Ship creator mod - anyone interested in it or collaborating?

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Llamageddon
Posts: 11
Joined: Mon May 19, 2014 1:33 am

Ship creator mod - anyone interested in it or collaborating?

Postby Llamageddon » Mon May 26, 2014 11:54 pm

Hey, I've been playing around with making ship graphics, and since I figured out how to automatically generate cloaked ship graphics, and that ship paint is actually done in a simple manner, I had an idea.

Namely, an external program that generates all the ship graphics from a list of parts, that you can choose yourself, and then add in rooms, systems, starting loadout. Perhaps with a budget.

Either way, the basic premise is simple:

  • The schematic is split into two parts - front and back, both of which are either split into top/bottom, or not. Perhaps I could add an extra middle section.
  • You choose from a list of prepared graphics for each of the pieces, for now, I'm gonna extract and adapt/create some graphics out of ingame ships, that are all standardized in sizes and aligned to the room grid.
  • After that you lay out the rooms, or let the game do it for you, and add doors, and systems.
  • It's all done on a budget, out of which you can run out.

So, the programming itself will be fairly simple, so long the graphics stick to a standard - pixel art, with a fixed list of colors. I'm gonna use three main palettes - hull and hull2(think hull plus the Engi A/B or Mantis C stuff that is darker and sort of "below", both 8 colors each, like standard ships, except no gradients here), and a 3 color detail palette. Plus you can draw paint on top of the hull while preserving the shading(including flood fill and stamping logos).

Well, as you can guess, that's gonna be a bit of work. Not hard work, but nonetheless, it will take me time.

So, I'd like to know if anyone would be interested in helping me, namely with the art. Both drawing new art and making some out of the base files.

And in general: Would anyone be interested in playing a mod like this? What if I had daily/biweekly/weekly/monthly random ship challenges?
Russian Rockman
Posts: 819
Joined: Fri Jan 10, 2014 11:43 pm

Re: Ship creator mod - anyone interested in it or collaborat

Postby Russian Rockman » Tue May 27, 2014 3:32 pm

It would be interesting to have a mod that lets you randomize a ship by combining pre-made hull images and room layouts, as well as pre-made starting weapon/drone layouts and augments and crew. Then the program could pack everything into a ready to go .ftl file like Superluminal.

Somebody else suggested a while ago customizing ship color. It would be interesting if someone was able to creat a color "slider" or at least pre-made re colorations of the different ships to choose from.

I of course would not know where to begin on any of that :roll: , but I do know it is technically "possible".
InventorRaccoon
Posts: 23
Joined: Thu Apr 17, 2014 5:25 pm

Re: Ship creator mod - anyone interested in it or collaborat

Postby InventorRaccoon » Tue May 27, 2014 6:05 pm

Llamageddon wrote:Hey, I've been playing around with making ship graphics, and since I figured out how to automatically generate cloaked ship graphics, and that ship paint is actually done in a simple manner, I had an idea.

Namely, an external program that generates all the ship graphics from a list of parts, that you can choose yourself, and then add in rooms, systems, starting loadout. Perhaps with a budget.

Either way, the basic premise is simple:

  • The schematic is split into two parts - front and back, both of which are either split into top/bottom, or not. Perhaps I could add an extra middle section.
  • You choose from a list of prepared graphics for each of the pieces, for now, I'm gonna extract and adapt/create some graphics out of ingame ships, that are all standardized in sizes and aligned to the room grid.
  • After that you lay out the rooms, or let the game do it for you, and add doors, and systems.
  • It's all done on a budget, out of which you can run out.

So, the programming itself will be fairly simple, so long the graphics stick to a standard - pixel art, with a fixed list of colors. I'm gonna use three main palettes - hull and hull2(think hull plus the Engi A/B or Mantis C stuff that is darker and sort of "below", both 8 colors each, like standard ships, except no gradients here), and a 3 color detail palette. Plus you can draw paint on top of the hull while preserving the shading(including flood fill and stamping logos).

Well, as you can guess, that's gonna be a bit of work. Not hard work, but nonetheless, it will take me time.

So, I'd like to know if anyone would be interested in helping me, namely with the art. Both drawing new art and making some out of the base files.

