For those of you who have actually seen Rift running (I think there are like 10 of you out there) you may have noticed something about my space station. It sucks! If you head over to the screen shots section of this page you’ll notice that there is no picture of it. That’s good marketing. A while ago I decided that I should go through Rift and start fixing up the parts that suck the worst. The space station quickly rose to the top of that list. So I decided to learn a bit more about modeling, which is what that whole space gun was about. The other day I started up a new model for my station. I figured I’d make a really high polygon count thing like the gun, something that would look just awesome in this blog. Then I’d use my normal maps and what not to fit it into the game. Sounds good right? Nope! Thankfully before I got too nutty with the polygons I took a few of my starter shapes and ran them through a model viewer test app I wrote. Sure enough, the normal maps just weren’t cutting it. So I simplified everything. Then I simplified some more. Then I did it again, and in the end, something pretty cool came out. It’s still not perfect, and it lacks a paint job, but it’s worlds better then what I had.

For the record, let me show you the old space station:

Nice! You like those screen shots? Now you see why I’ve never put it on the web page. Here’s the new one: