/me starts an "I love the devs fanclub" anyone can join!

So now we have some idea of what a station city will look like.

/me imagines a bunch of these in various configurations sprawled out over an entire sector.

Wow.

Very cool.

/me joins the "I love the devs fanclub."
Thanks for the pictures devs; they look wonderful.

/me imagines dog fighting in space ally ways. Barrel rolling in small square area and going around a 90 degree turn.

.....as station defense turrets blast away at the both of you for violating the no-fire zone! ;) Definitely a very high coolness factor.

Hmmm, I wonder what the station interface will look like for this baby. I'd imagine there'd be a separate screen for each module you "walk into." Perhaps some cool background artwork for each one. :)~

I just hope we get some new anti mine weapon or a no mine zone around the station, those bays look perfect for a couple hundred mines...

/me wants his own module!
Devs, how much do i gotta send via paypal to get my own station ;) :P

~The Penguin

send a total of $100 or more and they'll name SOMETHING for you.












...maybe...

Phaserlight, there have to be some 'seedy' sections of the city where there's only no-nuke/mine zones where you can have plenty of fun fights.

Glad you guys like it. I just re-posted the pictures, I didn't realize the contrast was so crappy and dark before. So, I just adjusted levels on them in photoshop and now you can actually see the station a little better. It was dark and rainy when I made the images, so I guess I thought the pics were brighter than they were. Anyway..

Roguelazer's questions, and others:

We don't know exactly how big they can scale. We hope they can scale very large ("Station Cities"), but this is dependent on testing, engine changes, etc. We may need to add occlusion culling to the engine before we can make them *really* big (full blown cities). We'll see.

We do want animations on sections of the station eventually (bay doors opening and closing, etc). Rotating/moving turrets can be done, but add unnecessary network load, which is why we didn't use them on the current test capital ship. Basically, any time a turret turns or whatever, it has to send network update packets. If you have a bunch of turrets, that becomes a whole lot of network update packets (not counting the projectiles they're firing, the people flying around that they're firing at, etc etc). If instead you just have a "Pod" stuck to a hull, with a "gun hole" that encapsulates the turrets field of view, it doesn't have the coolness factor.. but it's much more network-efficient. Network efficiency lets us potentially have much bigger and cooler space battles, which we think is more important than the turrets visibly tracking targets.

So anyway, we might have rotating turrets and the like, but we would probably only do it in places where their density would not be very high. For instance, not on a capital ship or a major station.

Framerate consistency with the new stations is still being tested. They have a much higher poly count than the existing station, but they're designed much differently to take advantage of the engine's progressive mesh degredation. Sections of the station which are further away will have less polygons, sections of the station that are closer will have more polygons, much like the current bumpmapped asteroids. With some tweaking of when objects degrade, we think we can get adequate performance. We'll see how it goes.

The various modules are designed to serve individual purposes in the game. "living quarters", "manufacturing", "docking bays", etc etc. The services that a given station can provide may depend on what modules are present.

I don't know if or when player-constructed stations will become available, or how we'll do it. We've had some great ideas in that direction, but we won't realistically have the time to spend on it until post-release, and I'm not going to speculate on how we'll implement it. We certainly *could* make modular station construction possible for users, but it would require a lot of work. We "could" do anything, but I don't know if or when we "will" ;).

We intend to have stations with which full-blown capital ships may dock. However, the station you see is not of that scale. Basically, when considering the docking needs of a very large freighter or military ship, it's good to look at parallels in the real world. There are only a small number of major ports on the planet that can actually take the largest of the ships we've built. It just isn't reasonable to be able to dock a Supertanker, or an aircraft carrier, at 98% of the harbors in the world. Either they draw too much water (vessel depth underwater, dangers of running aground) or there just isn't room for them to maneuver safely, even with the best efforts of tugboats.

Similarly, you can expect that only the major homeworlds and economic centers of the nations will have really large-scale docking facilities. At smaller "ports", very large vessels will need to stand off and ferry items in smaller ships, or via some sort of umbilical. The former option is currently planned (potentially both users being able to ferry their own freight, or have AI ships do it in a more automated way), the latter is a possibility.

"medium" sized freighters and capital ships will be able to dock at a wider variety of locations. But, there will always be those outposts that are only intended for small craft, where ferrying cargo would always be a necessity. Our current in-game stations are examples of how those small outposts might look.

Wow! Long post for a dev. Thanks incarnate!

You really can see the station a lot better now :). It looks like that large-ish module off by itself with lots of windows might be living quarters. And those docking bays, they definitely look like they're built for something larger than a Maud. :D "Medium sized freighters" perhaps.

The "ferry" idea sounds soooo cool.

Keep up the awesome work, devs!

Yeah, I really like the idea of a larger Centaur that holds more cargo :)

/me goes into a state of quivering drooling endorphine shock.

Nice.

If you don't understand why, let me highlight some of that.

"We may need to add occlusion culling to the engine before we can make them *really* big (full blown cities)."

MMmmmmmmmm...occlusion culling.

"We intend to have stations with which full-blown capital ships may dock. However, the station you see is not of that scale."

MMMMmmmmmmmm... this is only the _medium_ scale components.

"Basically, when considering the docking needs of a very large freighter or military ship, it's good to look at parallels in the real world."

Mmmmmmm.... attention to economic realities when appropriate.

"At smaller "ports", very large vessels will need to stand off and ferry items in smaller ships, or via some sort of umbilical. The former option is currently planned (potentially both users being able to ferry their own freight, or have AI ships do it in a more automated way)..."

Oh yeah! Sounds like 'courier drones' are going to become a reality at some point!!

I think that a slightly re-skinned Maurauder would do well in that role.

a bigger, slightly cooler bus. Gotta have the cooler bus. Liek the shuttles from Star Trek.

Actually, the Atlas would be the most similar to the shuttles from Star Trek. It even looks the same. :)

Out of curiosity, will the new stations prompt a redesign of the home sectors?
-How about some of the other sectors we have now?
-If so, can we keep sector 7?

/me just dropped to the floor...