FTL Captain's Edition 1.308/Inf 1.301b/EL 1.308

[Pigbear]

Is EL supposed to take over 5 minutes to install? It's been sitting there a while.

[R4V3-0N]

Is EL supposed to take over 5 minutes to install? It's been sitting there a while.

I personally never installed it, but when I installed CE recently- as well as looking at everything EL does- I can assume EL is VERY big.

[Pigbear]

I did forget the mention the command line for SMM is saying that the java ran out of heap memory, I think that's an issue.

[R4V3-0N]

Just before I start making the gibs all out- Do these set of rebel ships tickle your fancy sleeper?




I added extra gradients to the Vintage rebels as due to there simplistic-ish geometry and shading it was very bland without the gradients. Normally I do not do gradients because I often over do it however with these simple wide hulls I think they turned out pretty well.

[Estel]

I wholehearthly agree that "vintage" rebels were lacking deepth and looked quite bland, compared to other, awesome CE's ships. I always shaked my head when encountering vintages - even after some work on them, they still looked like ripped from "other story".

The added gradient seems to fix 90% of the "alien look" problem. I hope that non-pirate ones can get "gradiented", too.

/Estel

[R4V3-0N]

I wholehearthly agree that "vintage" rebels were lacking deepth and looked quite bland, compared to other, awesome CE's ships. I always shaked my head when encountering vintages - even after some work on them, they still looked like ripped from "other story".

The added gradient seems to fix 90% of the "alien look" problem. I hope that non-pirate ones can get "gradiented", too.

/Estel

This is the first time I added gradients and someone asks me to add more gradients instead of simply remove the ones I just did xD

I may do that to the non-pirate ones. However the problem here is that I kinda do not want to edit all the gibs again as not only is it tedious but also pointless in my mind as the thing is no one would notice it- as well as most of the destroying part of the enemy is covered by explosions and the moving makes it hard to notice as well.

Yea- the vintage rebel ships 'look' bad because it is like the kestrel- made very early in a time that the game was going for more and more simplistic view, then the more and more new ships made the older ones look bad (ie slugs and kestrel is the oldest vanilla ships, compare them to the Federation cruiser, engi ships, rock, crystal, etc... and then the newer guys- the rebels... and even more newer- the lanius)
So they updated them.


Justin Ma (the dev and artist) does lurk on the modding page for the forum as well as use some mods (ie CE) so when he checked back and found out we put his early works back in with CE he probably false palmed with embarrassment and wondering how the hell did I even get it back in game xD

[Sleeper Service]

Ha, so once upon a time I learned that the gradient tool is evil. The examples there don't really fit our problem at hand here, but the thing is that the old Rebel ships look flat for shading reasons and because it uses a very limited palette. I don't think gradient really fixes that.

If you compare the new and old rigger you'll see that the new one has much more different shades on the wing sections. Also the "top" of the wings don't have the same shading on both sides, the left one is slightly shaded and the right one is as bright as the rest of the ship. In the mid section there are also much more shadows that the ships protruding parts drop on the ship body. In generall, the old riggers use a smaller color palette, basically just three shades instead of the about five (?) that the new rigger uses. Ultimately its that stuff that makes the new rigger look more plastic, all of this is missing on the old rigger, but adding it would make the ship look as plastic as the rest of FTL stuff, without falling back on gradient shading, something that FTL art does only very selectively.

That said I understand that adding more shades and more shading detailed would be a lot of work, so I'll still take the shaded variant, given that the gibs match.

The idea for more disconnected Slug ship layouts sounds good. As far as I can tell since AE crew is spawned at the systems they man, so it would be possible to spread crew across multiple ship sections. That would makes individual crew more vulnerable, but the whole ship better protected against boarding, which might indeed be an interesting challenge.

[Krazyguy75]

...gradient tool is evil...

Can confirm, I saw a post about using gradients, and my reaction was "Eh... it worked OK here, but it doesn't really make me happy."

I think that, if you want to improve the rebel ships, rather than using gradients, add more complexity to the ships themselves, like additional decals and small pieces of equipment to break up the large flat surfaces into more complex shapes. Even adding dividing lines would help in some ways.

[Pigbear]

After letting EL sit on SMM for half an hour it still hasn't installed, here's my SMM output if it's any help.

