Wow. That might make sense as the end boss, but as a player ship? It feels too... bigWhale Cancer wrote:Why aren't you using the campaign only Leviathan? The giant zerg mutalisk carrier? I think that makes a lot of sense for a 'mannable' Zerg ship.
(Also, I don't think it carries mutalisks. It spits out eggs that hatch into mutalisks, doesn't it? I certainly got the impression it had rudimentary basic intelligence rather than being crewed.)Now if we were talking about Scott Westerfeld's Leviathan, there's a good example of a living airship that's crewed. But it's not really got much in common with the Zerg Leviathan.
It just seems natural to me to have the player ships fairly evenly split between Terran, Zerg and Protoss. Otherwise all the Zerg players would feel left out, I'd need to find 8 or 9 ships for each of Terran and Protoss, and the Overlord would look pretty odd as the only Zerg ship on the roster. Overlords are living things too; it's not really like they have computers inside them that the transported zerglings operate. Plus I'd miss out on the chance to give Zergy names to all the Zergy-feeling races (Mantis and Slug are blatantly much more Zerg than T or P), augments (Regenerative Carapace! Parasitic Healing!), weapons, and so on.
O-HO, you're right! animations.xml. I hadn't realised that file was there. Hmm... I could manipulate that to separate the idle animation from the walk. So Engi could have crew portraits as SCVs. But then Engi would also look like SCVs while standing idle: not so good. I could also use it to just remove a lot of the animations, using just a few standard images for everything.Also, if I recall correctly, races have their animation sheets defined in an .xml file. So, in theory, you could write a simpler format for animations to make the spriting part easier. Another option is to unpack SC1 graphics and use those sprites for the crew; I think that would be easier than converting the SC2 models into animated sprites (you would have to sort of settle for certain idle or special ability animations for computer use, however).
I had considered using the SC1 sprites, but there are two problems there: not all the units existed in SC1 (I could approximate some of them, marauders as firebats, but in particular sentries with their forcefields aren't around in SC1); and SC1 was isometric, so most sprites are tailored for diagonal views, not u-d-l-r.
...Hmm, OK, Googling around, scratch that second one: they've got animations for all ways round. Not great options for repairing or using computers, and each unit only has one attack (not both melee and ranged), but yeah, I could maybe use these. Hmm.
Still feels like a lot of work, but perhaps a bit more achievable now.
Over this weekend I'll be posting all I've got, but I haven't split any of the images into gibs. The Battlecruiser image I'm using is this one: http://i.imgur.com/yaqdE.png (Actually I shrunk it slightly from that to fit better into FTL.)shark wrote:Can you share battlecruiser? i just need the gfx please. even better if it comes with _gibN.pngs
