[MOD][WIP] Starcraft Total Conversion

Discuss and distribute tools and methods for modding. Moderator - Grognak
Whale Cancer
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Re: [MOD][WIP] Starcraft Total Conversion

Postby Whale Cancer » Mon Oct 29, 2012 8:07 am

alextfish wrote:Making good progress here!

Got six ships into FTL so far, with varying degrees of completeness: the Medivac, Science Vessel, Raven, Carrier, Mutalisk, and Brood Lord. All of them are playable, and have the full ship background graphic, and renamed augments, crew, drones, and (where appropriate) weapons.

See some screenshots here:

http://imgur.com/a/2us82#0

Image

Work will continue!

Would still love it if anyone can tell me how to get the Arbiter, Devourer and air Queen from SC1 into the SC2 Map Editor.

Would also love it if anyone can tell me why sometimes putting a crewmember in a room still doesn't make them operate it. It seems to happen with engine rooms that are size 2 (not size 1 or 4), and with weapons rooms very frequently.


Why are you putting both ships in the minimage? This will screw up the high score screen and the like.

Edit: Also why the white background? Why no pink glow? The glow is easy to replicate in photoshop.
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hellcatv
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Re: [MOD][WIP] Starcraft Total Conversion

Postby hellcatv » Mon Oct 29, 2012 8:27 am

What about changing the skin of the drones drones into the various fighter units (carrier interceptor, wraith, viking, broodling)
much like I did with the Imperial Star Destroyer mod or the BSG mod

viewtopic.php?f=11&t=3733

viewtopic.php?f=11&t=3736
alextfish
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Re: [MOD][WIP] Starcraft Total Conversion

Postby alextfish » Mon Oct 29, 2012 9:13 am

Whale Cancer wrote:Why are you putting both ships in the minimage? This will screw up the high score screen and the like.

Edit: Also why the white background? Why no pink glow? The glow is easy to replicate in photoshop.
The miniship images are a pull between two factors. On the one hand there's the high score screen (not sure what other "the like") there is, but on the other hand there's the factor of being able to find the ship you want to play. The Type Bs don't have much correspondence with the Type As in all cases, and I certainly don't want people to have to refer to some document like this thread, or laboriously click through each ship trying the Type Bs looking for the Raven or whatever. So at the moment I'm just using the "Select your ship" screen as the index of all 18, which does unfortunately mean the ship highscore screen looks slightly odd.

I don't have Photoshop, although I can usually replicate most effects in GIMP. I'm definitely focusing on gameplay rather than graphical tweaking for the moment; once I've got all 18 ships in I might well have another go at the miniship images giving them the glow effect.

hellcatv wrote:What about changing the skin of the drones drones into the various fighter units (carrier interceptor, wraith, viking, broodling)
I'm probably planning to skin the drones, yeah. But I'd planned on having Wraith and Viking as two of the actual ships you pilot, so I'd rather not use them as drones too! The attack drones will turn into Auto-Turrets from the Raven and Interceptors from the Carrier (I've duplicated the DRONE_COMBAT_1 so I can have two names for it). The one I most want to skin is the MULE which serves to repair all of the Terran ships, but when I do that I'm pretty much opening myself up to have to do all of them.

"Broodling" is the name I'm giving to boarding drones, as fired by the Brood Lord: http://i.imgur.com/3gltH.png (and the airQueen if I can ever get an image of her). But I'm currently thinking of giving the Overseer the beam drone named Changeling as a way to pierce Zoltan shields; it'll be interesting finding a sensible image of that one!
Many years ago I created the FTL Starcraft mod: 18 new challenging ships to fly through the FTL universe!, and wrote a tutorial on creating your own FTL ships. They haven't been updated for AE though.
Whale Cancer
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Re: [MOD][WIP] Starcraft Total Conversion

Postby Whale Cancer » Mon Oct 29, 2012 9:27 pm

alextfish wrote:Would still love it if anyone can tell me how to get the Arbiter, Devourer and air Queen from SC1 into the SC2 Map Editor.


