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4846

Announcements / Re: Starfarer 0.54a (In Development) Patch Notes

« on: September 12, 2012, 08:50:31 PM »

Projectile graphics now rendered at correct aspect ratio based on the width of the trail, regardless of its length

So, if a shell bitmap's 8 pixels wide and 24 long, we define the trail at 8 pixels and it'll render correctly, yes, and if we make the width of the trail 16, it'll double the size of the bitmap by making the quad bigger, yes?

4847

Modding / Re: Judgement thread give and receive comments on sprites

« on: September 12, 2012, 08:39:55 PM »

The second one's pretty cute!  Good use of the glowing edges; really pretty nice considering it's a filter  

Here, I tried an edit:

4848

Modding / Re: Judgement thread give and receive comments on sprites

« on: September 12, 2012, 07:42:58 PM »

Well, look at good examples of well-shaded fighters for some hints about how to create some form from a smallish number of pixels and study them up close to see how they were done.  

For a good example, I'd say look at David's dagger_trp.png; it's a good example of what can be done with a very small number of pixels and careful attention to detail

4849

Modding / Re: Judgement thread give and receive comments on sprites

« on: September 12, 2012, 07:32:17 PM »

You can't really go about it like this; you're just applying filters here.  I get what you want to do, but this won't get you there.

You need to build the art up, starting with form and light.  You need to build it up, starting from deep grays and defining the surfaces and light and darkness, then add the "lights" in the places you need.  If you're not familiar with classical painting ideas / how to draw, you need to learn how to do that first.  This stuff isn't all that easy; start with a fighter, learn the basics of shading and how pixel detailing works before trying anything huge.

You certainly don't need Photoshop; GIMP is just as good for stuff like this, and it's free.

4850

Modding / Re: Judgement thread give and receive comments on sprites

« on: September 12, 2012, 07:10:21 PM »

Well... it's basically using a riot of colors, lacks any lighting to tell us about shape and form, and it's under-detailed.

Suggest that your first step be to convert it to grayscale, then give it a single, generic hull color, then slowly break down each part, giving it lighting and shadow to give it a 3D form.  You may want to start over again, with a fighter, to learn the ropes.

4851

Modding Resources / Re: SPIRAL ARMS: Kittens Sacrificed, Sprites crafted, Relationship advice (it's you)

« on: September 12, 2012, 06:54:46 PM »

Sorry for the double-post, it's been a minute.  

Here's a Glaug Cruiser.  Enjoy the obscure reference

Found some new methods that helped me get this one done a little faster, and then went overboard on some of the final details; a few kitbashes based on this and we'd have a reasonable alien-ish fleet for people to use.  Working on a couple of other things that I hope to get done by the end of the weekend, if I can get the code I'm working on done :-)

4852

Suggestions / Re: Another thread about carriers, no cakes here, the cake is a lie

« on: September 12, 2012, 06:47:22 PM »

On the balance issues: if Fighter Wings had an explicit, moddable value for Supply use per fighter repaired / rebuilt, it'd be cool.

That said, I think there's something to be said for perma-loss of fighters; it keeps players from simply having only one type in their fleet.  However, once Factories are in the game, I'm thinking it's going to be impossible to keep players from going this route if they choose, and then it just comes down to their costs.

I'd be in favor of having special Wings that had heroes attached to them, that you could keep alive and rebuild, but regular wings should remain disposable.  If we can build wings, then they need a continuing cost in Supplies and they should have Crew requirements of, say, 5X their pilot complement (IRL, keeping a fighter squadron operational requires a lot of people and equipment and spares).  I'd also like to see a specific type of Crew that is a fighter pilot only, with bonuses vs. regular Crew but additional hiring / wage costs.

4853

Modding Resources / Re: Complete Tutorial on Rendering and Post-Processing 3D Models.

« on: September 12, 2012, 01:09:33 AM »

Can't Wings with Kerkethea be used to generate AO passes and do simple materials and orthographic renders? 

Yes, yes it can

4854

Suggestions / Re: Greeble Objects

« on: September 11, 2012, 12:46:29 PM »

You can do that already; make a weapon that costs a billion Flux to fire

4855

Suggestions / Re: Greeble Objects

« on: September 11, 2012, 12:37:37 PM »

Hopefully there won't be anything hitherto-unconsidered that screws that up.

Well, there is the sim time spent on the radius checks and suchlike (at least, I presume each weapon has its own radius); it might be nice to have a flag turning that off in cases where it'd save CPU.

For light sources and the like, the biggest issue is when they're "damaged", they need to disappear; suggest that when damaged, Greeble Objects have a flag that, if set to true, reverts them to Frame 0 of their animation sequence.  Then lights could "go out", etc., but Zerg tentacles could stop at their current animation frame.

