StarDestroyer.Net BBS

I am working on a Geometry Wars like game at the moment. The shapes are going to be drawn by connecting a set of points. So the players ship is going to look like this

(0,0.5,0)
(0.25,0,0)
(0, 0.25, 0)
(-0.25, 0, 0)
(0,0.5,0)

which is basically an arrowhead that looks like the player ship from the classic Asteroids! game.

Now the problem is I am arriving at these coordinates purely by trial and error. For complex shapes I have to draw them in Paint.NET and painstakingly note down the vertices and then translate them because the origin (0,0) sits somewhere in middle of the figure not upper left coordinate. Instead if I could draw some line art and get the program to output the vertice coordinates it would be great.

Is there anything that could do what I ask for ?

If you're doing vector art, then GIMP has some rudimentary things that I haven't ever figured out, and Inkscape is an open-source vector graphics editor.

But it almost sounds like you want some kind of CAD program. If I was doing what I think you're trying to do, I'd be prototyping the shapes out with Blender. If you want to keep everything as integer values then just select all and snap to grid repeatedly, and hold CTRL on all movement operations. You could even export your mesh to an ASCII data type if you don't want to get coordinates by hand.

I don't know of any other CAD type programs that are free to get and easy to use.

Use a graph instead and turn on point coordinates.

Just get some 3D Programm. There are plenty of them that are free.

Wings 3D
Blender
Autodesk Maya PLE
Autodesk Softimage Mod Tool

It's only 2D, but I've found Inkscape to be surprisingly intuitive and powerful compared to GIMP.