Calling all modders

[boa13]

well, aren't even wooden ships held together by metal bolts? but yea a hammer is a good idea

Old ships like these were actually held together with large nails.

Such nails could actually be made from wood by the way. Metal was expensive and subject to rusting.

[DryEagle]

I wanted to stay away from bringing magicalness/mysticalness into it - while it is certainly an easier cop-out which would answer some of the issues as you described, I'm confident that we'll have enough people to not need to take such shortcuts.

That, and I don't want these ships to have shields. There's enough shielded ships already, and it's time for something different. And yes, I know there have been mods with unshielded ships and such. But you have to remember, they were balanced around the current game, rather than a whole total conversion which changes all weapons etc for it to make sense. So, this will be completely different.

There will however be zoltan shield available - "dry ice: creates a thick fog around your ship; it will take the enemy several shots to pin down your precise location before they can hit you" (with appropriate graphics, naturally)

For the submersibles, think of something along the lines of this:


but made out of wood etc. Yes I do realise it's kinda steampunky but at the same time, historically there are wooden submarine designs going back to the 1200's so it's not really as crazy as it seems.

[Starship Nexus]

That is very , very cool and i would like to maybe do some of the story and dialogues. So if you need any help shoot me a msg.

[Alvarin]

I've just started drawing and got stuck already... I've wasted ~3 hours on the front still of Mantis replacement. There are just not enough pixels to draw recognizable cutlass... Will try something else. I like the officer and the Rock so far.
Got a question - the green border around the crew is "friend", red is "foe". What is the yellow for? And the highlight on Zoltans?

EDIT - I don't know what the [Fuel] was supposed to become, but I think fresh water and/or rations can be a good replacement.

[DryEagle]

Pretty sure yellow = unselected crew, green = selected crew, red = enemy crew.
Yes, rations sounds sensible as a replacement for fuel.

[Alvarin]

I've had another idea, don't know how well it would be received...
How about turning the entire view 90 degrees? Meaning side view, as opposed to top view in FTL currently. Will make redrawing crew recognizable Still stuck on fighter...

Another idea is changing the not-so-reasonable vacuum influence with fludding. The fludding will also put out fires and suffocate crew by drowning. Breaches are valid.

[DryEagle]

Yes, flooding will certainly be the way to go. Funny thing is, if you think about it... putting lots of water in the ship is the same as putting lots of vacuum in the ship, in terms of it running out of oxygen, so we don't have to worry about that bit of the UI initially :)

I had considered a side-on view, as this would certainly be better, but there were a few issues:
1) all of the extra animation work compared to just recolouring and adding a little detail to the current models,
2) vertical movement. Since systemless rooms can't have room graphics, you can't just put in ladders and stuff, which would mean it wouldn't look very nice, or alternatively would limit your ship design quite a bit.
3) drones movement...
4) the way the guns are done, in terms of projectile angles etc, it wouldn't really make sense for side-on if you're being suddenly shot from below...
5) enemy ships shoot up, not to the side, meaning they'd either have to have a rotated side-on view, which would mean the crew sprites would be wrong by 90 degrees, or they'd have to be shooting their guns vertically, which wouldn't make sense since they're still using the same guns as the regular players in most cases.

[Alvarin]

Yes, flooding will certainly be the way to go. Funny thing is, if you think about it... putting lots of water in the ship is the same as putting lots of vacuum in the ship, in terms of it running out of oxygen, so we don't have to worry about that bit of the UI initially

I had considered a side-on view, as this would certainly be better, but there were a few issues:
1) all of the extra animation work compared to just recolouring and adding a little detail to the current models,
2) vertical movement. Since systemless rooms can't have room graphics, you can't just put in ladders and stuff, which would mean it wouldn't look very nice, or alternatively would limit your ship design quite a bit.
3) drones movement...
4) the way the guns are done, in terms of projectile angles etc, it wouldn't really make sense for side-on if you're being suddenly shot from below...
5) enemy ships shoot up, not to the side, meaning they'd either have to have a rotated side-on view, which would mean the crew sprites would be wrong by 90 degrees, or they'd have to be shooting their guns vertically, which wouldn't make sense since they're still using the same guns as the regular players in most cases.

1) - No recoloring, it needs to be done from scratch anyways, that was my reason for the turning.
2) - Layers of thin halls with the doors being trapdoors.
3) - I don't see any problem with the drones...
4) - It's not really from below - just like current isn't exactly top view, but slightly isometric, so would be the "side view", making the shot direction possible (same as drones movement)
5) - Is the shooting hardcoded to "up"? If not, shooting "down" will be perfect.

Anyhow, just an idea. I just am really struggling with the re-design of the crew - just way too few pixels to add any detail... Think about it - the legs are just two pixels long currently, so if I want to curve the cutlass, even by single pixel, it looks to be curved the whole 80cm, which is just wrong...

[ThePieman]

I have some weapon ideas:
Cannon-Basic weapon. 1 power, 1 shot. 1 system damage, high chance of breach.
Dual Cannons-Same as cannon, except double the charge time, power and 2 shots instead of 1.
Heavy Cannon-2 power, 1 hull damage, high chance of breach.
Pellet Cannon- 2 power, 1 system damage and 80 crew damage.

[DryEagle]

Avalrin-

For the drones, I meant that since they'd be moving all around the ship, they'd be going below the waterline... for a flier type thing, that would just be bizarre...
direction of fire, if shots come from down below, then that doesn't make any sense whatsoever if it was a cannon shot or harpoon etc, since they wouldn't dip that low. I mean it just wouldn't correspond to where the shot was coming from at all.
enemy ship fire direction is hardcoded and cannot be changed. so yea, that too.

As for the sprites - if carried items don't work, how about just focus on different colours of clothing, and perhaps different hats or backpacks? if it's possible to make different clothing obvious (e.g. tell the difference between a captain's suit and a simple shirt) the captain would have a big hat, the boarder would have something like a bandana, etc. would this be doable with the sizes that are there? if not, initially we'll just have different recolours of the current sprites I guess, until we can come up with something better. I know there was a mass effect mod with different races for the crew sprites, so it's worth you taking a look at that if you haven't seen it yet, maybe there's some ideas there.


Pieman -

As I said, the weapons here will be quite substantially different. We're basically going to have the split of 2 categories being "cannons" (lasers) and "bolts" (missiles) - bolts will include things like harpoons, which cause breaches, and incindary bolts which cause fires, etc. Basically one is for direct damage and the other is for special effects.

The cannons themselves will come in batteries, so we're going to have 3-5 shots per weapon group - so if you get a few of these going, you're looking at salvoes of 10-15 projectiles at a time. This is why we're going to have ships with different amounts of HP or defensive systems, and different prices for repairs etc. The charge times will be quite long however. Dodge will matter. Crew location for repairs will matter. I'd like to get perhaps 10 different weapons in the initial release; it's not nearly as many as the vanilla game, but with all the other changes, it should be sufficient to give enough options to make things interesting.