I plan to have unit customization in my game. And I want my game to be realistic where possible (without ruining gameplay) It seems to be that unit customization and realism have a conflict. Imagine a big space ship, you own the space ship and you decide to upgrade its engines with something better. The engines are a big part of the ship and most of their mass is embedded deep within the ship itself. Question: just how exactly do you get the old engines out and place new ones in? think 3D, 1st point of view. I don''t want to have magic teleportation of equipment, and I don''t want to hide the process from player. But it''s kinda hard to visualize it. Any talented engineers out there? think in terms of future, with advanced tech. What I want is description of the scene that player may see.

That shouldn''t be that hard and can even look quite cool...
Just build the engine of modules that stick, maybe half or more ine the ship. If you now want to uprgrade, you could make the hull open itself (I lack the words to describe), then you could open some (heavy) clamps that held the engine into place and let some tugs remove the module.
I know this isn''t superrealistic (I am pretty sure noone would build something like this), but it''s possible and nice to look at if done right (by a skilled artist).



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I don''t know if this helps, but I believe that current naval vessels actually have to be cut open to make extensive refits.
I think with spacecraft though, there are two ways you can go. If you want the engines to be an integral part of the ship, with their bulk resting deep inside the vessel, then there should be very little distinction between the engines and the main structure of the ship. I mean, imagine taking an old steam powered naval vessel, swapping out the boilers and pistons and stuff, and putting in a nice new nuclear power plant. It doesn''t make sense to do that, not just because the engines are buried deep inside the ship, but because so much of the ship''s design has to do with supporting the engine that is to be accommodated. With this approach, any upgrades to the engine could only be in the form of upgrading small components to improve performance, but too much of a perfomance gain would stress the hull beyond what it was designed for.
The other way to go is to take a kind of tractor-trailer approach. The engines would go in a self contained module that pushes the rest of the ship, kind of like a tug boat pulling a cargo barge. That way, when you want to upgrade the engines, you simply replace that whole engine section.

as plasmadog pointed out, I don''t think its too realistic to try to retrofit something as integral to a vehicle as an engine on a vehicle, especially a warship.

I''m not so sure there''d be a cool factor to it either. How exactly do you want customizations to work? At first I assumed you meant you could custom build units...sort of like having an engineering bluebook with which you can use to design new vehicles. That is cool. But if you try to apply this to retrofitting already existing vehicles I don''t think this will work. Some components on vehicles are very modular. Turrets should be easily replaced as well as most any external feature of a vehicle. Some electronics can be fairly easily replaced...but it depends on what.

What the military will do sometimes is take an existing design, and then turn it into other uses. Probably the best example I can think of is America''s old M113 APC. They had Anti Aircraft variants, ATGM (anti tank guided missle) variants, mortar equipped variants, mobile command center variants, you name it, they seemed to have a specialized version of it. If that''s what you''d like to do, that''s cool too.

Okay, retrofiting ships is not very practical in the real world. I suppose I could make "partial customization". Like Plasmadog suggested, allow player to slightly customize existing equipment on the ship, unless it''s one of those small equipments that''s no hard to replace.

However, would players like this? Wouldn''t you want to be able to retrofit your ship with any equipment? It sure would suck if you had to buy a whole new ship every time you pick up a really cool piece of equipment. And that would mean I''ll need more ship designs too, more work for artistis.

quote: And that would mean I''ll need more ship designs too, more work for artistis.

Artists like to be kept in work, don''t they?

yea right, artists are as hard to find as programmers. More artwork - more money I gotta dish out to artists.

you have to thing modular, like create a basic ship hull, and think where to place hard points to upgrade equipment like engines and weapons and stuff. course from a sci-fi genre this is easy to do. in alot of games ive seen, the ships engines are either like bolted on the wings , attached under the hull , on top of the hull, or in back of the hull. course this works well on big like frigate classes or capital ships, some ships just cant be upgraded engine wise, without a total conversion of looks.

You might want to think in terms of airplanes.

A number of old Grumman amphibs have had their radial engines replaced with turboprops. The larger Grumman amphibs have undergone extensive interior mods as well. And of course, virtually every older airplane out there gets upgraded with new and better avionics and gets GPS added in as well.

Basically, aircraft are airframes. Aircraft builders are airframe designers. Look at many of the aircraft builders: Boeing, Cessna, Gulfstream, Piper, Beechcraft, and so on. They do not design and build engines, avionics, brakes, tires, or even interiors.

Bendix makes brakes. Pratt & Whitney, Lycoming, Continental, General Electric, Rolls Royce and others make engines. Goodyear makes tires. Flightline designs and builds interiors for airliners. Avionics are made by numerous vendors.

The important thing is, these components are interchangeable and upgradeable, but the new components need to match certain criteria, including minimal performance specs, and size and weight constraints.

Are spacecraft really spaceframes? If so, you can model the paradigm after the aircraft industry.

Look at the hot rod paradigm. Old cars are stripped down and then undergo a ground up restoration. Except the hot rod builder installs modern and custom designed equipment in place of the original equipment. Old Fords often get newer fuel injected Chevy blocks. Interiors are redesigned. Fat tires get put on. Hydraulic brakes get retrofitted to cars which originally had ancient mechanical brake systems.

Han Solo's Millenium Falcon was essentially a hot rodded utilitarian spaceframe.


[edited by - bishop_pass on March 31, 2002 10:56:55 PM]

Just as a thought, you might want to implement things where customizable "frames" cost more to build than "hard", or fixed ones.

In other words, if you wanted to make a spacecraft with class I engines you could build a fixed craft whose engines could never be upgraded for cost X, or you could build an upgradable version of the craft which could be upgraded for a higher cost. The customizable craft is built initially with class I engines, but could be upgraded later with better engines. The degree of upgradability could vary by cost. You could build a craft with only limited upgradability, or one with ultimate upgradability (able to hold the biggest, fastest engines conceivably creatable).

Just some thoughts.

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