All right, since 0.8 is out, my biggest excuse for not putting the ships in game is gone. Trylobot's editor is excellent, so no problems there so far. But could someone code a ship system and a hullmod for me?
I have the following in mind:
Spoiler
Hullmod: Regrowth - the ship can slowly repair an amount of its hull at the cost of Crew.
System: Core Radiator - prevents flux from rising and doubles ballistics rate of fire for a short duration, accompanied by sprite animation
That's it, at least for now. I will list you as a full-fledged co-creator for those two things alone, because otherwise I'm stumped.
I could have a stab, but I'm working off 0.7.2 'copy-paste-despair' level of coding, so I might make a really shoddy job of it.
Hullmod: Regrowth - the ship can slowly repair an amount of its hull at the cost of Crew.
-I'll be at a loss how to do it without using Nexerellin-Levels of coding. At that point I think you'd need to make the ship be 'cheap' supplies-wise, and use console commands to remove crew as upkeep if that ship is in your fleet, but I'm not sure it's a wise thing to do - how would you account for multiple ships? That's at a level that is beyond me. An alternative would be to make the hullmod a reverse of the blast doors hullmod - instead of reducing crew deaths, it increases it, thus simulating 'spending' crew on repairs. That's significantly easier to do, but doesn't have the same impact as watching your crew numbers slowly drop over time.
System: Core Radiator - prevents flux from rising and doubles ballistics rate of fire for a short duration, accompanied by sprite animation.
-This is a lot simpler, and yet challenging. The no flux cost and double rate of fire is easily doable (although - when you mean flux from rising, do you mean from all sources, or just shooting?). The sprite animation is a bit more difficult to implement, largely because I'm a bit weak on how to control animations properly. What you have to do is make the part that animates a 'decorative' weapon, and have it built-in on your ship (Doable in Trylobot's editor). This decorative 'weapon' sprite is what you want to animate on your ship - if you want to animate the entire ship, then you are an absolute madman but assuming you don't change the size of the ship, make a turret sprite the size of your ship. For an example, look at Blackrock Drive Yard's Imaginos. The full-ship 'glow' is a single decorative waepon that covers the ship, and is set to oscillate between being there, and not being there.
This weapon will need to have multiple frames in a folder - not an animated png, but a series of frames that would make up an animated png. You need a frame (frame_0) that is visible in the campaign layer and when the ship system is inactive. Then, when the system activates, you switch the animation from frame_0 to frame_1 - > frame_x in a loop. When the system is done, you code it to go back to frame_0 and fixing it there again. I suggest that the animation sync up with the length of time that the system is active, although that can be carried out on the coding end. Alternatively the animation could continuously run, except slow when the ship system is inactive, quicker if the ship system is active, and stopping when the ship dies.
Having the actual ship sprite itself animate...I'm not sure it's possible to do. Heck, that's why Diable's transforming ships are not the actual ship sprite shifting - it's a bunch of decorative weapons animating around it / using coding wizardry to change turret offests and facings and oh god why did I even look into this holy crap Tarteflette you absolute MADMAN. SERIOUSLY. How on EARTH did you figure this out!?
An alternative is to try out coding yourself, poking through other people's mods, seeing how they did it, getting
IntelliJ and using Kazi's tutorial here.