Changeable Parts!

I have a bunch of interchangeable parts available for ship-building now.

And a menu for doing it in-game.

I also made a script in Maya for automatically displaying, hiding and exporting the parts at once. Of necessity, I have begun to think of manufacturer names and prices and filling in all this information about what your ship is made of. It's lots of fun!

Classes! Of ship...

Here is my initial conception of how your airship will increase in size and complexity as you progress. You will start out in a lowly one-man junker throwing harpoons by hand, and get as big as 70-foot-high tanker with 12 crewmembers and 4 giant harpoon guns. I need to separate them into different classes because some parts only fit with others of that class. This system of ship classes is a feature of the game universe, BTW... not related to my previous post on programming classes. : )

Classes!

AirWhaler will be a lot about earning and upgrading your ship's parts, weighing what your ship needs against what you can afford, weighing your ship literally against gravity...
So when it came time to enter and index a bunch of data (like price, mass, capacity, power) about a whole bunch of engines and gas tanks and rudders, I thought I might finally need to figure out what classes are for. After a day of experimenting, here is how I felt:

I just figured out what the heck classes are for in programming... even if I still can't quite explain what they are.
I am riding high on defining my own variable types! I am in categorization nirvana!

Halleyscomet/Wakefield said: The more you use them, the powerful and wonderful they become.Just wait until you start building classes out of classes!

Oh totally! I had an Engine class with manufacturer, power, mass attributes, etc. and when it came time to weigh my ship, I wanted to look up its Engine by unique name in a list of engines and get the mass. Then I thought, hey why don't I just make a Ship class with an Engine sub-class (and a Gas tank and a Storage hold and a Crew quarters, etc) ?
All the information is there, however much of it I want to make up, it's glorious.
ship.engine.mass =

Guns!

Harpoon guns now installed and pointing at the cube. Eventually, I'll make them point at your mouse cursor... and, *perhaps... actually shoot something.

Smoke!

My airship is now blowing off copious amounts of smoke. It's my own custom-made particle system, highly inefficient with the draw-calls, but I shall deal with that later if I need.