How do these procedural layouts compare to the shape of the exteriors? Do you build the interiors and then look for exteriors that match, or do you start with an exterior?
TL;DRStations use approximate exterior collision volumes with known connection points, and the procedural interior system fills inside those bounds without clipping, so the two fit together with little extra work.
Yeah, so that's a good question. What we do is we have an approximate collision volume that represents the exterior of a station. So we want to make sure that where there's an interior, it's connected to a nice view room outside. So there's a point on the exterior that we know that the station's going to be stemming from almost, because we know that we want the interiors to have a view room to the outside of the station. So there's points all along the exterior that we can guarantee where it's going to start from. And then we build a collision volume around these different elements. So with the ring, we've got a ring collision element, or if we want a station interior in one of the lateral sections of the station, we've got a collision volume over that. And what that means is that the interior procedural system will just keep going, and it's going to guarantee that it won't clip through those collision volumes. So within those bounds, let's say the station rings, those big new rings, it's going to just fill in inside of that physical ring. So we don't really have to do much work to make the two fit together. Because we know what the station looks like. We know what the components are. So we can do a collision model of that and just say, use the interior space of this.
And that's a big advantage of the tagging system. When everything is tagged appropriately, the system just knows which ones to match up to what.
Yeah. And the station exteriors were developed with this same technique. We're starting to see a lot of variation between station exteriors. It's the same process as what we're using at the moment as well.