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Starsector 0.97a is out! (02/02/24); New blog post: Simulator Enhancements (03/13/24)

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Author Topic: Update Pending..  (Read 14412 times)

etherealblade

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Update Pending..
« on: September 25, 2013, 04:31:11 AM »

...
« Last Edit: November 29, 2013, 12:13:50 PM by etherealblade »
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Gotcha!

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Re: The Ethereal Descendants [W.I.P]
« Reply #1 on: September 25, 2013, 05:12:42 AM »

It might be a better idea to not start topics when there's nothing to post. ???
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Sproginator

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Re: The Ethereal Descendants [W.I.P]
« Reply #2 on: September 25, 2013, 05:36:49 AM »

Can't wait pal,

If you need help just message me
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HELMUT

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Re: The Ethereal Descendants [W.I.P]
« Reply #3 on: September 26, 2013, 09:16:59 AM »

Obviously it will need some shading, but otherwise i like the boxy style and the flashy colors. Here's a complete tutorial about spriting from Ravendarke http://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=6423.0

If you still have trouble you can also ask Cycerin some help as the base of his ships are made from the BSF ship editor like you (correct me if i'm wrong).

However about the star system far away... Don't put it too far. In game it can be an absolute pain in the ass to travel there and i think that kind of details is much more important than lore. And we already have a lot of extremely fare modded systems. (in this thread http://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=6727.0). I want to blast some ships, not playing a cryogenic sleep simulation!
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Thule

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Re: The Ethereal Descendants [W.I.P]
« Reply #4 on: September 28, 2013, 09:23:21 AM »

are those ships resized? there is some pretty unpleaseant AA going on.
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Thule

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Re: The Ethereal Descendants [W.I.P]
« Reply #5 on: September 28, 2013, 11:43:06 PM »

muuuuuch better ;)

(i don't know what kind of program you use but there are certain resize methods you can choose from most of the time, sometimes it is hidden in the options.
for small pixel art always use "nearest neighbor" instead of the more default setting "bicubic"

i like the the alternate shading of the dreadnought. gives the ship way more character.
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HELMUT

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Re: The Ethereal Descendants [W.I.P]
« Reply #6 on: September 30, 2013, 05:42:18 AM »

(i don't know what kind of program you use but there are certain resize methods you can choose from most of the time, sometimes it is hidden in the options.
for small pixel art always use "nearest neighbor" instead of the more default setting "bicubic"

Oh, good to know.

And yes, your ships are better. Your previous cruisers were kinda blurry and it stringed my eyes. Will your new faction come with custom weapons as well?
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mendonca

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Re: The Ethereal Descendants [W.I.P]
« Reply #7 on: October 01, 2013, 03:35:34 AM »

I think a step that would be relatively easy, and could improve your sprites markedly, would be trying to pull out some depth in the ships by lightening various sections, simple multiply layers of varying opacity white, covering just a few blocks of the ship, could work I think.
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"I'm doing it, I'm making them purple! No one can stop me!"

mendonca

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Re: The Ethereal Descendants [W.I.P]
« Reply #8 on: October 02, 2013, 04:41:48 AM »

Looking great :)

Look forward to seeing them in game ...
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"I'm doing it, I'm making them purple! No one can stop me!"

HELMUT

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Re: The Ethereal Descendants [W.I.P]
« Reply #9 on: October 04, 2013, 12:34:58 PM »

I like the "blackhole generator gun" thing. With proper animation it can be very cool.
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etherealblade

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Re: The Ethereal Descendants [W.I.P] HALP!
« Reply #10 on: October 15, 2013, 01:44:12 AM »

I plan to place my system somewhere between cygnus and the Biso Telegate.
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« Last Edit: October 15, 2013, 11:16:43 PM by etherealblade »
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Trylobot

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Re: The Ethereal Descendants [W.I.P] Help Needed! Getting close!
« Reply #11 on: October 15, 2013, 01:39:26 PM »

I'd rather give you the tools to help you help yourself, etherealblade. Here's my first suggestion.

Since you're feeling overwhelmed, you need to scale it back. Make a copy of the current, broken version of your mod. Move the original one to another location, out of the Starsector folder.

In this new copy, You need to remove everything except one, single feature. Choose something really, really easy. For instance, adding one single weapon to the game, and a variant for a vanilla ship that uses your weapon.

Get that to work? Good. Now you have a baseline. Your debugging task is now merely a matter of adding pieces of content from your original mod folder to this new copy, one by one. You have to do this slowly. It's important, or you'll have wasted all the time to do this. Eventually you will encounter something that doesn't make sense to the game, and it will give you an error. It doesn't terribly matter what the actual error says; because you've been piecemealing the content in, you know where the error has to be.

This is the divide-and-conquer method, and it is literally the first technique taught to all would-be programmers at the school where I received my degree. Didn't know you were a programmer? You are. You are crafting data structures and writing script files, including actual Java code, so welcome to the world of programming. Debugging a mod error is literally no different than debugging any piece of logic. Chop it up into bits until you understand one of the bits. Then just hop to another bit that you don't understand, and chop it up too.

Let me know how far this gets you. My guess? Much further than the "do stuff, post entire mod, beg for help, repeat" method I see all too often.
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FasterThanSleepyfish

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Re: The Ethereal Descendants [W.I.P] Divide and Conquer! ;D
« Reply #12 on: October 21, 2013, 09:03:42 AM »

It's really hard, so don't worry if you have troubles! I had the same problems for the longest time.

TBH, for me it was mostly lots of copy/paste actions to replace certain words within the code. If you need a good starting point, my mod isn't very special, 3 planets and 2 stations with very little else.
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HELMUT

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Re: The Altari (Still W.I.P)
« Reply #13 on: October 28, 2013, 09:49:58 AM »

I really like this idea of space monsters. I tried to emulate this a bit with my Crystal ships on the Spriters judgement thread on a lesser level. Space Eldritch abominations roaming the void to prey on unsuspecting fleets? I'll totally buy that.

However, it will be pretty much needed to get some proper animations for theses. Statics sprites won't look goof and you'll need quite a handful of scripts and effects for them to really look "alive".

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Thaago

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Re: The Altari (Still W.I.P)
« Reply #14 on: October 28, 2013, 12:29:28 PM »

Hey, attached is that sample for adding systems and planets to the game. Brief explanation:
mod_info.json needs the line: "modPlugin":"scripts.SSGModPlugin"
to point the game towards what to call.

SSGModPlugin contains functions relating to what to do when the game starts/loads. In this case the only function that does anything is onEnabled, which is called every time the mod is turned on and the game started. Its currently setup to run just once and call the activate() function. The activate makes an instance of and calls a class that actually makes the systems.

SystemMaker contains a couple of arrays with data (names and locations) of star systems to make and the function generateSystems. The function loops through the arrays and (in order) makes the system, makes the star, makes the planet, and makes the jump points.

I hope this helps you break through that wall! :)

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