[SHIP] Lux Tempestas

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NarnKar
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[SHIP] Lux Tempestas

Postby NarnKar » Sun Nov 09, 2014 11:10 pm

And when the golden age of civilization ends, a vessel of golden light shall bid that time farewell...do not go gently into that dying light. Fight it back, and see if you can make it yours.

Lux Tempestas--The Golden Storm
A lost ship of a precursor civilization, made of darksteel plates wrapped around a golden core. It has since been refitted with Federation equipment, and flies into battle once more.

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At long last, the Lux Tempestas is finally complete! Between broken laptops and public computer problems, it's almost like the universe itself wanted to make this a lost mod. But at long last, it is complete.

I had no particular goal in mind when making this mod, and I was really just doing this cause I found some neat art I wanted to use in a mod. I wasn't even particularly motivated to finish it, really. But because of the warm reception I got in the Previews thread, I decided to try and hurry up the pace.
Which wasn't helped by the aforementioned computer troubles.

So, here's the Lux Tempestas! It should play something like a combination of Stealth and Zoltan cruisers, trying to evade behind a limited shield while charging up a powerful beam. Its signature weapon, the Radiant Stormcannon, is a 4 power 2 damage beam with a 500 pixel trail, but deals its damage very slowly and requires good shield suppression to use effectively. It has a 22 second charge time, and has the additional benefit of a 10-second stun.

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The Radiant Stormcannon

You may notice pink stripes that say AIRLOCK on the rooms that are, well, airlocks. You still can't add floor art to empty rooms, so what I did is, I made the door image really big, so that the airlock strips would clip through the doors image and into their proper locations. Images are added top-left-corner to top-left-of-room, so it's pretty easy to visualize the other rooms you want to clip into.

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The room image of the Lux Tempestas.

Download v1.0 here.
Replaces Kestrel A. Install with Slipstream Mod Manager.

Videos
Vanguard of Valor Twitch Stream

And now, for the lengthy attributions...

The hull of the Lux Tempestas is a hue-shifted recolor+minor edit of the Skyburner, a ship made by the community of Battleships Forever. View the original Skyburner thread here. I believe the policy was "anyone can use these hulls as long as they give credit, as they are a community creation and belong to no one in particular"--so...yeah, here's credit given.

One of the bigger changes I made was splicing in the rear spines of the Arms Fort Asmodai, by SilverWingedSeraph of the Battleships Forever forums. I tried to contact Seraph and see if he was okay with me using bits of it; however, I was unable to reach him. After some deliberation, I decided to go ahead with it, on the rationale that he never used it in one of his Battleships Forever mods (his computer crashed and all that remains of the Asmodai is the single image, with no data associated with it). However I'm quite aware that that's iffy territory, so if by some chance Seraph comes along and files a complaint I'd be happy to remove those spines.

The small changes I made were adding a black pixel outline around the hull, removing some of the fiery glows/flamethrowers, removing the back engine block and adding a more standard FTL engine in its place, and cleaning up some of the pixely/blurry artifacts around the edges, particularly around the spines. (Removing a white-outlined black spine from black space was an interesting experience, to say the least.) Oh, and of course, the recoloration.

The Grand Cannon/Radiant Stormcannon is actually an edit of the Sweetwater Handcannon, a cannon from Maplestory. The image itself was extracted using the Mapleme.net simulator, an online character creation/simulation website, which basically rips images from the game and lets you move them around yourself. It's the successor/competitor to Bannedstory, whose image creation was explicitly allowed by Maplestory proper, so I guess the cannon is fair usage??? Anyway there's credit where it's due. It's not like Maplestory would sue over this one free ship mod. I hope.

The Stormcannon firing sound comes from the SoundDogs website.

Of course, credit must be given to kartoFlane for Superluminal 2, and subset games for FTL.

Changelog:

v1.0: Initial forum upload.
Last edited by NarnKar on Tue Mar 03, 2015 6:37 pm, edited 2 times in total.
stargateprovider
Posts: 229
Joined: Thu Oct 03, 2013 1:21 pm

Re: [SHIP] Lux Tempestas

Postby stargateprovider » Mon Nov 10, 2014 1:00 pm

I like it.
The only little bug is with the beam that sometimes gets left behind on the screen when I jump to the next beacon quickly after I use it, because the beam is quite long and slow (it looks quite funny there) and I can still hear the beam sound afterwards.
Some of my FTL mods you may like, or hate, or... yeah:
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NarnKar
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Re: [SHIP] Lux Tempestas

Postby NarnKar » Tue Mar 03, 2015 5:29 pm

Oh hey, Vanguard of Valor stream!

To be honest: when I saw this was the mod he was playing, I felt a little embarrassed, actually. I'm not too proud of it--it was always just meant to be an art showcase more than anything, and I feel like it doesn't actually play very well. The intent was some mix of Zoltan A + B (the power, long charge time, and leto missiles of A, and the weakened shields of B)--well, the real intent was just to show off some art, but. Anyway.

