Spaceship Generator

Dawkins wrote the biomorph software to demonstrate evolution, you got to select squiggles and breed them.

What would be call is to evolve spaceships by selective breeding.

No doubt this being The Internet this was done by a Russian seven years ago, and I failed to GTFA.

See Mistake 6 at http://www.dedoimedo.com/physics/sci-fi-mistakes.html

Mistake 7 also hints about the possible shape when there are no preferred orientations.

Also interesting

http://www.popularmechanics.com/space/deep-space/a8140/what-...

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/11/24/spaceship_design/

Procedural generation of mesh is difficult, but not costly (in terms of CPU, drawcalls or memory, textures or total polygon/tris in the combined mesh).

Many, many other games use modular assets, especially if poly and tri counts are important to keep down for mobile and low power consoles / handhelds.

With a few component models that can be separated and added to a base model, procedural mesh generation can work. But, it is extremely messy when starting out, just due to complexity and the strategy of a significant redesign of assets to be modular, not singular.

Once designers and artists are on-board, and that's half of the battle initially, in getting artists to make modular design for assets instead of single design of flagship or lead assets, then you need to create code to make the game actually work with Frankenstein ships or Frankenstein characters, buildings, etc.

it leads to intriguing art and possibilities.

And working out all of the intricacies of positions, storage, blending, replacement/deformation of modular assets, how to diagnose, test and display problems, modifying or identifying pre generated or fixed module assets in the gui, storing the atomic position and/or physics settings, looking for deformed mesh, hollow mesh/gaps, raytrace problems, wrap uv and deformation, problems with textures, etc. Batch calls, pooling, spawn locations, collision mesh, sic.

And that's just things I could think of from regular assets. Modular mesh, as well as modular textures are usually a no go area, because of the problems with the engine and performance guesswork when problems come up at the last minute. Or the first minutes. Etc.

Most indie games don't have the time to waste on procedural generation unless it's been troubleshooted or tested by designers and coders, or sold as an asset by others.

Buildings are often generated like this in game,

No Man's Sky is perhaps the more popular ur example of how to make procedural generated assets using math functions and geometric texture generation (it's been a long time since I looked at the tech they were supposed to be using under the hood, but i misremember something like fractal/geometric generation of textures to minimize the workload)

but it is still a tech demo of a well understood, but infrequently used tool.

That is, until they release the game.

Since you linked these pages, you and others also might find this interesting:

http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/misconceptions....

In my opinion Atomic Rocket contains the most accurate discussion of hard science fiction I've ever encountered.

UVs are not needed any more since a long time. They have many drawbacks (the first one being that they are explicit).

The renderers I used in production, when I left the VFX industry ca. 2010, all supported PTEX [http://ptex.us/ptexpaper.html].

Blender seems to have WIP support for it too nowadays [ https://wiki.blender.org/index.php/User:Nicholasbishop/Ptex]