John Harrison's Journal: New Game - Advice Needed - Plus Post 1k - New Arrival

I have grown a bit bored programming wise and I am going to commence writing a new 3d game. It will probably be a space combat game, since those don't involve animating models, which I don't have the patience for.

I will use OpenGL and SDL, so it should be very portable. In my last 3d game I didn't use models for the ships. Instead I got out the graph paper and drew them, put it on a coordinate system and then programmed the model in. Some of it I was just plotting points, other parts I generated with loops and trig funcitions. The asteroid were 3d fractals of my own creation. This wasn't too bad until I decided to add textures, which look ok, but not great.

Can anyone out there suggest a free or cheap 3d modelling program? All I want is to make ships and texture them and then be able to display them in the game using OpenGL. I haven't messed with stuff in a while so I am a bit out of the loop.

Also, once the program/file format are decided on, I will be accepting contributions for ships as well as scenarios.

Another limitation of my earlier game involves the controls. While I find them to be great (I made it work in a way that I like), most people think they suck. The joystick controls are especially bad, keyboard is okay. Unfortunately the controls are very limited from an architecture point of view, and fixing them would require a quite a bit of rewrite. I will be posting notices demos and betas here for people to try out and give feedback.

On to another topic. My next post will be my 1,000th /. post. Think of all the time wasted. I am trying to save it for an especially good or bad comment. It should hit either -1 or +5.

Finally, I purposely don't post much personal stuff in my journal, unlike some /.ers. Actually, I don't write much here at all. However this will be an exception. Our first child should be arriving in the next few weeks. It is a boy, but we don't have a name yet. We are so excited. I am sure that our lives will change forever, for the better. Hopefully we can keep up with all the changes and new responsibilities as well as get enough sleep.