Coherent design is melting my brain

It starts pretty basic most of the time, you get an idea, start working on it, fix a few hurdles and adjust some ideas, make some great progress and then hits some evil wall that you never even saw coming and will need to start reworking systems or designing things totally differently.

In my case its these model constraints on the ships. I've been deliberately making the shapes weird to try and identify where I would have problems (I secretly love being angry and frustrated all the time) and go figure I'm running into issues with size and placement of models on the hardpoints when they're mix-matched. For instance making a long hull and putting the mounts for the wings near the back of it, then realizing they clash with the engine if you use the wider, larger engine but everything is peachy on the short hull with the mounts in the middle. Is that a problem with the mount location? The wing length? Hull length? Engine width? Theres so many factors it can get really difficult to choose which one to clamp down on to get good design constraints.

I look back to Black Prophecy (2010 -2011 space action game with a ship customizer much like this) and wonder how any of those guys managed to stay sane while doing this. They had the same diversity in their model combinations but I suppose they just made tighter constraints for sizes of things to keep it all in order. I'm still just amazed that they could have so much ship diversity and fluid design without clashing parts all the time. Too bad it flopped.

I hope I don't have to keep redesigning the ships. It seems that I'll need to sit down and define maximum sizes for a lot of mounted items to prevent overlapping and clashing.

On the up side I did make some new models for Oomph and get them loaded into the webplayer. There are some more functional camera controls in the pipe that will allow you to view the ship better so you can get a good look at the new weapons, hulls and engines. You can also now change your thruster color values thanks to Jean for some cool new HSV Color Actions. I had been messing around with adjusting those colors with GUI sliders last week but it wasn't working out. His actions made it much easier so check out the color slider to change the thruster colors! =)