Code: Select all

INFO  FTLModManager - Using FTL dats path from config: C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\FTL Faster Than Light\resources
ERROR JacksonAutoUpdateReader - com.fasterxml.jackson.core.JsonParseException: Unexpected character ('"' (code 34)): was expecting comma to separate ARRAY entries
 at [Source: .\backup\auto_update.json; line: 19, column: 8]
INFO  ModsScanThread - Background hashing finished.
INFO  ModsScanThread - Background metadata caching finished.
INFO  ManagerFrame -
INFO  ManagerFrame - Patching...
INFO  ManagerFrame -
INFO  ModPatchThread - Restoring vanilla "data.dat"...
INFO  ModPatchThread - Restoring vanilla "resource.dat"...
INFO  ModPatchThread -
INFO  ModPatchThread - Installing mod: Better Planets and Backgrounds_v1.3.1.ftl
INFO  ModPatchThread -
INFO  ModPatchThread - Installing mod: better_asteroids.ftl
INFO  ModPatchThread -
INFO  ModPatchThread - Installing mod: CE Resource Pack 1.27.ftl
WARN  ModPatchThread - Clobbering earlier mods: img/main_menus/main_base2.png
INFO  ModPatchThread -
INFO  ModPatchThread - Installing mod: FTL Captains Edition 1.279.ftl
INFO  ModPatchThread -
INFO  ModPatchThread - Installing mod: CE BPaB Compatibility Patch 1.0.ftl
INFO  ModPatchThread -
INFO  ModPatchThread - Installing mod: CE Additional Music Addon 1.266.ftl
WARN  ModPatchThread - Clobbering earlier mods: data/.dropbox
INFO  ModPatchThread -
INFO  ModPatchThread - Installing mod: CE Infinite Addon 1.267.ftl
WARN  ModPatchThread - Clobbering earlier mods: data/blueprints.xml.append~
WARN  ModPatchThread - Clobbering earlier mods: data/sector_data.xml.append~
WARN  ModPatchThread - Clobbering earlier mods: data/events_nebula.xml.append~
INFO  ModPatchThread -
INFO  ModPatchThread - Installing mod: CE Additional Music Infinite Compatibility Patch 1.0.ftl
WARN  ModPatchThread - Clobbering earlier mods: data/sector_data.xml.append~
WARN  ModPatchThread - Clobbering earlier mods: data/sounds.xml.append~
WARN  ModPatchThread - Clobbering earlier mods: data/.dropbox
WARN  ModPatchThread - Clobbering earlier mods: data/animations.xml.append~
WARN  ModPatchThread - Clobbering earlier mods: data/events_nebula.xml.append~
WARN  ModPatchThread - Clobbering earlier mods: data/blueprints.xml.append~
INFO  ModPatchThread -
INFO  ModPatchThread - Installing mod: EL Texture Pack 1.27.ftl
WARN  ModPatchThread - Clobbering earlier mods: img/weapons/ba_effector_impact_1_strip9.png
INFO  ModPatchThread -
INFO  ModPatchThread - Installing mod: CE Endless Loot Addon for CE Infinite 1.275.ftl
Exception in thread "Thread-6" java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: Java heap space
        at java.util.Arrays.copyOf(Unknown Source)
        at java.lang.AbstractStringBuilder.expandCapacity(Unknown Source)
        at java.lang.AbstractStringBuilder.ensureCapacityInternal(Unknown Source)
        at java.lang.AbstractStringBuilder.append(Unknown Source)
        at java.lang.StringBuffer.append(Unknown Source)
        at java.io.StringWriter.write(Unknown Source)
        at org.jdom2.output.support.AbstractXMLOutputProcessor.write(AbstractXMLOutputProcessor.java:342)
        at org.jdom2.output.support.AbstractXMLOutputProcessor.textRaw(AbstractXMLOutputProcessor.java:419)
        at org.jdom2.output.support.AbstractXMLOutputProcessor.printContent(AbstractXMLOutputProcessor.java:932)
        at net.vhati.modmanager.core.SloppyXMLOutputProcessor.printElement(SloppyXMLOutputProcessor.java:113)
        at org.jdom2.output.support.AbstractXMLOutputProcessor.printContent(AbstractXMLOutputProcessor.java:946)
        at net.vhati.modmanager.core.SloppyXMLOutputProcessor.printElement(SloppyXMLOutputProcessor.java:113)
        at org.jdom2.output.support.AbstractXMLOutputProcessor.printContent(AbstractXMLOutputProcessor.java:946)
        at net.vhati.modmanager.core.SloppyXMLOutputProcessor.printElement(SloppyXMLOutputProcessor.java:113)
        at org.jdom2.output.support.AbstractXMLOutputProcessor.printDocument(AbstractXMLOutputProcessor.java:533)
        at org.jdom2.output.support.AbstractXMLOutputProcessor.process(AbstractXMLOutputProcessor.java:191)
        at org.jdom2.output.XMLOutputter.output(XMLOutputter.java:822)
        at net.vhati.modmanager.core.SloppyXMLOutputProcessor.sloppyPrint(SloppyXMLOutputProcessor.java:165)
        at net.vhati.modmanager.core.ModUtilities.patchXMLFile(ModUtilities.java:228)
        at net.vhati.modmanager.core.ModPatchThread.patch(ModPatchThread.java:236)
        at net.vhati.modmanager.core.ModPatchThread.run(ModPatchThread.java:88)


It's still running right now incase it does decide to change

[kartoFlane]

@Pigbear
It won't finish, SMM has run out of memory while trying to patch in the mod, so just quit it. Check out the first post in this thread for troubleshooting for memory issues with SMM.
If it doesn't help, then it might mean that your PC just doesn't have enough memory to be able to run EL.