XVE: Modular Ship Building System

Modular Ship Building system.... Yeah, so I've played about with compute shaders and high res oceans for, well for too long, I do want my game to have a low-poly feel so I've returned to focus in that direction.

Today beginning my modular ship building system, I can build a ship to place into the play space out of discrete pieces.  Since I'm using an Entity Component System this is trivial, I just create the "ship" as a series of child entities of the one ship and each has a different model offset to just place the renderable where I want them.... Yes yes, lots of words, just go with me here.

I started with building out a Hull Model, then a bow and finally a stern, and set up a function to build a ship with a number of segments of hull capped with ... yes the bow and stern:

The result was extremely visually underwhelming:

However, it proves out four key piece of technology, first is my transform hierarchy code is working as expected the parent entity here positions all the sub-renderables.

The next is the entity creation utilities are working, with the components tagging bow and stern orienting the entity along the X axis as "Forwards".

Right in the middle is my new Obj loader and the vertex colour attributes; I've moved away from using a Texture map to look up the colour of a face, say from a texture like this:

I've moved to vertex colours, but may return to UV's and faces, we'll see when I reenable global lighting.

And the final piece of tech is my revamped ImGui display of all the entities in the scene; I'm looking at implementing a gimbal control for moving entities about more easily within a scene.  This leads to the next piece of tech I am going to look at which is a scene editor, I need more play space defined, so land masses, buildings, objective markers, a compass display and of course to be able to control these new ships.... Watch this space.

Project Blackbird Cancellation

This is a very hard post for me to write, not only am I personally and quite emotionally involved, but I am also still under a strict NDA and as such I can only point you to search the internet for many of the other leaks on the topic.

But finally I can perhaps explain why the number of blog posts I have been making has dried up; I often said it was because I was busy.

On January 2nd 2019 I walked into my first day of development on Project Blackbird as part of the core engine tech team with my employer The Multiplayer Group and as a founding member of the project with Zenimax Online.

The project as it stood the day it was cancelled was, is, stunning to look at.  Alex Tardiff lead the standing up of a brand new renderer from the ground up, a brand new engine was also stood up along side this and the two interoperated superbly.

Early in the development we did a lot of research, selecting technology, containers and performance considerations; we stood up a project with a handful of people and scaled it sucessfully to hundreds.  Standing up a new engine, a new renderer and the complete tooling stack for it is no mean feat.   Think an almost skunkworks kind of deal, with just a dozen members standing up something like Unreal 4; then scaling it out to something which in my opinion visually looked better than Unreal 5, with all the tooling, all the content creation to roll out experience after experience coming together nicely... Within just over six and a half years!

The experience of playing was incredible, the mechanics in the game unique, the world in which the player experienced the game mezmerising.

The team was amazing, sure we had ups and downs, but we were one under the Blackbird banner and until 4:03pm Wednesday 2ny July 2025 we believed there would be a cornerstone gameplay experience delivered on PC, XBox and Playstation 5.... Alas, no more.

As you may understand I am extremely upset by these events, finding constant moments of almost grief, automated message reminders still appearing from headless accounts, sprint goals all planned out but no actions to make, I am bereft of purpose, I am emotional, I was a BLACKBIRD.

https://www.trueachievements.com/news/canceled-xbox-mmo-project-blackbird

https://insider-gaming.com/phil-spencer-loved-zenimaxs-new-mmorpg-but-it-was-canceled-anyway/


https://www.eurogamer.net/zenimax-online-studios-head-matt-firor-announces-departure-following-widespread-layoffs-and-the-cancellation-of-in-development-mmo

 

https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/a-new-mmo-in-development-at-elder-scrolls-online-studio-zenimax-has-been-cancelled-as-microsoft-puts-thousands-more-people-out-of-work/