[WIP] [Steampunk] Lighter than air

[R4V3-0N]

You are getting better and better at the hulls, I'm impressed.

[a Sir]

You are getting better and better at the hulls, I'm impressed.

Thanks!

I finished the tesla-diesel enemy ship:

[Gencool]

The ladders work better than you might imagine, though till my net's up I guess you'll have to take my word for it.

As for the sitting thing; just testing that it works, really. I based the chair and console off the existing room decorations. They'd look right for a side-on FTL, I just don't know how the rooms will look for LTA yet ^^

Also, yeah, 100% sure on the idle anims. It's messing me up on both this /and/ crewD. Tempted to report it as a bug just so I can get everything looking beautiful

[a Sir]

The ladders work better than you might imagine, though till my net's up I guess you'll have to take my word for it.

Something else came up in my head... Are the robots/automaton going to climb ladders like humans? I imagine some of them might have arms and legs, but if they are more wheel-based, it might be a problem to roll up.

... I suddenly got a lot more busy. The next couple of weeks, I won't be able to work a lot on the mod, so I'll just start making different layouts of the player ships with reskins. Anyways, I was testing out a pirate kestrel...

[Russian Rockman]

You seem to be making some great progress on the ships. I am impressed especially since you said you've never done anything like this before. I would never be able to design something like that from scratch, not even on paper.

So not to overwhelm you, but I liked your newest ship so much that I finally stuck it in Gimp for a second to see if there were any effects it could do to make it look even better. After messing around for about 5 minutes I got the following. You could probably make it look even better if you look up how to do some of this on Gimp. Unfortunately I'm not talented at all enough to do any improvements, therefore these are just "proof of concept" pics.

I found that you can make a "wood like" texture using the Filter/Artistic/Weave filter in Gimp. I think it looks great, it actually makes the metal portions look more "metally" rather than like wood too. You can adjust the size of the patches and stuff to make the balloon look more like cloth of increase the amount of space between the lines to make it look more like wood. It could have multiple uses. (This is my first time using the effect though, I don't know much about it.)

Shadow on top is a bit weird, I could have fixed it, but again... Proof of concept only.



By using Color/Auto/Color Enhance I got the following. A brighter colored ship that looks like it was made of a different wood or painted differently.




And finally I got this using the Filter/Distort/Old Photo effect. Makes me excited.




Anyway, I hope that you can update the images using techniques like this in the future, if there is anyone out there that actually knows how to do stuff art related and Gimp or Photoshop related I'm sure they could help you make something awesome by just adding some effects to the designs you've already done.


There is also THIS MOD: http://www.ftlgame.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=24541 That adds more detailed crew portraits. It looks like I was wrong to think that the portraits use the first frame of the walk animation, so we might be able to have crew portraits for the different automatons and people which will add even more detail to the mod.

Honestly, all this graphical stuff is way harder than the .xml stuff I'm used to. Luckily everyone is excited about this mod concept, otherwise I don't think it would ever get finished.

[R4V3-0N]

Those are beautiful...

[Gencool]

The smaller ships, I forgot to say, are gorgeous.
Love the pirate re-colourings too!

Filters may pull the look away from FTL a bit, which is fine, but the size limits of the player/weapon sprites means that they're still gonna be pixel art.


I hadn't thought of automatons, honestly, but I /had/ thought of the rock/heavy/gaurd dude, who I imagined rolling up and down them like a vertical train...
Another alternative would be to have the repair drone move along rails similar to portal 2's Wheatly...


Also, with the portrait thing, I had thoughs on making them as 'downtime' sprites, so helmets removed etc.
They don't animate in the hanger, but I admit I never tried to see if they did in the crew slot of Ship...

[R4V3-0N]

rock should be some guy who's heavily armored. like very heavily armored.

It will make it look more sense. Not just because of his extra health, but a bit into it's slow speed and fire proof.

[Russian Rockman]

rock should be some guy who's heavily armored. like very heavily armored.

It will make it look more sense. Not just because of his extra health, but a bit into it's slow speed and fire proof.

Big Daddy???

[R4V3-0N]

Tada, I forgot you existed for that comment.

Soviet Slug would be pleased.