Posted January 25, 2011 by dgbaumgart in Art, Development
There’s more to space combat in Starfarer than nearly-obsolete front-line sluggers like the Onslaught. Meet the Astral class capital-ship carrier: a modern, refined platform for supporting squadrons of small fighters and bombers such as the Dagger torpedo-bomber you can see below. Escorting the Astral is a nimble Wolf class frigate.
This Astral carrier has some top-of-the-line point defense systems on its starboard side while the port has some nasty repeating torpedo launchers. Once you get past the escorts and fighter-bomber cover, you’ll have to be sure to choose your approach carefully — and that’s before dealing with the full-coverage shield. Astral-class carriers should not be taken lightly.
What follows is a bit about how I went about designing the modern ship classes of Starfarer along with some concept sketches for the Astral and Wolf.
I was going to talk about fighters in part 2 of this series, but thought better of it. Oh, you’ll still find out more about fighters – it just won’t be from me talking, but through the magic of video. And Fraps. Which is totally killing my desktop, I might add, forcing Starfarer to run at less than the silky-smooth 60 fps. Using Windows Movie Maker isn’t helping much, either – I had to scrounge up some plugins to export the project in HD – by default, you can’t even do that. Ahem.
This video has me setting up some combat scenarios in a sandbox. It lets me spawn ships and fighter wings at the touch of a button, and then they fight it out. In the actual game, you’re controlling a ship – but in this sandbox, we’re just watching the AI fight it out.
As our crack Eastern European video production crew was not involved in the making of this video, please pardon any rough edges.
