Nomad ships while being organic are not necessarily "insectoid". What they do share between each other is modular body structure, rotational symmetry and three appendages (wings, leafs, pointy things, "claws", lair's antennas, gate "wings", etc) by 120 degree. Additionally they all have internal body and bone frames, with latter barely visible due to the similar textures used on the surface, nevertheless they are there if you look closely. Currently Discovery have three custom made nomad ships, however only two of which are designed and based upon the vanilla ships.
Added colours to the descriptions. Missing colours for Corsairs and Zoners. Suggestions?
Added radial symmetry and undelying skeletal structure to Nomads.
Cheers,
Idaho
"There's no mystical energy field that controls my destiny. It's all a lot of simple tricks and nonsense."
- Han Solo
zoners appear to be a light tan that goes into yellowish tones along with parts that are ivory coloured - the juggernaut also uses dark grey panels. - but mostly tan colours dominate the zoner design, nothing flashy.
corsair ships are brownish - dark tan, but in their enviroment, it looks slightly red, too. its a clay colour / earth colour. if BW (outcast) ships are like the sky ( light grey ) - then corsair ships are like the earth.
Corsairs... I would say old, rusty metal... Especially their bomber and caps..
zoners: Well, zoners got many ships, that "couldnt go somewhere else", same as IMG - they got many models which dont make a complete FL-ish ship line. Zoners are gonna get at least unfied capships, I would like to see IMG having some more ships based on the gunboat. (Replace the ugly Albatross and the ugly big black brick Bstar Adv.!!!)
I want to say that ships aren't designed for function anymore.
That is to say, they have the technology; energy fields, antigravity, super-tensile solids, neural computer interfaces, Wormhole generators, and presumably super-nanocomputers, that would allow them to make functioning ships in nearly any form, and therefore, when they make ships, they make them in shapes that they are comfortable with, shapes that mean something to the people who fly or fight them. Ships are essentially shaped like logos, made to represent, in the human mind, what the faction that builds them stands for. Shapes mean things to people, especially when they can connect those shapes to their lives, so is it any wonder that the Kusari make ships that look like origami, or Rhienland have ships that are representative of heavy industry? The Border Worlds line looks like stark practicality, but of course, a computer could generate a design a stronger ship, at the cost of its impression of practicality. The ships are spatially designed to appeal to the customer, probably using rather complex computer algorithms to test what shape will appeal most to humans.
/Signed. When I come up with my ships I study the other designs of the line I'm building for (usually Border Worlds) and come up with something that, first and foremost, looks really, really cool. THEN I go back and say 'Okay, how can I make this super-sexy ship into something that's decent in combat?' It's about looks, first and foremost.
And remember, kids, if anybody asks you how that spindly little ship stays together, reply:
"Structural Integrity Fields..."
We now return to your regularly scheduled programming. Thank you.
EDIT: I would like to point out, though, that in general a ship must somehow hold a main reactor, and it needs to be as small and hard to hit as possible. Those are the big rules.
Quote:Quick comment - we thought that Panzer was the Leader, Swift. -Agmen
Well, to cut it short the overall style seen in Freelancer primarily comes from the technical way the ships are made.
Two things that first come to mind: solid and flat surfaces, and tiled textures instead of one-two large "skin" textures. What difference does it make? It does a lot actually, "skin" textures are good for organic modeling, for high-poly (in terms of games of course, highly detailed by polygons that is) modeling with lots of surfaces to cover, each had to be more or less covered with its own patterns imitating shadows, bumps, etc. However it is not the case for Freelancer. Here ships are made of flat surfaces, they aren't really curvy, even bretonian ships aren't if you look at them close enough. Flat surfaces and tiled textures work well together. Another thing that bothered me is that majority just had to made textures for the sake of having their own textures. Now that's not really effective granted that most don't really have necessary skills to produce quality texture on par with Freelancer, as a result the ships look rather rubbish and lose consistency across. And I'm not looking into optimization issues yet (large resolution TGAs instead of DXT compressed DDS, etc). Again, for the purpose of maintaining consistency the developers used material libraries, each house had their own separate, and all ships of the house used their own. In my opinion if you are making a ship for a certain house: make it using shapes, forms and textures of the existing ships of the house. If you really really need to make your own textures (let's face it: most of the time you don't need to) create your own texture pack with seamless textures that can be used across other ships as well, not just a large and unnecessarily big skin texture only suitable for your single ship and nothing else.
In this regard ships in Freelancer are made in a method resembling those of level design rather than typical modeling practices. Take a closer look at base geometry of the ships, it is very simple, quite often just boxes connected to each other, ships made out of simple structures. Yet the result is very good.
Just a reminder - try to keep comments limited to the vanilla ship lines, at least for now. Zoners technically should not be on the list because they use Border World and Civilian ships, but there is mention in the vanilla infocards of the Zoner Juggernauts which would imply that they have their own Zoner ship line - so I have them on the list.
If, and the current trend would seem to indicate so, future Discovery releases phase out the non-Freelancer designs for custom Discovery ones, then I'll add them to the list. For now, it would just be too complicated to include other vanilla factions that build their own ships (eg IMG, etc.).
A little farther along this line of thought:
I wonder if we couldn't begin to come up with descriptions for the new ship lines that are associated with specific factions. I was thinking of the Loki, Thor, Odin for starters. I know next to nothing about them(don't use them in-game) other than they look like modified Rheinland designs and are Hessian? Any others? Keep it to the custom Discovery/Freelancer designs - leave out the Star Wars, etc. designs.
What seems to be the concensus on who is going to get ship building capabilities? To be more specific, which factions, within the scope of their respective RP, are going to be able to build their own ship lines? Also, since it is obvious that the Civilian, Border World lines are being expanded, among others, what about the idea of adding other named ship builders. For instance, there would be Civilian Builder A(call it Boeing) and Civilian Builder B(call it Airbus). Just seems bland to me to call the Hawk, Falcon, Eagle, etc. the Civilian ships. I mean, there's no corporation called "Civilian" in Freelancer/Discovery. Someone, some named company should be building them. So why not come up with company names for our ship builders. Just an idea. Thoughts?
Thanks for the comments on ship design and modelling so far.
Cheers,
Idaho
"There's no mystical energy field that controls my destiny. It's all a lot of simple tricks and nonsense."
- Han Solo