Expect me moaning that ships aren't eeevil enough and have too many airlocks.
EDIT
This mod needs more TLC. The errors are pretty basic, but there are a lot of them. I'll get into it in more detail but for now let's say that you got quantity and not quality. In trying to add a lot of SW content, you quickly moved on to the next ship/weapon/etc. but never really polished what was just added.
If there is one reason few people play this mod, it's that it looks unfinished. First impressions are so important (and high quality FTL mods have kinda spoiled the audience) and what the player thinks when they first see the new ships should be as close to perfection as possible. It doesn't look very good at the moment. It makes me wonder how much the author(s) play the mod. You must play your creation, it's the most important feedback you get. If you enjoy it, the others will too. If you notice issues, others will too.
Now to gripes. Let me say that all these criticisms are just to tell you what i see wrong in the mod, and what i belive should be worked on to improve it.
- Text doesnt fit into textboxes
This is the very first thing i noticed. Why? It badly hurts the presentation and makes it look amateurish or even like you couldn't be bothered to change names. If a full name doesn't fit, shorten it. Vengeance Frigate is just as good as Vengeance Class Frigate, except it fits. Victory Class Star Destroyer very obviously wont fit. Shorten it to Victory Class or just Victory or what you think is best. Not everyone playing the mod knows all about the proper shipnames, and those who do will still know what ship this is.
This also applies to weapon descriptions, augments or any other text. You can sometimes push words into the following line by adding extra spaces to pad them out.
- Ships are not positioned properly
It's not that hard to align all ships into the center of the gameplay area, and they will look better in the hangar. It will take a little bit of annoying fiddling but in the end all the ships will apear on the same level/height when flipping through them in the hangar. This page explains how to manually alter values in shipname.txt and use offsets to move the whole ship around.
- Room layouts are not centered vertically on the ship image
This again hurts the mod. It doesn't leave a good impression when it's obvious that the rooms and ship base image don't match.
In shipname.xml you can move the base image of the ship to match the room layout. If you can't make a good fit, take a screenshot of the ship with it's layout shown, and try to resize the ship base image so that it can be centered and look good. It's annoying work, but it will improve the mod a lot.
- Room layouts obscure too much of the ship and make up one unbroken big room.
First of all, the player certainly wants to see the ship they are playing. Ships are a big thing for FTL, and most ships here are completely covered.
Second of all, if you look at regular FTL ships you can see that rooms have some spaces between them. Ship layouts are essential to good gameplay and you should definetly spend a lot of time scratching your head thinking about ways to make improvements.
Avoid using non-standard room sizes unless for a good reason. Don't make the room layout too convenient, and try to break up the rooms so they don't form a large single piece. Look at the regular ships for cues on how to make interesting layouts. Walking around the ship should be interesting, and not too easy.
The Mantis A is a bitch to play largely because of it's damn room layout. But it fits that ship perfectly.
- System interior images are stretched/squashed
When picking an interior image to use for a system, make sure to use a correctly sized image. 35x70 images will look bad in 70x35 and 70x70 rooms. If an image doesn't exist to fit your room, you will have to paint it yourself. It's pretty time consuming but makes ships look unique. At the very least make sure the images are not badly resiyed.
- Player can buy systems in stores that cannot be used on a ship.
This is a common problem. When removing a system from a ship, the system also must be removed from stores. This causes problems in multi ship mods because you want some ships to be able to buy as system but not others. There is no easy solution for this. It's really stupid to waste scrap on a teleporter and not actually get one.
- Shield ellipses are moslty too big for each ship.
This isn't really terrible, esp. since defenders are typically very fast, buy it would add a little bit if each ship had a shield that fit it well.
- Drones (fighter wings) don't fit the UI
I guess there's nothing you can do here. The fighters look lovely so if they have to be that size, fine. It still looks a bit weak i think.
- Weapon Mounts are hidden.
I'm not sure if that's intentional or not.
- Typos or other text errors
Typos are an easy way to quickly ruin a mod. Fortunatley i haven't seen many but there are a few. The % sign is showing as a [] for some reason, which is a little bit annoying.
- As promised: There are too maly airlocks
Not on all ships though.
There's more than just complaints. The weapon effects and sounds are nice and there's plenty of weapons to use. Tartan Patrol Cruiser looks very well done. A bit on the insanely OP side, but hey. Fighter groups look very nice. It will be an interesting mod, but right now few ships look really interesting.
The effort that went into this mod shows, but it's far from finished. If it takes time, so be it. It doesn't have to be done tommorow. Once it is completed, it should be an eye-poping, well balanced, polished labour of love that will keep finding new fans well after release.
Best of luck. And i hope this doesn't come out like bitching. I wanted to offer some feedback on the negative and not so much on the positive.
and the ISD are all about the wedge shape. Some people can draw nicer looking hulls, but this isn't a painting competition, it's all about loading up a custom ship and dying a horrible death in FTL's universe. Balance and design are much more important then looks, though they are a nice bonus.