[[TracNav(TracNav/TOC_Development)]]

= Content Creation Guidelines =

== Polygon Count ==
Try to keep these in mind as a soft upper limit for the number of polygons.

 * Space ship: 1500
 * Space ship weapon: 600

== Avoiding Glitches ==
Please avoide these things. They might mess up the normals and lead to rendering problems.
 * Don't leave holes in your mesh. Use F or Shift + F instead to fill them.
 * Double vertices, edges and faces. In Edit Mode, you can remove double vertices by selecting all and hitting W -> Remove doubles.
 * Non-manifold edges, that means edges that do not have exactly 2 adjacent faces. To see which edges are non-manifold, switch to edge selection mode in Edit Mode and choose Select -> Non-manifold.
 * Vertices in plain air.
 * Unconnected submeshes. Make sure, that meshes are fully connected and not just submeshes, that are joined together to form one pink-bordered object.

== On Weapons and Spaceships ==
In order create a standardized interface between weapons an space ships, these are some guidelines. They made sure, that the weapons fit at the mount points of our space ships without colliding with the space ship mesh. Both designers of weapons and space ships should keep this in mind when working on their models.

At the moment, we work with only one class of weapons. The weapons of this class must meet several requirements which are all shown in the following picture (click to enlarge).

[[Image(weapon_guide.jpg,400)]]

 * The '''maximum dimensions''' of the weapon mesh in x, y and z-direction are '''2, 2, 6''' (see black box in picture)
 * The muzzle of the '''weapon must point in negative z-axis''' (see arrows in picture). This convention is due to Ogre's coordinate system, where the x-axis points to the left, the y-axis points upwards and the z-axis points out of the screen accordingly. By complying with this convention, we make sure that the weapons models do not have to be rotated when attached to the ship. Depending on your model, it might be easier to model in the x-y-plane and rotating everything when done.
 * The same criterion for orientation applies for '''space ships''': Nose/front of ship must point in -z-direction.
 * The '''object center''' of the weapon model must be on top of the model in y-direction. In x-direction, it is centered and in z-direction it is between the rear third and the center third of our maximum dimension bounding box (see red dot in the picture).
 * Be sure to include '''a plane surface''', where the weapon can be attached to the ships hull. The object center should be in this plane.