Star Trek Online: Starship Exteriors @ Gamasutra

Star Trek Online's lead client engineer Ian Pieragostini offers some insight into the visual development of the game in the latest in a series of technical articles at Gamasutra.

The starships are one of the most recognizable characters in Star Trek. To make sure we faithfully reproduced the look, we began by selecting a segment of footage to reproduce. We chose a sequence from Voyager.

We created an external sample application as a test bed for our ideas. We felt this would keep iteration time down and allow us to try lots of different things. Properly integrating new graphics techniques into an engine including the export pipeline is not trivial. It can also lead to dead code as ideas are tried and abandoned. An external test application is a place to quickly test out ideas with throw-away code.

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Source: Star Trek Online