And in general: Would anyone be interested in playing a mod like this? What if I had daily/biweekly/weekly/monthly random ship challenges?

Considering I want to try and make some ships, but I am terrible at splicing, or anything other than hue/saturation/brightness tweaking and recolouring, I would love something that would create custom hulls for me. I wouldn't need all the other stuff, except maybe gibs, though, Because I use Superluminal2 to make custom ship rooms and stuff.
xlandar
Posts: 151
Joined: Thu Jan 23, 2014 1:34 am

Re: Ship creator mod - anyone interested in it or collaborat

Postby xlandar » Tue May 27, 2014 10:51 pm

I might be able to help, how should the ships be cut up so that the pieces all match?
art and coding tutorials wanted, pm if you have some good ones please!Image
Llamageddon
Posts: 11
Joined: Mon May 19, 2014 1:33 am

Re: Ship creator mod - anyone interested in it or collaborat

Postby Llamageddon » Wed May 28, 2014 2:10 am

Ah, for now it's sort-of hypothetical, as I am a bit torn. I could do this in Python, using PIL, but that's too slow for realtime preview, so you couldn't see ship glow/floor layout as you edit things, and I'm not sure if I could actually do hull painting that is fast enough in it.

What else would you people suggest? I could probably do other languages, but I'm actually suffering from pretty heavy depression and few other things, so it'd be nice if it was simple. I could also do it with Lua and Love2D, but that's a game framework and it would be really awkward. Maybe Java, like Superluminal2 is done? I don't really do Java, though.

As for how the graphics would look, my plan is to make all the pieces 35*x+12 by 35*y+12 pixels, where 35 is the room grid size, and 12 is twice 6px border, so there's some hull beyond the rooms too, and have a separate "where you can put rooms" image/data file.

The images themselves would be, first, a dark(think Mantis B back below the "helm") "skeleton" with support beams and stuff, that I put below the whole thing, in case the main hull pieces have some gaps, and then six types of hull pieces - front(upper, lower, upper+lower) and back(likewise), with the pieces overlapping slightly, so yeah, the graphics would have to be tweaked so that the overlaps don't look awful, and it'd probably mean they should all be similar size. Alternatively, there could be additional sets of graphics under the main ones, for when the pieces don't match up, so that you don't get for example a 6 room high ship suddenly being 3 room high. I guess it's a bit of a slight problem.

Well... like I said, for now it's mostly hypothetical.

I also thought about using shaders to generate lighting from normalmaps, and somehow painting the hulls, which would be easy, except it most certainly would not create anything plausible looking due to detail being impossible and drawing being hard.

Another thing I had in mind would be to just splice out lots of pieces, and separate them into categories - skeleton/background, hull decoration(think spikes), hull(front/back, upper/lower), additional hull(helm, etc.), and additional armor plating(like rock ship), and just let people smash those together, but that sort of makes it impossible to have random ship challenges, and I imagine that could be the most fun part.
xlandar
Posts: 151
Joined: Thu Jan 23, 2014 1:34 am

Re: Ship creator mod - anyone interested in it or collaborat

Postby xlandar » Wed May 28, 2014 2:28 am

That could work... I think the best way to do it would be to create lots of different pieces (it would be easier to get them to match) and have people throw them all together however they want. The pieces should all be grayscale, and after the ship is done, they can choose colours that would go overtop. We would need a lot of people to help if all the images are original or heavily edited though. :( another thing you could do is create "layers" instead of having fixed places for things, that would require less work (graphics wise) and the ships would still look fairly nice.
art and coding tutorials wanted, pm if you have some good ones please!Image
Llamageddon
Posts: 11
Joined: Mon May 19, 2014 1:33 am

Re: Ship creator mod - anyone interested in it or collaborat

Postby Llamageddon » Thu May 29, 2014 12:25 am

Yeah. But I guess I'd have to splice tham all out of existing graphics, and just convert the colors(since they tend to have gradients) OR make it all grayscale, since that could be recolored fairly easily too. Painted parts could be red instead.

I thought about making a set of test graphics in lower quality, but my OCD is acting up and I just can't force myself to do it with crappy programmer art, and I can't do much better tbh n.n