http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/setView/news/gameID/68/showArticle/3244

POTBS is doing it... so can we! :D

I like the fact that they supposedly have a whole forum devoted to player-submitted ship designs, and I think the peer review is a great idea.

Well it does seem like it could be a good idea, but i expect the pbayerbase would have to do most of the work regarding setting up the peer review system.

http://www.experiencegaming.com/content.php?contentID=2042

"Our staff is about fifteen people, plus another dozen who are outside contractors."

And they're hiring another three right now. What is possible for 30 developers may not be feasible for 4.

It is possible, but interest from the player base is REQUIRED.

I for one am not interested, for example, and have never looked at those design threads; 3D model design is simply not my thing. And I'm quite sure I'm not the only one.

Yeah but your most likly one of maybe three jexkerome, I for one would love some thing like this.

I would love it. Now if I could actually design.......

3million credits to the winning spaceship design

I did a little modeling back in the day using a freeware program for Mac called Mechanisto. I used it to create 8 different textured ships for an Escape Velocity (the original) plug-in. I don't think I'm the only one who has attempted such projects in the past. In general we have a very creative userbase.

Provided it is consistent with the game universe I think player created content is awesome (and that is where the peer review comes in)... we have a lot of creative energy among us and it would be great if we found a way to harness it. I'm always checking the ship design contest thread... some of the models I like, others I don't like as much, and it would be nice to see more of the models actually textured, but I just wanted to encourage all spaceship artists out there to keep the ideas flowing.

Speaking of which, does anyone know of any freeware/relatively inexpensive modeling programs that are Mac OSX compatible?

Wings3D is free, but it doesn't do textures as far as I've seen :(

blender 2.34 (?) is free to download and does UVMaping. What I've been using to do models lately. Bit of a learning curve to use it though, but there are great tutorials online if your interested.
http://www.blender.org/cms/Home.2.0.html

Wings3D for modeling, Blender3D for texturing, if you're willing to endure the frustration of learning. http://www.blender3d.org

And Phaserlight: Mechanisto? Eeew... :P I used that for about a day, before I got sick of it's modeling. Strata was the way to go...

Edit: johnhawl, they're at 2.37 now, but meh.