Orxonox

How cool is that:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eha8DhChSOQ

and another movie of the same thing:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=crKxvuyuWoE

I guess it's pretty easy to do this with blender. Is it not? We would only have to create some parts acting in a certain way and we could create a lot of spaceships quite quickly. Depending on the model format we're using we may even be able to procedurally create and alter ships in the game!

Is this idea totally crazy or something cool to follow?

It's actually very cool! But sounds difficult to implement (merging the meshes for instance). But if someone feels comfortable with it, why not?

EDIT: merging might not even be necessary..

Of course it looks nice, but although the parts are already very sophisticated, you can see that they are just put together.

Problems would be in my opinion: merging the meshes (Blender still has problems there, it must be very complicated), making all the various different parts,...

I plan to implement such a concept with the weapons, however.

I'm suspecting that they don't actually merge, but treat the parts as multiple objects. SceneNodes could easily keep the Ship together.
It may not look well at certain spots, but it's probably a hundred times less difficult..

Looks nice but I wouldn't want to implement this thing

patrick wrote:Looks nice but I wouldn't want to implement this thing

That's why I said Blender. I imagine that we could create parts like those in the video, maybe even with handles (dunno if this works) and just put them on a model. It wouldn't be as easy as in the video, but we could add details and gimmicks to a model in a very easy fashion. When we define such handles which morph those parts, we could maybe even change them in the game and each model would look slightly different.

This has several advantages:

1. It's not realistic, that every space ship of the same model looks exactly the same. So slight changes would intensify the authenticity of our universe.
2. Every unique model of the same race should at least a bit resemble to other models. So human fighters, even with other models, should have forms and colors which make them resemble each other. Generic parts added to a model would help it.
3. Lastly it makes the creation of a new model a lot easier. I'm not saying we have to this to the extend we see it in the video, but it would help a lot if we do not have to invent the wheel every single time we create a new model.

I also do not think, that those parts get merged. However we could merge them when we are in Blender. We could import a certain part in to the scene, position and scale it, even change the looks with the handles and in the end merge it with the ship before exporting.