The Ur-Quan Masters Discussion Forum

I was sketching on a new Star Control project, but derailed (http://androidarts.com/misc/marathon_pfhor_lineup_3.jpg) pretty quickly. Here's some art though.

(http://androidarts.com/starcontrol/2010_lineup.jpg)

Well, those are not Black Spathi. I was supposed to get to those, but first I wanted to play around with justanimate's design (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LzUBPnT66FY),
which I think works pretty well (arm placement, round simplicity, Spathi stealth). Not sure about the Earthling pilot.
It's loosely based on the SC1 menu portrait and melee pilot portrait, but it feels too sporty.

I was thinking of doing assets for a SC mini game. Just a little star cluster, exploration, some aliens, mining, research.
The game setup would go something like:


In the voids between the galaxies, small star clusters lie in isolation, all a few billion years old.
They don't appear to have been formed naturally, but it's doubtful that the precursors were somehow responsible for
their construction. The precursors did however find a way to visit them and (in their usual manner) littered artifacts
all around, maybe even a few species (Daktaklakpak?).

During the Ur-Quan conflict, the Earthlings executes a contingency plan: Project Egg Basket (whatever).
They send out a few customized Cruisers with the task of finding more peaceful space. Somewhere between
Spathi and ZFP space, they receive a distorted distress call. It leads them to a strange vortex with a Black Spathi
ship whirling around in it. Soon, a few ZFP Stingers appears to answer the distress call as well (and maybe some
other (hierarchy?) aliens as well).

The captains begin to work together. In a Star Trek kind of way, they figure out a way to free the ship by emitting
some pulse of a certain frequency, all in unison. The effect isn't quite what they expected. Instead of dissolving,
the vortex violently implodes, sucking all of the ships in. It appears the pulse frequency functioned as a coordinate
key of sorts.

Now the aliens are stranded in some random (frequency=seed) star cluster. Will they work together to find a way home,
or will they begin to squabble over precursor artifacts? Perhaps some unknown evil is lying in wait for them?

Who knows? I don't.


Also, planet scaling experiment (http://androidarts.com/starcontrol/chibi_planets.gif).

Your art is, as always, awesome. Any chance you might follow up on that minigame, or is it just conceptual?

nice work! :)
I hope you're going to make a smallscaled game of it :).

Also nice idea about the planet scaling, I hadn't thought about that one yet :). Keep in mind that if you're going to work with SC2 data you'll also have to apply a similar formula to get their orbit distances looking good ingame ;).

Nice work indeed. Love the Yehat and Spathi.

Thanks. Yeah, I'm thinking there should be a relatively simple formula / table for planetary orbit times depending on distance.

Hmm. Third one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kepler%27s_laws_of_planetary_motion

I was indeed thinking of using a square or cube root for distances too, because proportionally realistic planetary distances are difficult to fit in a playfield.
Then there's temperature. If planets were squares and sunlight comes like a view pyramid, I could imagine that a square 2AU away would get 1/4th the light of one that's 1AU away. But then there's the whole deal with magnetospheres and greenhouseshizzle.

Anyways, just playing with ideas here. I wrote a text document to accompany the pictures but I left it half finished.

Cube root planet orbits (http://androidarts.com/starcontrol/chibi_orbits.gif).

That's also the formula I used. To determine the planet's position at a given date I've established a 'system creation date' based on the system's position in space, on this date (waaay in the past) all planets are aligned and I work from there.


I suggest for these things looking into the way that SC2 generates these. I doubt that the SC2 planets are 100% scientifically correct, but it's a good place to start.
Also, for generating the planet's textures currently there is no better way than to do it with the actual SC2 height translation maps and color maps. The way they are used is well documented on sourceforge, but if you need help I can be of assistance ;). For generating the planet's height map you can use fault formation and/or perlin noise, depending on what kind of planet you're trying to create.

Man, I wish I had half your talent. Nice as always Arne!