Here is a shot of the basic layout of a Command Craft with no skin yet.

This should show that I'm doing the work myself in med?


After more tweaking around I'll begin the skinning process.

You can and should seriously cut down the number of polygons on that ship.

Given the simple looking shape you waste a lot of resources
on it.
There is a lot of detail you could put into the ship with them.

Use the resources efficiently.

You've received a lot of negative comments here. So, here is a positive one: I like your first screenshots. They look much better than I expected.

You have a lot of enthusiams. So I wish you good luck, to finish this game. But even if you do not succeed and start developing something other (like I did many times): game design is a never ending process of learning and of bettering oneself. And it's fun.

What you are doing is absolutly right: Try doing everything on your own (programming, effects, shaders, modelling, music, sond effects,...). Thats the only way to find out what you like. Maybe you are mult-taleted and you succeed in every discipline. Maybe not, than you know what to concentrate on.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to see more screenshots or even videos.

@bodden :
We are not negative, he claimed lot of things very similar to beginners saying : "I'll make the best next MMO !!"
And now he begins to understant that he talked too much , and reality, creation, is lot more hard , time consuming than just thinking and planning, sometimes impossible (specially in 2 months !!)

I doubt the author of SC2 will appreciate someone beginning in some 3D game making areas saying :
" I'll make lot better than SC2 "
SC2 is a great achievment and great game with great graphics, he should respect the game and the author behind and stop refering to that game.

It's cool to be enthousiast, and talk about impossible goals, like :"i"ll make the next Crysis in two months"
But some of us don't like a lot that unrealistic way of talking

It's somewhat like saying , none of you in that forums have done Crysis, i'll make it and better than anything else or better than X 3DGS game !

@kmega99:
You should reduce the polycount on your ship.
It's too much detailled ,specially if you want 50 or 100 ships at screen (you'll have to use LOD also).

Your actual version should be for cinematics or very close
camera view !

Don't forget you'll have HUD, path finding, network, 3D special effects etc ... all that running at same time.

For the rear cylinders elements of your ship you shoudl have :
- 8 or 10 side cylinders for close view
- 5 or 6 sides for mid range
- 3 Side for very far range (or another type of optimisation)

Perhaps you can make it detailled like now, then use it like that in your game ; than decide after if you have to weld vertices to decrease the polygon number depending on frame rate.

Don't forget :
Your model don't need to be so rounded, faces smoothing and shaders will make it smooth on surface even without beeing well rounded !

Here is what i made in 10 minutes maximum :


You can see it looksvery similar to your ship model !
But the polycount is very low compared to yours



Even this polycount should be for close views or near, for distant it should be reduce a lot !
The texture and shaders will make all the work to make it look very detailled and rounded.

@Ratchet, again you now criticise people for mentioning and comparing to SC2...
YOU compared it first and nowhere in this post has kmega said "I'll make lot better than SC2" (unless it's been changed somewhere)


The only comparisons he's made are

Nice poly reduction model of the ship though, as most have already pointed out the polycount is wayyy too high, there's more polys in the ship than there are in my whole game!

@kmega99 while I defend what you're trying to do and hope you achieve it, I doubted you'd make the game in 2 months before it was aiming to look like SC2 (sorry again for the referencing) but trying now to achieve this, just look at the dates of when production started and when it completed, calculate the number of hours worked and multiply that by the number of artists alone... work that to your timescale and see if you can achieve it before you're over 150 years old...?

you really need to concentrate on the core elements, get them working and if it starts to take off join a team, then maybe you'll release something better than SC2 before you're 75

I stop saying bad things about kmega99.
I wont take care could he says it will be the best game of the planet ever done

@Mr Guest :
Nice poly reduction model
It's not a poly reduction, i made it from zero.


@kmega99 :
One big rule that could help you is keep it little and simple at beginning, specially if you do all yourself alone.
Begin your ships, textures, some programming, some HUD step by step; for example:
-two textured ships (with LOD)
-some basic unit selection and move to pointed destination
-some first HUD elements.
-some first 3D effects (nebula, asteroids, 3D explosions etc ...)

Continue posting screenshots, we will give you tips and advices perhaps like we did for your commander space ship.

Reducing polygons doesn't require it be made from the original.
Which country are you from?

nice
REduction is a attribution (lat. reductio).
You reduce a bigger thing in a smaller thats the way in chemistry, computer science, boiling, ... abstract: Reductionism.
But i didn't know that the meaning of reductions is addicted to the place, you come from?
Please stop offending on little details, mrguest.

but i went offtopic, sry.

For the first model, your ship looks great, but as said, there a a lot useless polygons. It's great, that ratchet took his time to show you, how you could create a ship with less polygons.

Thanks to ratchet for showing!

After modelling, you can draw a skin where you add a lot of details without using that much polygons. You can use also LOD - level of detail, so ships far away will use models with even less polygons or smaller textures.
A normal-mapping-shader will be great, too to add more details.

edit: just wanted to notice the normal mapping, maybe he didn't know it :-)

A normal-mapping-shader will be great, too to add more details.

He will have to use the shader if we want to make the Next Best space RTS game