NPC "flavors"

[Paranoyd]

I loved Freelancer and Escape Velocity: Nova for the one simple fact that each NPC faction had a definitive style that identified them - round ships, flat ships, square ships, symmetrical ships, asymmetrical ships, etc.

 

Correct me if I'm wrong, but Avorion's NPC ships are proceduraly generated? That would explain why each block is just, a square block placed in a certain order next to another square block.

 

My suggestion would be to expand the block choices to include some "prefab" blocks that each NPC faction in a game can randomly choose from while a ship is being generated and then keep for that set for rest of the game. So the first NPC you encounter may have square modular ships parts that they then keep pulling parts from for the rest of the game.

 

Also, adding the plain, X, Y or Z mirrors to NPC building options on top of this, to add even more uniqueness to the different factions for some fast identifying.

[Lannik]

What you get a random assortment of space needles and space bricks. What more could you dream of? Honestly though it would be nice to implement something like what starmade has where ships you design or import get implemented into the game as NPCs.

[Sable Phoenix]

I too have wondered if it's possible for the procedural generation to use other shapes besides cuboids.  Being able to set a few parameters that would handle symmetry, other shapes, and perhaps weighting the distribution of blocks towards a particular plane or axis, would go a long way to avoiding the universally asymmetrical piles and rods of slightly different bricks we get exclusively.

[bs1110101]

There's probobly some mathematical way to define this, but what i think would be a very good way to make ships have more varied styling would be to have some number which corresponds to sort of a density of a cube made of the farthest points of the ship, and a range that each faction keeps their ships in.

 

For example, a ship with lots of long spindly stuff sticking out would have a  very low 'density', while something like a star destroyer would have a much higher one, being all one big chunky thing.