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[xenoargh]

OK, I'm happy with it now.  The glow will be an engine-on thing or something.

[Okim]

Cut off the tentacles and make them animated decorative weapons instead of static ones (you already use ccopy/pasted tentacles, so why not).

[xenoargh]

Yeah, I drew the first set of tentacles on the right, but I needed more and was too lazy to draw more sets.  I hoped it would be sufficiently non-obvious, lol. 

Anyhow, that's the kind of thing you'd want to do in 3D for the whole sprite (i.e., build a model, rig it, animate it, render X number of frames, do cleanup), or build a bunch of frames of animation that could loop for each tentacle and do various tricks to hide the issues with overdraw, if you didn't want it to look really flat and fake. 

That sounds suspiciously like work to me, though   If I want to go that far (given how much work that is, and I know exactly how much work that is) I'd just start making a game in Unity and save myself a bunch of hassle

Not saying that stuff like that can't be done, mind you, but people get paid to do it for a reason

[Tecrys]

I've worked a little bit with the lighting, thankfully gimp can render light sources.
So, I took my huge version of that ship, ran some effects and filters and I think it looks about right now lighting wise.
Let me know if I'm missing something here ...

The upper one is with a stroke the other one without, personally I think the stroke suits it well.

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[HELMUT]

I'm not sure if I should tell anybody what I use for kitbashing.
Isn't it obvious?

Not really, i'm curious to know what parts you use for kitbashing as well. For your ship, i never was really a fan of the outlines but in the case of you bio-ship it's discrete enough.

Xeno, cool sprite but as Okim said, animation would make it much better. I don't think there's need for complex animation for the tentacles. You can do like Okim did for the wings of his Rockfly, you attach one of each to a weapon mount and make a scrip that will make them constantly move a few degrees giving the impression of a living ship.

[Tecrys]

I don't think Blizzard can sue me for kidbashing concept art, can they?
No, really, I'm using Zerg concept art.
I simply isolate shapes like armor plates, tentacles or other things, then turn them, mirror them or paint them differently and shrink them to the right size.
In this case I did some lighting effects with a filter and shrinked it afterwards.
Pretty simple.

Edit: So this is the final version or the one I'm most happy with. Onwards to the next ship!

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[Gotcha!]

I like this organic stuff.
Now if there only was a way to have these 'ships' explode into fleshy chunks and meaty gibblets...

[Tecrys]

Isn't there a way to define new explosion sprites like you can define sprites for engines and so on?
Maybe there's a way to change around on-hit effects for them as well to make it look like blood and bits of carapace blown off.
BTW: I guess this is not the right place to ask this but would it be possible to write a script or something for damage over time effects like acid or similar things?

[Erick Doe]

I don't always respond to the feedback provided here, but I do often take it into consideration when reworking my sprites. Your feedback matters!
 
Here's another ship for TuP: (based on the all time popular Mace sprite)


Phoenix-class Carrier / light cruiser
-1x medium ballistic, 2x small ballistic
-1x medium missile, 2x small missile
-2x small universal

-laser drones

This ship will be an all-round vessel of exploration. Having launch bays, reasonable weapon mounts for a light cruiser, ample cargo space and very cost effective when it comes to fuel and supply consumption.


This Homeworld-ish concept art also helped inspire this ship design on a very basic level:

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[HELMUT]

Tecrys, very unlikely for Blizzard to sue you for this. Anyway keep it up, your sprites are good!

Erick, is it a kitbashed Batavia ship? Some parts doesn't seems they come from Starsector and it feel a bit weird. Honestly i think you can definitely improve this one, the top part of the hull is overly symmetric and the white prow doesn't feel like it's part of the ship, same thing with the engines. The overall shape is interesting but it currently feel more like it's made of legos cobbled together. Other than using pipes from the tankers sprites, i also found that the scaffolds from the station and com array sprite are very handy for low to mid-tech ships to make them feel like "one part".

Anyway, here's the updated ship chart for the unique ships. Just have to start coding them for Talkie-Toaster now. By the way, anyone would have an idea how to implement the Lemon-bridge? I didn't thought about game implementation when i sprited it and now when i think about it i have no idea how it would work. The whole animation include the two cannons in it, but gameplay wise they are independent. Also would be pretty useless if the ship deploy itself when it enter the battlefield, i at least made this animation for the player to see!

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[Erick Doe]

Erick, is it a kitbashed Batavia ship? Some parts doesn't seems they come from Starsector and it feel a bit weird. Honestly i think you can definitely improve this one, the top part of the hull is overly symmetric and the white prow doesn't feel like it's part of the ship, same thing with the engines. The overall shape is interesting but it currently feel more like it's made of legos cobbled together. Other than using pipes from the tankers sprites, i also found that the scaffolds from the station and com array sprite are very handy for low to mid-tech ships to make them feel like "one part".

I'd like to call it a 'quality' kitbash, where the vanilla parts are hard to spot. Similar to the Mace. 

Not sure why you think some parts don't match. Though I do agree that the 'bridge' part could be integrated better. The aft section could overall do with more detail.

[Uomoz]

@Erick I kind of agree with HELMUT about the last sprite, the texturing feels a bit watered down and too clean to really fit into vanilla-style (the same feel I have about the batavia ships).

@HELMUT will this ships be available to mod into compilations, outside of Talkie-Toaster amazing mod? I'd love to build special fleets with admirals using this type of ships, waiting for an official vanilla quest-system implementation.

[Wyvern]

Hm... Animating the Lemon-Bridge is likely to be... interesting.  Doable, thanks to the ship-sprite-replace method, but interesting.  The first question, of course, is why it doesn't just fly into battle with guns deployed; my suggestion would be that having the guns active, say, reduces top speed / maneuverability, and the LB's ship system is used to indicate when to deploy/hide weaponry.

The second question is, are those supposed to be turrets?  If so, things just got more complicated; you'll need a way to hide the weapon sprite, and a last frame of animation where the guns vanish from the ship sprite (to be replaced with un-hidden weapon sprites).  Pretty sure this is all doable, just a bit complicated.  Oh, and you'd need to make sure to set the guns to straight forward, and to have de-activating the ship system rotate the guns back to straight forward before re-folding everything.

You'll also need a way to make sure the player can't fire those guns unless the system is active; again, doable - I'd be inclined to do something like have the ship system when off increase ballistic (the turret up front is energy, right?) flux costs by 1000%, but it should be possible to just disable them instead.

So... Yeah, all totally doable.

[Erick Doe]

@Erick I kind of agree with HELMUT about the last sprite, the texturing feels a bit watered down and too clean to really fit into vanilla-style (the same feel I have about the batavia ships).

Watered down? You're right. I need to sharpen it a fair bit to match vanilla.

[Xalendi]

Here's my first attempt at an original ship.

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