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.