Starbright Illustrations (blog)

By The Illustrator 　http://starbrightillustrations.com/blog/2010/05/28/blenders-pleasant-distractions-and-games-based-procrastination/

From the front not much has changed

I’m trying to think about my sometimes-seemingly-never-ending work on this spaceship from a new paradigm. Instead of simply smoothing the mesh and fixing it, I’m enriching it. Each change I make is an improvement, adding finish and detail to make the model – when it one-day gets finished – more interesting. Right now I’m working on adding a pair of docking arms to the underside of the spaceship model.

Up close, and more detail is apparent

I’ve already invested three or four hours in this one tiny detail but instead of seeing this as getting in the way of the final creation of the 3D model that will eventually be introduced into the space simulation game (Vega Strike), I see it as part of the process of enrichment, and the more time invested in it the better. At least that’s what I’m telling myself right now.

And that’s a good thing because there is still a bit of work to do on even this tiny little detail before the spaceship will be able to start flying through the 3D simulated deep space environments of the game.

Anyway while work is carrying on with the 3D modeling in Blender, which is actually quite fun in Rubik’s Cube solving kind of way, I’m also doing stuff that could be described as fun in the more traditional sense. This includes meandering around in the Internet by typing random stuff into Google. As I’m working on a space flight simulation game, today I decided to see what that would lead to as a Google search. Top of the list as usual was Wikipedia’s article on this type of computer game.

Of course it wasn’t long before I was reading about games I could install on my computer (Ubuntu) and there are a surprising amount. Nothing to rival the latest PC offerings naturally but enough to be going on with. One that really caught my eye was Oolite, an Elite space simulation game. Vega Strike doesn’t work on my machine because of a rubbish 3D card, so I’m hoping this one works.