I might change this, though - you can get non-rotating pretty easily by just setting the greeble mount to have a zero width arc, and it'd be nice to have, for example, a scanning antenna dish that swings back and forth through some set arc (or just spins continuously in a full 360).

That'd be great and it would make stuff like gears, rotating satellite rings, etc. a lot easier; I was just thinking about the least-complex way to get it kludged repurposed, heh.

4856

Suggestions / Re: Greeble Objects

« on: September 11, 2012, 12:23:09 PM »

Yay  

It really would solve a bunch of problems, although I should say from experience that building the content for anything serous-ish is not easy.

I think that Vanilla could use it a lot, too; things like animated space stations could be fairly practical if they could be just a frame or frames with a bunch of Greeble Objects randomly attached to them, for example, making it possible to populate the Sector with somewhat unique-looking locations through procedures, for example.

I really think this might be a winner

4857

Suggestions / Greeble Objects

« on: September 11, 2012, 12:11:54 PM »

This is a non-trivial, but probably not totally impractical idea that I came up with when I saw this post about making an always-on animated sub-part of a ship.

It'd also provide another way to implement blinky stuff, per my suggestion elsewhere, although I think it'd be a lot less efficient.

Basically, Greeble Objects would be a special class of Weapon; they could be mounted like any other weapon and they would have the AI Hint of GREEBLE.  If set, these "weapons" would:

1. If animated, do their animation unless damaged, just like the Thumper ./ Assault Chain Gun do.
2.  Not rotate.
3.  Not bother telling the end-user when they've been "disabled".
4.  If they have a PROJ in their definition, then they'd release the PROJ at their fire rate + / - some random number.  This may seem like a weird thing for them to do, but it'd allow for us to, for example, make a WWI ship mod where Greeble objects emit smoke from ships' smokestacks, steampunk Greebles could occasionally emit sparks, etc., etc. giving a lot of life to ships.  Same deal with sounds; if they have one defined, they'd play it when "firing".
5.  Greeble Objects would not ever target anything, etc., obviously, to save CPU.

4858

Modding / Re: interest in a babylon 5 mod?

« on: September 11, 2012, 12:00:30 PM »

Well. Animation stuff is possible to do. You want a rotating chunk of your hull? You can simulate it by creating a new weapon with a proper animation. Put it in the proper place, give that weapon 0 flux, 100000 range and 1 damage. Make it a projectile weapon, hide its bullet, give it proximity detonation at range 100000 with the actual damage radius of 0 so that it would instantly detonate without damage to you. Make it built_in and set it to NO_AIM in hints (like missiles). This should make you weapon to 'fire' as soon as it sees any enemy ship.

Careful with this idea!  Such a design would vastly increase CPU load, if a lot of ships used it, due to distance checks every game frame. 

Better to ask for an always-on animated greeble feature instead.

4859

Suggestions / Re: Different colored UIs for ships of different epochs

« on: September 11, 2012, 11:55:54 AM »

I'm opposed to this idea, on the basis that:

1.  UI is a very non-trivial area in a game.  You can't just slap stuff together and build a new UI.  We're talking about maintaining multiple UIs here, and that sounds like a big waste of resources.  A color shift is not a big deal, but anything past that gets pretty significant, fast.

2.  If the UI differs in significant ways for each Epoch, it may confer serious advantages and disadvantages to players.

3.  I think it breaks the backstory a bit.  Any interface developed in Starfarer's period of future human history is, by its nature, going to be very advanced, but more importantly, it'd be fundamentally different than what we see.  We're just seeing a bare-bones analog of what the pilots using a "neural interface" would see; presumably, they don't need to see all this stuff like we do at all, because they can "feel the ship" like it's their own body and perceive the enemy's state with a plethora of sensory options, giving them a much different view of what's happening than we have.

Anyhow, I'm not hatin'; I just would rather see Alex's time spent on things that are a lot more important

4860

Suggestions / Re: Codex Movies/Animations

« on: September 11, 2012, 11:47:25 AM »

Something like having a ship mount said weapon, then be shown firing it at something?  Even that would be a fairly big deal, I suspect, given that Alex has already made the "background battle" feature that shows in the Codex. 

It'd also have to be a pretty generic solution, so that it didn't eat up development time making content that was basically just there for fluff and would get along with mods. 

I'm not opposed to this, but implementing something like this is not trivial.  I'd like to hear brainstorming ideas about things that could be done that would:

A.  Not involve making new content.
B.  Wouldn't be insanely complicated.
C.  Would provide useful information.