Fractal Softworks Forum

Starsector => Mods => Modding => Topic started by: Cruis.In on September 18, 2017, 06:54:32 PM

Title: star trek ships?
Post by: Cruis.In on September 18, 2017, 06:54:32 PM
I love whats happened to the game since I last played it like 6 years ago heh. Would be awesome as multiplayer too. Or even some kind of mmog 2d eve online.


anyway fantasy aside. Are there any star trek ship skins? If not is it as simple as getting a sprite and fixing it with hard points? Would love to fly the sus defiant as a destroyer in this.
Title: Re: star trek ships?
Post by: AxleMC131 on September 18, 2017, 10:56:17 PM
Pretty sure there's at least one Star Trek mod out there. There's certainly at least one Star Wars one, but IP mods aren't often of the greatest quality because of inconsistencies between these other fictional universes and Starsector's gameplay mechanics.
Title: Re: star trek ships?
Post by: TrashMan on September 19, 2017, 12:57:14 AM
ST mods should be easy.

All weapons are invisible and you only have 3 kinds - torpedoes, phasers/disruptors and pulse phasers. It's pretty much copy-paste, change color.
There's alos no shortage of top-down images of ST ships to use.
Title: Re: star trek ships?
Post by: AxleMC131 on September 19, 2017, 02:51:43 AM
All weapons are invisible and you only have 3 kinds - torpedoes, phasers/disruptors and pulse phasers. It's pretty much copy-paste, change color.

All very good reasons why a Star Trek mod in this way would also look and play like utter shite.  :-[ But whatever takes your fancy I guess.
Title: Re: star trek ships?
Post by: xenoargh on September 19, 2017, 10:08:49 AM
Uh, if we're going by film / TV canon, then:

1.  There are quite a lot of weapon types, including shield-piercers, cloaking devices that make Phase Cloak look lame, hacking devices, boarding via teleporters, shield systems that "re-tune" to resist damage, etc., etc.; it's actually a pretty rich universe, in terms of weapons and counters.   They aren't invisible, either; I'm really not sure where that idea comes from; Trek's weapons are quite visible and flashy.  

Unless we're talking about turrets with that statement (where that's not entirely accurate either, but largely is); basically, Trek ships just have invisible Built-Ins and wouldn't have Hull Mods, etc.; they're purpose-built and don't get "field modifications" terribly often in canon.

2.  The problem with this, especially the Romulan Cloaking Device, is largely that you'd need to build some pretty specific AI support for it, since Cloaking Devices don't work much like Phase Cloak at all (they don't make ships invulnerable, merely invisible, for example).

3.  Phasors and other Beams would do Hard Flux; that's not a biggie to implement, though.

4.  If you wanted a super-accurate Trek, then most combat ships would have 4 shields, not just one globe shield; that's doable though, with some Station-like bits and a little scripting, I think.  What would be interesting is doing the lenticular shields that are pretty common in the Trek universe.

5.  I think that the idea that it would play badly is largely wrong; it would just play very differently and need a lot of tuning for that experience.  Making vaguely Trek-like ships as a Faction wouldn't really do it; we're talking about a TC here, I think, which is a lot of work.  I'm not passionate-enough about Trek to do this, but if somebody did good Trek sprite conversions and built the ships / weapons, I might consider building some of the code for it.
Title: Re: star trek ships?
Post by: TrashMan on September 19, 2017, 11:28:09 AM
Uh, if we're going by film / TV canon, then:

1.  There are quite a lot of weapon types, including shield-piercers, cloaking devices that make Phase Cloak look lame, hacking devices, boarding via teleporters, shield systems that "re-tune" to resist damage, etc., etc.; it's actually a pretty rich universe, in terms of weapons and counters.   They aren't invisible, either; I'm really not sure where that idea comes from; Trek's weapons are quite visible and flashy.

90% of that list isn't weapons.

And when I say "invisible", I mean there is no actual turret that requires graphics. A phasor strip is pretty much just a weapon point with a turret with no graphics.