Subset Games Forum

edit: sorry for the bad image formatting, I can't figure out a way around it. To see the proper images, just right click the image, go to properties, and copy the address into your address bar.

Hello everyone, new to the forum, and new to the game, I just got it last week.

First of all, awesome game, it's super fun.

Second, thanks to DarkFrost for his FTLEdit ship editor, and thanks to alextfish for his guide "Creating Player Ships with FTLEdit"

Without further ado, I present to you my 2nd custom-made ship for the game (the first was just a test to learn how to do it)



The Cobra Class Destroyer is a ship from the Warhammer 40k Universe. It is known as the smallest independent Imperial ship (ie it can patrol alone, and is not a fighter or bomber based on another ship).

More info: http://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Cobra_Destroyer

Due to difficulty in finding an overhead image of the ship of suitable quality, I decided to try something different and make the ship from a side view. Sure, the crew and rooms are all top view, but I actually think it looks pretty good.

The Cobra is armed with a dorsal weapons battery (a Burst Laser Mk II in the game) and prow-mounted torpedoes (2 Hull Missiles in the game). Note that the crew are not to-scale with the ship, as the ship is approximately 1.5km long (yeah, 40k ships are big). I like to think that instead of individual characters, each crew member represents a team of people, so the pilot is not just one pilot, it is the entire command staff on the bridge of the ship, and the weapons guy is not one guy, it is a large number of gun crew, the ratings that load the weapons, the engineers that serve them, etc.

The ship is fully functional in the game, with working rooms, weapon mounts, shield image, cloaked image, ship list icon, etc. The only reason why I do not consider it 100% done is that the base image still needs work (I need to remove those white spots left over from when I removed the background), and it needs to be balanced properly. The balancing, however, is not an urgent issue for me, since the eventual goal is to replace all the ships in the game with Warhammer 40k/Battlefleet Gothic ships, so balance will need to be dealt with later. I suppose the extra-long-term-way-beyond-my-ability goals are to completely overhaul the game, replacing everything with new 40k-based events and text, maybe replacing the room images with side-view 40k ship interiors, replacing the crew sprites (yeah, insanely hard)

Here are more pics:

The ship list icon:


The ship base image in the hangar:


The ship rooms seen in the hangar:


The ship with all room upgrades:


The ship with cloaking activated:



and finally, the download. It is GMM compatible, and it replaces the Rock Cruiser A in the game. Just drop it in the mods folder, activate with GMM, and you're good to go. Go purge the stars in the name of the Emperor!
https://www.dropbox.com/s/9j5o6cq8sxm6x ... word.ftl?m

Hi and welcome to the forum.

A newcomer to the forum but that is an excellent first effort (well ok, second). I guess the help provided by the community paid off. It's also nice to see some W40K ships. And the cloaking looks so damn nice!

You have an ambitious project on your hands and i wish you good luck with it.

EDIT - you can upload images as attachments and place them inside posts, but the result is not much better. Rightclicking is the best way to view images, unless you feel like uploading small thumbnail links to full screen images.

UltraMantis wrote:Hi and welcome to the forum.

A newcomer to the forum but that is an excellent first effort (well ok, second). I guess the help provided by the community paid off. It's also nice to see some W40K ships. And the cloaking looks so damn nice!

You have an ambitious project on your hands and i wish you good luck with it.

EDIT - you can upload images as attachments and place them inside posts, but the result is not much better. Rightclicking is the best way to view images, unless you feel like uploading small thumbnail links to full screen images.

thanks!

Yeah I just followed the guide by alextfish on how to make the cloak image. It looks pretty good for very minimal effort or skill.

I don't want to get anyone's hopes up for some vast WH40k mod, but I'll see where it goes. I'll just keep making ships whenever I get the chance.

oh and a note on the balancing: I use the Infinite Space mod, and I actually haven't tried the ship yet with the regular game. It has a 4-slot medbay, 4-slot teleporter, and it starts with decent weapons. It might be a bit overpowered, but again, like I said, I'm not necessarily trying to make it balanced for the regular game.

Harnisfechten wrote: It has a 4-slot medbay, 4-slot teleporter,

You mean, 4 slot apothecary, and 4 slot teleportarium

Welcome! This does indeed look like an excellent effort. I don't know WH40K myself, but this looks great. The side view does give you a more idiosyncratic ship layout, and the idea that the horizontal doors are actually elevators between decks is kinda a cool way to reinterpret the game

Harnisfechten wrote:Yeah I just followed the guide by alextfish on how to make the cloak image. It looks pretty good for very minimal effort or skill.

I'm very glad it was useful! It's awesome to see people making high-quality mods, and I think having a custom cloak image definitely helps towards that. In fact, seeing how cool this post looks with a cloak image included has made me think I ought to edit my Starcraft mod's front page to include a cloak image or two

The one big thing I'd say you still need to fix is all the white pixels around the edge. It's tricky to properly delete backgrounds; it's possible some trick with feathering and the magic-wand selection tool could do something, but in the end what I had to do for my Starcraft mod was just laboriously scroll around the edge erasing a bunch of single pixels till it looked right.

thanks!

and yeah I will probably need to erase it pixel by pixel in Gimp. I keep putting it off >.> but I'll get it done eventually haha

edit: and I need to add engine glow. And make the ship list image match the other ones better.

Harnisfechten wrote:thanks!

and yeah I will probably need to erase it pixel by pixel in Gimp. I keep putting it off >.> but I'll get it done eventually haha

edit: and I need to add engine glow. And make the ship list image match the other ones better.

You could paint-bucket white around the ship and delete the white again, with a magic wand with a far higher tolerance to completely remove the white.

This is an awesome idea, one that I thought of briefly right before looking at the Mods Thread. Imagine my excitement when I see someone has already started this!

Now, being unsure of how serious about this you are...
May I suggest actually getting a hold of some BFG models and high res photographing them from a top view, and then making the ftl base from scratch? I know it seems like a lot of work, but I feel like most of the pieces are already in place in the recourse folder. Just a bit of custom work cutting them up, recoloring, and saving as new images.

If you want help with this I would love to get involved, as I am a big Fan of BFG and FTL.

Any thoughts on races as of yet? Text Rewrites? Enemy ship rewrites?

also there just so happen to be 9 fleets in BFG... 9 fleet types, 9 ships with two types each...

NewAgeOfPower wrote:

Harnisfechten wrote: It has a 4-slot medbay, 4-slot teleporter,

You mean, 4 slot apothecary, and 4 slot teleportarium

Haha Awesome.