Dev Diary - Building New Spaceships for Chapter 8

Hello again! Im Thomas Hanse Eidson and Im a system designer on the Star Wars Galaxies (SWG) team.

My previous diaries outlined what a system designer does, player versus environment balance issues, and expertise systems. They are available in the archives, if you wish to catch up, but are not required reading. In this diary, I will give you a hint at the enormous task of adding new ships into SWG.

The space system introduced with Jump to Lightspeed has been tweaked and fixed in small ways in the last few years. New ships were added to the system later, but the designers who added those ships are no longer with the company and their methods for adding them were not documented. I volunteered to add the new ships as I have fixed space issues previously and had the most experience with the systems involved. Since then, much of the design team has worked on space and many of us are now very knowledgeable of those systems.

The new ships were selected based on their artwork existing in the game, with the exception of the Naboo N-1 Starfighter. I culled through our pilot forum for information you folks may have posted and gathered data for these ships. Of course, not much information on the boards existed for the gunships, aside from non-player controlled gunboat bugs. I did find information that the neutral faction lacked a ship that would fill the role for Rebel and Imperial ships that the Naboo N-1 would fit perfectly in.

Further, I checked various online sources that outlined the roles that the gunships currently filled. I compiled a small history of the ships to use as a basis for the design of each ship.

Blacksun AEG-77 Vigos massive interior

The implementation of ships with interiors is a daunting task. All large tasks can be broken down into smaller tasks. Each small task can be tackled and completed in a short timeframe so that progress is clear and stress is avoided. Here is a preliminary list of tasks that I mailed out before the publish cycle:

Sadly, I found this to be an oversimplification of the tasks required, as I began to research how to implement a new ship into the game. The tasks were deceptively harder than I initially believed. The interiors took much longer, the crafting process required much more work (notice there is only one task under crafting above), and the turrets were difficult to tweak and test. I predicted issues would occur even when I didnt know which ones would occur, so I started earlier than the publish cycle on implementation. The process is continuing as I write this article. The total time I have spent implement the four ships should be around nine to ten weeks for myself.

A drawback to doing something new is that you do it slower than subsequent repeats, because you are discovering how to do it as you go along. With new space ships, I knew we needed art. I knew it had to be hooked up. Other than systems I had touched, such as crafting, I needed to learn what files were involved and what the data in them represented. I had to poke through files and discover how to hook up each piece of the puzzle. If I came across an issue, I couldnt go ask someone without knowing who I was supposed to ask. An issue might look like an artist could fix it, which occurred often, but once we delved into the issue it could turn out to be another area of expertise (such as programming or design).

One particular issue was the Blacksun transports doors appearing as flowers. I kept asking art when it would be fixed. They had no idea what was wrong, as everything looked fine on their end. Eventually, I found a file that designers use to define all the doors and noticed that the door for the transport (now called the Blacksun AEG-77 Vigo) was missing. Whoops! In fact, the art was not finished on these ships as they had never been tested in-game with a person controlling them. Our artists spent a lot of time polishing the art and getting the interiors to function properly. The second largest art task was getting buggy turrets to function properly, right behind the Naboo N-1s initial art implementation. Many of the turrets had camera hardpoints that were too close to the base and clipped into the geometry of the ships themselves. Our artists groan whenever I walk into their office. Luckily, there was not too much artwork required for the new ships that we would need to split the publish up or drop features we wanted to put in. Everything that the additional ships were intended to do has made it in the publish, as of the writing of this article.

A broken door on the Blacksun AEG-77 Vigo

The implementation began with simply getting the ships to work. It took me about two weeks of research, file creation, and data entry to get the first ship flying. In that time, I had to create the files for crafting the ship, ship deeds, ship blueprints, and the ship itself. This didnt include component customization or interior components. After that, I hooked up some bogus statistics and made sure the shipwrights would accept the blueprints. The component customization wouldnt work at first (it took another week getting it fixed up), so I forced generic testing components into the ship slots to launch the ship for the first time. It was very encouraging to even be able to fly a new ship!

Once the new ship was flying, we tackled the interior. An engine room was filled with its various panels and plasma conduits. Alarms were sprinkled through the ship along with invisible damage locations that shake and spark, when the ship is hit. The turret ladders were placed and their respective turret hardpoints were matched up. The interiors took another week and have been modified many times since.<