For this next dev blog, we’re going to be talking about a major new set of POIs (points of interest) located on the southern tip of New Yoke Island, and what better way to start than with the heart of it all:
Power Plant
Sat next to a mountain running with gigantic trenches is a large power plant, providing electricity to the surrounding area using a mysterious substance dug from a big mine on the other side of the mountain, and transported to the plant via train. Unfortunately, that mysterious substance is coal. Locals speculate that this was chosen because “it looks cool”... Anyway, the power plant is a surprisingly dense area filled with a lot of detail, while still remaining performant. There are train tracks running through it, tons of large pipes, tiny spaces to hide in, and more.
The power plant was designed, modeled, and textured by Emma, who’s done a phenomenal job. I enjoy showing behind the scenes stuff and I’m sure at least some of you enjoy seeing it, so here’s some insight from Emma on the creation process, as well as a couple screenshots from her development software:
The power plant was inspired mainly by an existing German coal plant I was given to use as reference. I started with a blockout of the buildings as simple boxes, making sure it didn't overlap the train tracks and wasn't too big or small, with a good amount of vertical and horizontal shapes to have a nice silhouette from all angles. After the design was set, the main challenge was to keep it low poly but with a good amount of details. I managed to make it less than 30k triangles, which is very low for such a big structure, by having as few rounded shapes as possible and using a lot of boxes for the details. The power plant has many pipes going in and out of the buildings that are supported by railings. To avoid having to use too many polygons on those structures, I made a texture with a custom mask that I applied on simple boxes, which gives a very nice silhouette and shadows and makes the whole area feel more industrial.
Port
If you look ever so slightly south of the power plant, you’ll find a shiny new port to explore! We’ve had a fairly substantial community of ship builders in SP1 for quite some time now, but we never really had any points of interest that were particularly exciting for boat stuff. That’s all changing now though; in the port you’ll find docks, ship hangars, a dry dock, and if you were disappointed at the power plant not being nuclear, you’ll also find a couple of nuclear submarines in the docks.
Aside from having cool places to do your boat stuff in, the port is also a pretty substantial chunk of flat, paved ground to play around on, in-case you want a lot of wide open space to drive in.
Like the power plant, Emma made the port, as well as the submarine model. Here’s some more of her thoughts:
The port is located between the power plant and the military base, so the idea was to use it for both industrial and military purposes. I was free to design it any way I wanted using the list of elements that the team gave me, which was quite a fun task. I first designed the ground, taking the terrain of the area into account and placed blockouts of the elements I wanted in it, I then detailed each element. It has piers for normal sized boats, a dry dock, wide areas where big cranes can be placed, an aircraft carrier dock, hangars and a lot of ramps to easily go in and out of the water. Just like with the power plant, a lot of elements are modules that are instanced in the engine: ladders, cranes, ramps, all to [reduce memory usage.]
Located south-east of the power plant and port is the last thing in our overview of southern New Yoke, protecting all the infrastructure we’ve been talking about in the area: a military base!
Bannock Station
Named after Russell Bannock – a Canadian ace pilot during World War 2 and a prolific test pilot thereafter – Bannock Station sets itself apart from the rest of the airports by a fully-fledged military base, breaking the trend you’ve seen of locations that are designed for civilian use.
Bannock is the work of Henry/DeezDucks, who you may recall from previous posts as the person who made the Driftwood Circuit and several other parts of the environment (as well as various stock crafts in the game). There’s a lot to talk about here, but rather than speak of these details myself I’ll let Henry talk your ear out for a little bit:
Me again, Bannock Station is the Military Airport that I've been working on for the archipelago in the past few months. When setting out with the style of the location, I looked at multiple Western style air bases as the basis of the design, with heavy influence taken from American, German, Norwegian and Canadian Air bases in particular (see if you can spot the different aspects).
Located next to the power plant and port, this proximity and the terrain were the main considerations I needed to design around, so the layout had to be optimized and compacted a bit. I nonetheless tried to include a wide variety of spaces on the apron, like Fighter and Cargo Maintenance hangars, with accompanying aircraft models from Emma (Community Manager’s note: Specifically, the heavy-lift cargo planes you see parked in a couple of these screenshots are Emma’s work), and eventually a rotary and search and rescue facility.
This base also includes some new and exciting things to SimplePlanes that I was pretty keen on pushing for, like dispersed hardened aircraft shelters and an emergency arresting system at both ends of the main runway. I also tried adding a lot of different options for positioning/parking your vehicles to hopefully make screenshots, roleplaying more interesting and give you guys cool places to hang out during multiplayer sessions.
I've been pretty busy with grad school shenanigans recently so there's still a couple more changes on the way before the game’s release, I'm nonetheless excited to show this new POI that I've been cooking up :)
So there you have it, a Canadian member of the community made us a Canadian-inspired military base named after a Canadian pilot :P
We really hope you have fun with it!
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