The first Featured Vehicles theme was "Draco 3-Stars". There were not as many entries submitted as I would have hoped, and the one featured in the header image was the one that just missed the cut. The controls were just too difficult to use even though it was clever with the backwards cab.
There were two main categories of entries: Tiny launchers, and tiny cars. I ended up choosing 2 of each, with one of the launchers being my own, because it was the most efficient design by a decent amount. By "most efficient" I literally mean it achieves the best efficiency (under 5 if you use it right), and it's also the easiest to use. I was hoping someone else would figure out that exact design, but it appears the theme was of little interest, or there wasn't enough time, or both. So it's unlikely I'll do Play-mode focused themes again in the near future.
NEXT THEME: WORMS - April 15th
In the spirit of that, the next Featured Vehicle theme is Worms. By Worms I mean long vehicles with segmented bodies, not the videogame. How the vehicles look and move is the most important judging criteria for this theme, but functionality and controls are also a factor. There's a budget of $200,000, just to keep them reasonably-sized and encourage creativity over excessive part counts.
I'm going with 2 weeks for the deadline this time, and may go longer in future themes (monthly). You can repurpose existing vehicles for this challenge, but once again please use the Featured tag so I can find them easily.
EDITOR PROGRESS REPORT
This week I've finally had time to focus on the Structure Editor, and it's going well overall. The hardest parts were the very beginning (staring with a blank file is daunting), and all the 3D math required for using the mouse to move stuff. The UI system is a bit different from the rest of the game, so that took a bit to get rolling as well.
The basics are working though, so it's now a lot easier to add features and tweak things to work better. There was a decent amount of lower-level code from the previous editor that ended up not being usable, but I'm now to the point where specific structure editing functions can be adapted quickly. I hope to have a version of the editor out next week, though I still have to tackle saving/loading custom ones (currently it just loads built-in structures).
After the structure editor is functional, the layout editor is the second editor I'll get in. It might go quite fast since much of the code can be shared, but it may also get too messy to share as much as I want and require re-organizing a bit. Steam Workshop support for structure/layout/island editors will likely come after all the editors are in, as there are some issues I need to work out...
The biggest unknown in my mind is how to deal with layouts that require structure files that you don't have. I think you'll have to upload any non-built-in structures to the workshop before you can upload a layout with custom structures. That way the layout will have a reference to the structures that others can easily download. It sounds fine now that I'm writing it out, but there are things I could be missing.
Islands (ground) will likely work similar to structures, where you won't be able to upload a layout that has custom ground without uploading the island first. It's also possible I'll change layouts so they include the island data too, and make it easier to copy/paste that data between layouts. In that case the island editing would just be a separate mode within the layout editor. Definitely something that needs a bit more thought, but having fewer files does sound appealing.
As you can tell, I'm kind of figuring out some of the details as I go along. Until next time...
[Version 0.113c was uploaded this morning. It fixes an issue with the Featured Vehicle text not updating because of file caching.]