[SHIP][AE] The Aries

[Yizzzy]

Hello, new member here. Here is the ship I made/am making. It's made fully in GIMP (never used it before now) from scratch, though it draws heavily in style from the FTL ships. It replaces the Stealth C. It lacks Gibs and it's own cloak, and I may make them later, but I am not sure. It also lacks a lot of details, but it still looks cool (at least I think so ). I'm probably going to make other ships before adding more to this one. I want to get good at GIMP.





Strategy: The layout is pretty strong with lots of venting, though doors do come under attack quite a bit. It also has a relatively weak crew, boarding defense wise. If playing on hard you'll likely take some serious damage early on, especially running into drones. In general, it plays a lot like Stealth A, though it probably has a weaker start. Later on it becomes a real beast if you can max everything. It's built to not be too overly strong.

http://www.mediafire.com/download/kmrj5 ... rr_008.ftl

It's not that unique gameplay wise, but it's the first mod I've made for a game, so whatever.
Enjoy!

[FederationScumX1999]

Congratz on your first ship, it looks pretty neat despite the lack of detailing. That's something you'll get a feel for when you see where extra panels and hull lines go, and how the shading works on most FTL ships, though you can go even further if you wanted. You'll reach that point fairly soon I'm sure.

It lacks Gibs and it's own cloak, and I may make them later, but I am not sure. It also lacks a lot of details, but it still looks cool (at least I think so ). I'm probably going to make other ships before adding more to this one. I want to get good at GIMP.

Making gibs and cloak is actually fairly simple in GIMP if you just want to emulate the style of FTL. I'll try my best to explain. I'm sure there's a tutorial somewhere, but I may add pictures later if text alone isn't working.

For gibs, you just take the freehand selection tool and copy and paste parts of your ship into separate GIMP workstations so that each can be worked on alone. Erase leftover pixels so that each piece is a unique part of the ship. You then add debris (mostly consisting of angled boxes and long struts covered in simple shades of black and silver) that jut out towards where the pieces would normally be connected to others. Some areas of a gib you'll leave alone, otherwise you'll have struts overlapping visually when the ship is destroyered. If you want, you can choppy and copy debris from gib images found in FTL's img folders and do some collage work to get it to look right.

As for cloak, all you gotta do is create a second, transparent layer over the image of your ship in GIMP (Layer > New Layer then Layer > Stack > Raise Layer). You should then be able to draw white lines, pixel by pixel, of your ship's outline. To save time, since your ship is symmetrical, you only have to outline half the ship then create a flipped copy (using copy and paste and the Flip tool respectively) and line it up properly.

Once that's done, select Layer > Stack > Select Bottom Layer, then Layer > Delete Layer. This will leave you with just your outline. You'll then create a new transparent layer (but this time you will Lower Layer rather than raise) and use the airbrush tool and a color of your choice to spray along the lines of the outline. It may not be perfect, but it should achieve the glow effect of cloaking nonetheless. When you're done, select the top layer, then Layer > Merge Down. This will combine the two layers and you can then export it as your cloak image. Be sure not to overwrite your ship image accidentally. -w-

Hopefully all of that made sense, and I'll give your ship a spin soon to see how it plays out. Welcome aboard.

[Yizzzy]

Thanks for the reply FederationScum. I may do this. I am currently working on 2 other ships' art in GIMP atm, so we'll see.

[Anthonest]

The ship design is great, but it would look way better if it had some clean up.