Configuring Starship Deckplans from Room Tiles

[Gamerprinter]

Although not part of the 25 Quick & Dirty Map Tutorials Guide Kickstarter (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/615795674/25-quick-and-dirty-map-tutorials-guide-book), I may release this product idea sometime during the development period (in the next year.)

I was working on a starship deckplan, however, I had yet to think up a decent deckplan configuration, although I had already begun creating some map tiles on a room-by-room basis. It struck me, that I could create 3 or 4 bridge configurations, cargo holds, medical bays, engineering sections, galley/rec centers, and various crew quarters. I could create some odds-and-ends like a brig, cold sleep pods, weapons platforms, armory, work shops, a flight deck. Then create various connecting hallways, stairways, elevator shafts, ladder ways, maintenance tubes - all with equivalent sized doorways. Then one could configure whatever deckplan in mind by selecting various starship tiles assembling the whole.

If I also included several theme/color schemes, I could do each chamber in Star Wars sterile black/white, industrial/commercial grays and grating/thread plate, warrior race blood reds and gun metal, and luxury liner carpeted and pastels of each starship chamber tile to cover a wide range of ship owners/vehicle purposes.

Including the various versions with the various color schemes could create a starship tile set of at least 100 pieces.

Here's some early examples of my concept as tiles:

4874

4875

Thoughts?

Michael

[Trenloe]

Although not part of the 25 Quick & Dirty Map Tutorials Guide Kickstarter (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/615795674/25-quick-and-dirty-map-tutorials-guide-book), I may release this product idea sometime during the development period (in the next year.)

I was working on a starship deckplan, however, I had yet to think up a decent deckplan configuration, although I had already begun creating some map tiles on a room-by-room basis. It struck me, that I could create 3 or 4 bridge configurations, cargo holds, medical bays, engineering sections, galley/rec centers, and various crew quarters. I could create some odds-and-ends like a brig, cold sleep pods, weapons platforms, armory, work shops, a flight deck. Then create various connecting hallways, stairways, elevator shafts, ladder ways, maintenance tubes - all with equivalent sized doorways. Then one could configure whatever deckplan in mind by selecting various starship tiles assembling the whole.

If I also included several theme/color schemes, I could do each chamber in Star Wars sterile black/white, industrial/commercial grays and grating/thread plate, warrior race blood reds and gun metal, and luxury liner carpeted and pastels of each starship chamber tile to cover a wide range of ship owners/vehicle purposes.

Including the various versions with the various color schemes could create a starship tile set of at least 100 pieces.

...

Thoughts?

Michael
These look really nice. With the layer extension available for a few FG rulesets it would be pretty easy to build up a starship on the fly using these graphics as tokens. Makes me want to run some Traveller... :)

[gmkieran]

I would happily invest in a product like this! Still trying to run Firefly RPG in FG, but decent ship interiors are nigh impossible to come by.

[AstaSyneri]

I would happily invest in a product like this! Still trying to run Firefly RPG in FG, but decent ship interiors are nigh impossible to come by.

I backed gamerprinter's Kickstarter and look forward to learning from that, but deck plans indeed are really hard to come by (especially if they are supposed to be alien - the interior stuff is usuall human or very ... icky alien).

Not having tried it in person the probably best solution seems to be ProFantasy's Cosmographer (https://www.profantasy.com/products/cos3.asp). At least from watching Joe Sweeney's tutorials (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NH9KCbICR44).

Of course that would mean yet another significant investment (CC 3 + Cosmographer + Annual 2012 for more stuff = £85.85) in money and time. Apart from its functionality likely being overkill ;-).

[grimm182]

I wanted to do something similar for my games, basically take these sci-fi "geomorphs" and update them with shiny new 3-d gfx:
https://www.wizardawn.com/rpg/tool_smap.php (great site btw)

Sadly i am suffering from too much to do and no time to do it all syndrome...but it might give ideas on how layouts can be done.

My original plan was to do the floorplans in Source/Hammer using texture sets from Half-life 2 and Portal...but keep the layouts the same as the 2d versions.
This would allow quick changing of various textures within a few moments plus easy assembly. :)

[Phystus]

I like the look of this.

Another thing to consider besides different color schemes for each tile would be different conditions - neat and new, slovenly and old, and damaged versions of a weapons turret for example.

~P

[grimm182]

Another thing to consider besides different color schemes for each tile would be different conditions - neat and new, slovenly and old, and damaged versions of a weapons turret for example. this was one of the reasons i was going to use source engine...easy to do this sort of thing. :)

[AstaSyneri]

this was one of the reasons i was going to use source engine...easy to do this sort of thing. :)

Did you get around to make any examples? Or did you just think about it? I don't know what the source engine is...

[grimm182]

Sadly never got far...the source engine is used by 3-d games like Half-Life, Left 4 Dead, Alien Swarm. It has similarities to an architecture program but 3-d.
To make a room and some walls and apply textures is only a minuet or so. It also allows easy copying and making prefabs which in turn allows easy creation of variants. Long weekend...maybe i will test the waters...

[AstaSyneri]

Sadly never got far...the source engine is used by 3-d games like Half-Life, Left 4 Dead, Alien Swarm. It has similarities to an architecture program but 3-d.
To make a room and some walls and apply textures is only a minuet or so. It also allows easy copying and making prefabs which in turn allows easy creation of variants. Long weekend...maybe i will test the waters...

The trick usually is that in addition to interesting geometry you also need very good textures for them to look good :(.

I looked at Ed Bournelle's Floorplans (Skeleton Key Games) for my UFOs, but the style is more human than anything else - it just doesn't fit.

My next step is to take the bird's eye view ingame maps from the XCOM game (some very nice guy on the 2K forums assembled those for me), straighten them out and put a grid over them. But that's only a stop-gap of course and doesn't replace the need to design more UFOs. When I find the time (hahaha).