[TUTORIAL] Creating Player Ships with FTLEdit

[alextfish]

Hi all. I'm happy to announce I've created a 12-step tutorial on using FTLEdit to create a playable ship. This takes you from installing FTLEdit and GMM, through creating the layout and setting the options (pretty briefly), and then through the bits that FTLEdit doesn't do for you, like setting weapon mounts, shield images, room images, making a cloak image, and brief mentions of miniships and gibs.

If there's some relevant topic that you think I've skipped over too quickly, I'm happy to enhance it as people suggest.

This emerged from someone asking me "what steps I followed from start to finish" and I realised it was getting rather too big for a single email or forum post. So I thought I'd provide it as a resource for the community. Hopefully this should help people to make some awesome ships for us to try out

View the tutorial at: http://toothycat.net/~hologram/FTL/Ship ... orial.html

[Darkfrost]

Looks awesome, good job I'll add a link to this in the post about FTLEdit

Thanks for this, hopefully this will clear up a lot of the issues people are having!

[HeavyGuyFP]

I was following this tutorial, however somewhere down the line something went wrong and I can't see what.
I followed the tutorial pretty much every step of the way, however when I mounted it into FTL using GMM, selecting the ship in the hanger causes the game to crash without an error message of any sort.
I don't know if it has any relevance, but I was trying to replace the DA SR-12, the Stealth Ship Type B.
Help would be appreciated.

[alextfish]

Sorry to hear that. I'm very familiar with the kind of syndrome you describe: I'd guess probably most modders spend a little while tearing their hair out trying to find the cause of that crash.

It unfortunately means your XML isn't quite right. It's very easy to get things fractionally wrong, and XML is a very sensitive format.

First: Carefully look through the text of your blueprints.xml.append file, in particular looking at every tag inside angle brackets <likeThis>. Every "<tag>" should either end with "/>", or end with ">" and be matched by a later "</tag>". (But not both!)
If you find any cases where this is wrong, fix them up, re-zip the mod and try repatching.

Second: Make sure that if your blueprint refers to img="myship", then your mod's img/ship/ directory contains each of:
myship_base.png (your ship image)
myship_floor.png (may be transparent)
myship_gib1.png (not actually sure if this is required)
And similarly if your blueprint refers to layout="myship", then your mod's data/ directory contains myship.txt and myship.xml.

If all of those are there, then third: Copy the entirety of your blueprints.xml.append file into a forum post here (enclosed between [code]...[/code] tags). Post it here and we'll take a look

[HeavyGuyFP]

Checked through the XML file and couldn't find any problems that you described so I haven't a clue what's happening.
Here's the .xml.append contents, I hope you can help me out here

Code: Select all

<shipBlueprint name="PLAYER_SHIP_STEALTH_2" img="alliancecruiser" layout="alliancecruiser">
     <class>Stealth Cruiser</class>
     <name>Alliance Cruiser</name>
     <desc>The Alliance Cruiser is a sturdy ship, though lacking in firepower.</desc>
     <systemList>
           <pilot power="1" room="0" start="true" img="room_pilot_3"/>
           <doors power="1" room="10" start="true" img="room_doors"/>
           <sensors power="2" room="5" start="true" img="room_sensors"/>
           <medbay power="1" room="12" start="true" img="room_medbay_4"/>
            <oxygen power="1" room="4" start="true" img="room_oxygen"/>
           <shields power="2" room="2" start="true" img="room_shields"/>
           <engines power="2" room="1" start="true" img="room_engines"/>
            <weapons power="4" room="3" start="true" img="room_weapons"/>
       <drones power="0" room="8" start="false" img="room_drones"/>
            <teleporter power="0" room="11" start="false" img="room_teleporter"/>
            <cloaking power="0" room="6" start="false" img="room_cloaking"/>
     </systemList>
     <weaponSlots>4</weaponSlots>
     <droneSlots>2</droneSlots>
     <weaponList count="2" missiles="0">
       <weapon name="LASER_BURST_2_A"/>
       <weapon name="LASER_BURST_2_A"/>
     </weaponList>
     <droneList count="0" drones="0"/>
     <aug name="ADV_SCANNERS"/>
     <health amount="30"/>
     <maxPower amount="10"/>
     <crewCount amount="3" class="human"/>
     <shieldImage>alliancecruiser</shieldImage>
        <cloakImage>stealth</cloakImage>
</shipBlueprint>

[alextfish]

That XML all looks fine. Can you tell me precisely what files you have in your mod's data/ and img/ship/ directories?

[HeavyGuyFP]

I have the base file, named alliancecruiser_base, the floor file named alliancecruiser_floor, a single gib file called alliancecruiser_gib1 (though it still stopped FTL without the gib file), and the shield file, called alliancecruiser_shields1.
The gib and floor files are both transparent.
And in the data folder there is "alliancecruiser.txt", "alliancecruiser.xml", and the blueprints.xml.append file.

[alextfish]

That all looks fine too. (Assuming all the images are PNG files, i.e. have extension .png as well as the filenames you listed.)

Tell you what. Send me the mod as an email attachment (alex dot churchill at cantab dot net) and I'll have a poke around myself.

[HeavyGuyFP]

I've sent the ftl file because I assume that's what you'll have wanted.
Here's hoping you can find what I've been incompetent at

[Skcarkden]

Hi, i'm a little confused, isn't there also a step by step on how to actuall install FTL? i got lead here by another link hoping it explained how to install but it just says install it, but then gives details on GMM.

I'm not very computer savvy and get thrown off when other instructions simply say extract to where the files are extracted to. is there any tutorial with more details to actually install FTL Edit and how to run it? :S i play this on steam, if that makes a dif :S