Week of Voidsong Redesign & Procedural Meshes

Voidsinger

This week we decided to hammer out the Voidsong's design and found many major issues with it and thus we redesigned the system. I also spent the week debugging and optimizing the procedural meshes that were used to optimize large ships.

Voidsong Redesign

The way that we were initially planning to do Voidsongs was as follows: Voidsiongs would be categorized into slots depending on what they did. The Voidsongs would all cause some part to do something with the exertion of a few Voidsongs used for misc tasks. The problem with this system was it was inconsistent and had no internal logic to it. It also had the problem of Voidsongs that would affect the same part in different and mutually exclusive ways. We wanted a system where all Voidsongs could be combined in any way and the effects of combining Voidsongs would be logical and interesting to experiment with.

To solve this I called a design meeting to discuss the issue with the team. The first idea that was discussed was how there shouldn't be a pulse laser Voidsong and a beam laser Voidsong but a Voidsong that fires a laser and a Voidsong that makes the effects of other Voidsongs longer. This system was interesting but too vague and hard to design around. I then came up with the idea of creating a pseudo-language for the Voidsongs.

The way this language works is that each Voidsong would be a "sentence" composed of "words" and the words would determine what the Voidsong would do and would be categorized into nouns, verbs, and adjectives. The language would be syntaxes to make it simpler to memorize and use on the fly. When a verb is added to a Voidsong it will cause an effect such as causing things to improve or heat up. When a noun is added to a Voidsong it restricts the effects of the verb to only parts described by that noun. Adjectives would work similarly as they would cause verbs to only affect things described by that adjective. This system is better than the previous as it encourages the player to experiment with different combinations of words while also being able to predict their effects to an extent.

Our current words, subject to change:

Procedural Meshes

This week I continued work on procedural meshes. Initially, I wanted to make each ship have only one procedural mesh segment so that it would minimize the number of materials needed; however, this proved impractical and irrelevant. It was impractical due to the fact that resizing a mesh would require the recreation of all of its triangles and collision resulting in more large than if it had been divided into segments. The dividing also made applying materials easier and allowed for the use of complex collision (which in the case of procedural meshes is more efficient).