SimplePlanes 2 | Environments Part 4

For this next dev blog, we’re going to be talking about a major new set of POIs (points of interest) located on the southern tip of New Yoke Island, and what better way to start than with the heart of it all:

Power Plant

Sat next to a mountain running with gigantic trenches is a large power plant, providing electricity to the surrounding area using a mysterious substance dug from a big mine on the other side of the mountain, and transported to the plant via train. Unfortunately, that mysterious substance is coal. Locals speculate that this was chosen because “it looks cool”... Anyway, the power plant is a surprisingly dense area filled with a lot of detail, while still remaining performant. There are train tracks running through it, tons of large pipes, tiny spaces to hide in, and more.

The power plant was designed, modeled, and textured by Emma, who’s done a phenomenal job. I enjoy showing behind the scenes stuff and I’m sure at least some of you enjoy seeing it, so here’s some insight from Emma on the creation process, as well as a couple screenshots from her development software:

The power plant was inspired mainly by an existing German coal plant I was given to use as reference. I started with a blockout of the buildings as simple boxes, making sure it didn't overlap the train tracks and wasn't too big or small, with a good amount of vertical and horizontal shapes to have a nice silhouette from all angles. After the design was set, the main challenge was to keep it low poly but with a good amount of details. I managed to make it less than 30k triangles, which is very low for such a big structure, by having as few rounded shapes as possible and using a lot of boxes for the details. The power plant has many pipes going in and out of the buildings that are supported by railings. To avoid having to use too many polygons on those structures, I made a texture with a custom mask that I applied on simple boxes, which gives a very nice silhouette and shadows and makes the whole area feel more industrial.

Port

If you look ever so slightly south of the power plant, you’ll find a shiny new port to explore! We’ve had a fairly substantial community of ship builders in SP1 for quite some time now, but we never really had any points of interest that were particularly exciting for boat stuff. That’s all changing now though; in the port you’ll find docks, ship hangars, a dry dock, and if you were disappointed at the power plant not being nuclear, you’ll also find a couple of nuclear submarines in the docks.

Aside from having cool places to do your boat stuff in, the port is also a pretty substantial chunk of flat, paved ground to play around on, in-case you want a lot of wide open space to drive in.

Like the power plant, Emma made the port, as well as the submarine model. Here’s some more of her thoughts:

The port is located between the power plant and the military base, so the idea was to use it for both industrial and military purposes. I was free to design it any way I wanted using the list of elements that the team gave me, which was quite a fun task. I first designed the ground, taking the terrain of the area into account and placed blockouts of the elements I wanted