IronDuke's I-War2 Remake/I-War3

Thanks for the info Bozobub, it will save me some time.

By clay, do you mean Playdough, or pottery? Just curious.

Ceramics. I never have been good with a wheel, but I'm very good with additive/subtractive/assembled stuff. And I can do raku fires w/o blowing up the work reasonably often.

Haven't had access to a kiln/shop in ages tho . It's an expensive medium.

Ceramics are cool too. Have you ever tried making a Dreadnought with it?

@IronDuke and IronyMan
IronDuke told me in a PM he would like the textures to be generated by the game where possible. I see a bit of a tradeoff about this. If we use procedural textures, the UV meshes may need to be more complicated to make the simpler textures work. On the other hand, I can generate textures, and IronyMan can mesh them together properly so they will work on a simpler mesh, but the textures will not be generated in-game.

Either way, the textures would have two parts. First, a procedurally generated metal texture. Second, hand-drawn detailing. The textures could have a third layer as well indicating hull damage such as holes and gashes.

I know next to nothing about procedurally generated images, but wouldn't it make the most sense to use a generation script to create the metal images, then save them as image files and paint over them before packaging them with the game? Saves time on loading, increases file size somewhat, decreases load on RAM and GPU, right?

One thing I suggested to IronDuke as an "advanced" solution is to generate the images on loadup once, and save them permanently to the hard drive. That way, the file size could be smaller, and both loading time and RAM/GPU load would be minimal after the first load. Really, it's up to IronDuke which we should pursue.

Ah, that would work. It'd make the textures different for every install too, wouldn't it? That'd be pretty neat.