There are six doors on the Arth Starport.  They are Operations, Personnel, Crew Assignment, Bank, Ship Configuration, and Trade Depot.

I finished the Operations door.  Within this panel, there are three distinct screens – the “welcome” screen, the notices screen, and the evaluations screen.  I have not done the evaluations screen yet as that would require the player to recommend planets for colonization first.  The notices screen is completely done – I have all the notices game data set up and it will show the appropriate notices based on the last notice read by the player and the current stardate.

I changed the controls slightly to be more modern when reading the notices.

What I call “the astronaut” is the little guy in the original game that you make walk around the spaceport.

As mentioned in a previous post, I am pretty gosh darn good at architectural 3D modeling. However, my ability to model organic objects is really bad. So, when it comes time to do something about having a player model walk around the Arth Starport, I begged the Internet gods for a ready-made model that I could just drop into the game and use.

And the gods delivered.

On archive3d.net I discovered a model aptly named “Astronaut 3D Model” that is pretty decent, and already in the T-pose for rigging. I’m no expert at rigging character models, but it is something I know how to do. So, I imported the 3DS model into Max, fixed up the smoothing groups, rigged and skinned the model (badly), and exported it into the FBX format that Unity likes.  Oh, and I also assigned some material IDs to certain parts of the suit so I could at least have different colors on the suit and not have it be all white.

I found the run animation in Unity’s asset store, and the idle animation also came from Unity’s asset store.  Both were free giveaways.

While the animations generally work well, the run animation does has a hitch in it, most likely from my bad rigging job. If anybody would volunteer to give me a better model and / or animations I would be more than happy to accept.  🙂

I spent quite a bit of time building the Arth Starport model in 3D Studio Max. It was a lot of fun. It was not hard to do at all – after all it’s just a bit of architecture and I’ve always been good at architectural modeling in Max. My primary goal was to make the station very recognizable. I eye-dropped the colors straight from the screen capture, and made the dimensions of the starport itself very similar. One thing I noticed about the starport in the original game, is that it was drawn quite incorrectly from a 3D perspective point of view. That made it a bit challenging to re-make, but I think I managed to do a decent job.

There are only two texture maps on the starport – the first one is the Arth logo which appears on one of the light gray outside panels, and the blue 6 pointed star that appears on the floor.  I made both of these in Illustrator.