We were actually talking about this mechanic recently. The idea was actually to have more of a 'Hero' unit than something you're going to go out of your way to tech to. We had three basic archetypes for flagships at the moment; Assault, Support and Political. The assault would be pretty self explanatory, a huge powerhouse ship similar to the experimental we've seen on SupCom and stuff like that. Support were being designed more like Super-Carrier type ships, fast reinforcement (Basically a production structure that moves, if possible?) And the Political would grant a modifier for capturing planets or defending them. We wanted RAC to be a team oriented style game rather than 1v1, giving people potential roles or playstyles provided we can get the balance right. It was being designed as more of a mandatory feature that all players would be trying to get than a resource sink, it's one of the areas we're really thinking deeply about.KDR_11k wrote:Spring's gadget system makes mod code more modular than normal so it can be possible to take features from other mods, drop them into yours and just have them work. That's why it's useful to look around for features you'd like in other mods.
Rigging and animating doesn't really exist for Spring yet AFAIK, you only get the option to script piece rotations but with a space mod that should be less problematic than e.g. with something involving people running around. It's designed for mechanical animations.
The flagship idea worries me insofar as an expensive construction that's hard to replace is also hard to afford in first place, a player going for one would have to seriously throttle regular unit production and would be vulnerable to regular attacks. Teching to flagships likely won't be a regular occurrence during regular matches.
As for planet capturing, the goal was to have a web of planets as your objective to gain favor in a system. It could be as simple as standing near them and then moving to the next, or as complicated as actually researching or upgrading your planets to fortify, increase resource production, things like that. We're aiming for the more complicated route but given my total lack of scripting knowledge I'm not going all out in the design just yet.
and @ the Organic ship comment, it's a 3D concept. One of our artists is designing a bio mechanical race and said he couldn't get muscular looking ships at under 3000 verts. That 3D concept was a basic normal map that I gave him on a 1300 vert model, to show him how low poly we could get. It was by no means a final model
. I was basically just showing him some design shortcuts that I WOULD use given that those fighters are incredibly small - but I'm not the one designing that race! Thanks all for your feedback, I'd have written more detailed (I have a huge page of lore and ship information somewhere on my computer I can upload.) notes, but I've been loaded with work this week, time to update the wiki I guess. :)