There are no Blizzard made models of these units in SC2 style.
Contribute to help save the Whales from their various diseases! *DELAYED* Should release the skeleton with the main quests attached by the end of the week (By NOV 9)! *DELAYED* Don't listen to my dates! Things always seem to come up!
alextfish
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Re: [MOD][WIP] Starcraft Total Conversion

Postby alextfish » Wed Oct 31, 2012 11:11 am

That's true, but there are some pretty good-looking fanmade models, particularly in the SC2BW mod. (E.g. this Devourer, this Queen and this Arbiter would be good enough for me). I've downloaded the assets from that mod, but I've not been able to get them into my SC2 Map Editor. I'll have another go later.
(EDIT: Yep, successfully managed to get the Queen and Arbiter. They're not as good as Blizzard's models, but they'll do. Can't get the Devourer - it's coming out looking like a Corruptor for some strange reason - but I might just abandon that, as it was going to be pretty similar to the Corruptor. I'll use the Protoss Scout or Corsair instead.)

Progress on this mod is going well: I've got 15 of the 18 ships designed, and have given most of them at least an initial playtest. Balancing the weapons and augments out between the ships is going nicely, although I've had to add duplicates of a couple of ion weapons to be able to give them appropriately Zergy/Protossy names.

The Zerg, Terran and Protoss all have a very different playstyle: the Protoss are easiest due to the shields but each ship plays differently (e.g. Void Ray's Prismatic Beam is devastating but does take a long time to charge; Carrier you can't tell to target down specific systems). Terran have a bunch of fun abilities and the SCVs+MULEs let them recover quickly from damage. Zerg are definitely hardest; the parasitic healing arm is useful but they do still tend to fall apart, but I'm trying to give each one a benefit to make up for it. Mutalisk plays very well with the Weapon Pre-Igniter and three basic lasers as the triple-impact Glaive Wurm.

The main effort remaining is the fiddly alignment of weapon mount points and determining offsets of the image vs the layout. (If only FTLShipEdit did those, this would be much easier.) Plus whatever event tweaking I choose to do, of course, but that's a different and very deep pit I'm not leaping into just yet.
Many years ago I created the FTL Starcraft mod: 18 new challenging ships to fly through the FTL universe!, and wrote a tutorial on creating your own FTL ships. They haven't been updated for AE though.
alextfish
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Re: [MOD][WIP] Starcraft Total Conversion

Postby alextfish » Fri Nov 02, 2012 5:52 pm

Still coming along nicely. Got all the engine rooms actually crewable, after a bunch of fiddling with XML. Still need to align images and sort out mount points. Doing a bunch of playtesting and balance tweaking (Phoenix was way too good; Overlord was way too bad).

Have a screenshot: Image
Many years ago I created the FTL Starcraft mod: 18 new challenging ships to fly through the FTL universe!, and wrote a tutorial on creating your own FTL ships. They haven't been updated for AE though.
Whale Cancer
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Re: [MOD][WIP] Starcraft Total Conversion

Postby Whale Cancer » Tue Nov 06, 2012 9:03 pm

You haven't released a teaser or anything for this, right?

I'm curious as to how you are doing things like the mutalisk (as I stated upthread, I think that many of the zerg ships should have been enemy only AI controlled ships as them having a 'crew' is bizarre).
Contribute to help save the Whales from their various diseases! *DELAYED* Should release the skeleton with the main quests attached by the end of the week (By NOV 9)! *DELAYED* Don't listen to my dates! Things always seem to come up!
alextfish
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Re: [MOD][WIP] Starcraft Total Conversion

Postby alextfish » Wed Nov 07, 2012 1:04 pm

The only thing I released was a very early no-graphics mod of the Kestrel into a Medivac. I should probably issue a beta release soon though. I'll aim to have that out this weekend, I think.

You're right, it is odd for the Zerg ships to have "crew". (Apart from the Overlord, the troop transporter.) I'm thinking of making one of the taglines be something like "Have you ever wanted to peer inside a Mutalisk? ...Nor have I, but now you can do that anyway.") My early experiments with crewless ships indicate it's mainly a big drawback though, and Zerg ships are already penalised by getting neither shields nor MULEs. Parasitic Healing (Repair Arm) is pretty helpful, but it doesn't really make up for it. So I decided the idea of a Corruptor or Mutalisk being "crewed" is an oddity you'll just have to put up with to play the mod.