The shields issue has been noted, and I'll fix that one up. I'm also considering bumping up the shields to level 2/one shield bubble, so that there's more scrap to spend on actual supplementary weapons. It's kinda like the Engi B problem, now that I think about it--if you don't get good weapons, you're screwed.

Unless, well, you swap out the Grand Cannon. But then that kinda defeats the point a little.

It's kinda funny though because the Scythe Industrial Beam from CE works quite similarly--a long, high-damaging beam that moves extremely slowly--but VoV had way more luck with that one while he was streaming The Derelict. The only difference is color and power required. Ah well, you win some, you lose some, eh?

Chances are I'm probably just going to tweak the visuals and leave the weaponry/loadout as is. There's nothing that clearly indicates this ship is unbalanced, so, bleh.

I guess I just don't feel as proud of it as I used to, because I've actually made a ship out of (mostly) custom art now, and I feel like I own this new ship, in a sense (not strict ownership of course since I did borrow the lineart)--like it legitimately belongs to me as something I've put effort and love into--I feel like I own this new "art showcase" ship much more than I own this one.

So there's that.

Because this ship's made from community resources (albeit the resources of the Battleships Forever community), anyone's free to use this hull, or the hulls from which I spliced and recolored this ship. These have been linked in the OP.
williamcll
Posts: 14
Joined: Tue Nov 04, 2014 10:33 am

Re: [SHIP] Lux Tempestas

Postby williamcll » Tue Mar 24, 2015 1:55 am

The beam audio sometimes sounds very annoying especially when it dosen't stop after firing.

Nevertheless, this ships is absolutely beautiful and fun to play.
Celepito
Posts: 5
Joined: Thu Jan 07, 2016 5:17 pm

Re: [SHIP] Lux Tempestas

Postby Celepito » Sun Jan 10, 2016 10:03 am

I really like the designe of this ship, but when I play with it, something feels wrong. Partly because of the 4th weaponslot I think and the weakness of the cannon later (I got the game recently so that could count in). Thats why I would like a version with only 3 weaponslots but a 4 (or 5) dmg cannon (leaning towards 4 dmg). I would do that by myself BUT ... I don´t have a any idea how to do so. So I will ask for help here: Can someone make a version for me? Or tell me how to do that?
meklozz
Posts: 350
Joined: Wed Sep 23, 2015 9:11 am

Re: [SHIP] Lux Tempestas

Postby meklozz » Mon Jan 11, 2016 4:42 pm

Celepito wrote:I really like the designe of this ship, but when I play with it, something feels wrong. Partly because of the 4th weaponslot I think and the weakness of the cannon later (I got the game recently so that could count in). Thats why I would like a version with only 3 weaponslots but a 4 (or 5) dmg cannon (leaning towards 4 dmg). I would do that by myself BUT ... I don´t have a any idea how to do so. So I will ask for help here: Can someone make a version for me? Or tell me how to do that?

If you use an archive manager to open up the .ftl file (7-zip is great, you can even edit files without unpacking the whole thing), go to a folder called data and a file named blueprints.xml.append, edit it with something like notepad.

Once in there, you can modify any values you want, they're pretty understandable. Don't go too far right away, some things don't work as well as the others, just take it slow.

After you're done editing, save the file, in 7z you can then just confirm replacing the file, but if you've unpacked you need to repack to .zip with the same file structure inside, so you want to have data, img etc. folders right inside the archive (also rename zip to ftl).
Celepito
Posts: 5
Joined: Thu Jan 07, 2016 5:17 pm

Re: [SHIP] Lux Tempestas

Postby Celepito » Tue Jan 12, 2016 1:50 pm

meklozz wrote:
Celepito wrote:I really like the designe of this ship, but when I play with it, something feels wrong. Partly because of the 4th weaponslot I think and the weakness of the cannon later (I got the game recently so that could count in). Thats why I would like a version with only 3 weaponslots but a 4 (or 5) dmg cannon (leaning towards 4 dmg). I would do that by myself BUT ... I don´t have a any idea how to do so. So I will ask for help here: Can someone make a version for me? Or tell me how to do that?

If you use an archive manager to open up the .ftl file (7-zip is great, you can even edit files without unpacking the whole thing), go to a folder called data and a file named blueprints.xml.append, edit it with something like notepad.

Once in there, you can modify any values you want, they're pretty understandable. Don't go too far right away, some things don't work as well as the others, just take it slow.

After you're done editing, save the file, in 7z you can then just confirm replacing the file, but if you've unpacked you need to repack to .zip with the same file structure inside, so you want to have data, img etc. folders right inside the archive (also rename zip to ftl).

Thanks, works wonderful.
sleepz8
Posts: 73
Joined: Thu Feb 04, 2016 11:25 am

Re: [SHIP] Lux Tempestas

Postby sleepz8 » Fri Feb 05, 2016 8:54 am

Just thought I'd drop by and say, THIS SHIP IS AWESOME!!! It looks great and is a lot of fun, nice work!!