Heya Mike,
Well.. it is open, in a way, and even better than with some sims, cause the developers themselves will back addon makers up and help out when someone comes with a good product, unlike other sims, where quality greatly suffers from too open a structure and an abundance of 3D modelers with no real knowledge about what makes ships float, planes fly, cars drive, etc etc, resulting in beautiful, but unrealistically behaving vehicles/vessels..., well at leat in my humble opinion...
So people
can make ships for this game if they wish, and indeed, VSTEP encourages people to do so.. but the community has to first manage to make a ship according to the guidelines, before VSTEP can use it.. that's obvious....But if/when they do, they have a really good chance to get their ships in the game.
And most of the stuff that needs doing to make the model according to the guidelines, is wel documenten in numerous tutorials all over the net. But it takes time to learn much of these skills, plus you need the right software too of course, which not everyone might have.
But it takes that software, knowledge and skill first, to be able to do that.. after that is all done, vstep will do the other hard part, implementing it..
People that make addons for other serious simulators also have to figure a lot of that stuff out, and there it's also a lot more than just a mesh and nice textures, to make a decent addon.
It's just hard work, and takes some skills that can be learned if one so desires and has that kind of time. That's pretty much 'all that is to it'..
Having said that, I too have no idea how to proceed with my models after modeling and a bit of texturing...
Regards,
Fred