My approach to making the Zerg ships workable so far is:
* Mutalisk gets Weapon Pre-Igniter, which is a lot of fun, and not as OP as you might think on a shieldless ship
* Overlord gets a load of zerglings (Mantis) and a gigantic teleporter
* Brood Lord gets 2 Broodlings (boarding drones) plus a lot of bombs
* Queen seems to do OK with one Broodling and Ensnare (ion bomb) and a small teleporter with one zergling
* Corruptor I'm least happy with, but it can often survive with its strong weapons

I've completed the game with Queen and Brood Lord, so they at least seem OK.

I've been really wanting to alter the crew sprites on the crew display to be SCVs, zerglings, high templar etc. (Crystal as Sentries with Lockdown as Force Field is too delightful.) Sadly it turns out you can only do that if you completely replace all the animations. I've extracted a few animations of the 7 units from the SC2 editor, but I'm no spriter so I find it unlikely I'll manage to make decent animations for operating a computer, repairing, hand-to-hand fighting etc, for each of the 7 units. It's annoying that it's all-or-nothing, but it basically is. So I fear we'll have to have SCVs that look like Engi and so on. It's still fun to play as a mod basically consisting of 18 new ships, so that's the angle I'll promote it as.
Many years ago I created the FTL Starcraft mod: 18 new challenging ships to fly through the FTL universe!, and wrote a tutorial on creating your own FTL ships. They haven't been updated for AE though.
Whale Cancer
Posts: 272
Joined: Fri Sep 21, 2012 3:28 pm

Re: [MOD][WIP] Starcraft Total Conversion

Postby Whale Cancer » Wed Nov 07, 2012 6:54 pm

alextfish wrote:The only thing I released was a very early no-graphics mod of the Kestrel into a Medivac. I should probably issue a beta release soon though. I'll aim to have that out this weekend, I think.

You're right, it is odd for the Zerg ships to have "crew". (Apart from the Overlord, the troop transporter.) I'm thinking of making one of the taglines be something like "Have you ever wanted to peer inside a Mutalisk? ...Nor have I, but now you can do that anyway.") My early experiments with crewless ships indicate it's mainly a big drawback though, and Zerg ships are already penalised by getting neither shields nor MULEs. Parasitic Healing (Repair Arm) is pretty helpful, but it doesn't really make up for it. So I decided the idea of a Corruptor or Mutalisk being "crewed" is an oddity you'll just have to put up with to play the mod.

My approach to making the Zerg ships workable so far is:
* Mutalisk gets Weapon Pre-Igniter, which is a lot of fun, and not as OP as you might think on a shieldless ship
* Overlord gets a load of zerglings (Mantis) and a gigantic teleporter
* Brood Lord gets 2 Broodlings (boarding drones) plus a lot of bombs
* Queen seems to do OK with one Broodling and Ensnare (ion bomb) and a small teleporter with one zergling
* Corruptor I'm least happy with, but it can often survive with its strong weapons

I've completed the game with Queen and Brood Lord, so they at least seem OK.

I've been really wanting to alter the crew sprites on the crew display to be SCVs, zerglings, high templar etc. (Crystal as Sentries with Lockdown as Force Field is too delightful.) Sadly it turns out you can only do that if you completely replace all the animations. I've extracted a few animations of the 7 units from the SC2 editor, but I'm no spriter so I find it unlikely I'll manage to make decent animations for operating a computer, repairing, hand-to-hand fighting etc, for each of the 7 units. It's annoying that it's all-or-nothing, but it basically is. So I fear we'll have to have SCVs that look like Engi and so on. It's still fun to play as a mod basically consisting of 18 new ships, so that's the angle I'll promote it as.


Why aren't you using the campaign only Leviathan? The giant zerg mutalisk carrier? I think that makes a lot of sense for a 'mannable' Zerg ship.

Also, if I recall correctly, races have their animation sheets defined in an .xml file. So, in theory, you could write a simpler format for animations to make the spriting part easier. Another option is to unpack SC1 graphics and use those sprites for the crew; I think that would be easier than converting the SC2 models into animated sprites (you would have to sort of settle for certain idle or special ability animations for computer use, however).
Contribute to help save the Whales from their various diseases! *DELAYED* Should release the skeleton with the main quests attached by the end of the week (By NOV 9)! *DELAYED* Don't listen to my dates! Things always seem to come up!
shark
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Re: [MOD][WIP] Starcraft Total Conversion

Postby shark » Thu Nov 08, 2012 10:41 am

Can you share battlecruiser? i just need the gfx please. even better if it comes with _gibN.pngs
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