lines in clothing and buildings as well. I don't know if that's form following function or the other way around. Feudal Japan seemed to create a strong foundation for that aesthetic. I hasn't considered Shinto influences, but I very much want to look into that. I suspect that the same requirements for building many small, durable temples can be applied to building many small, durable fictional spaceships.

I could go on endlessly about SF design. I'm honestly not the biggest SF fan anymore, but anything to do with art and design, that's the thing that makes me the happiest - studying it, critiquing it, creating it. I am always pleased to meet people who feel the same way!