Modding Help a slime race mod

Thanks.

I was thinking about things like... how the leg part of the slime costume looks right at the base of the feet. I guess in that case, I could just use the lightest color right at the bottom, or... something. Hm.

I'll experiment a bit.

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I was thinking about the way slime or jelly looks when you look through it while it's pressed against the ground (or a dessert dish), like the way the feet are on that slime costume set.


but let's see here...

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Not every image I've looked up of slime or jelly shows that same effect. Maybe it's just an angle issue.

Just tried recoloring things a bit, and also looked at the Monster Girl Universe mod for comparison and curiosity.


When that mod was usable, the side of the slime girl race that was more of a blob below the torso looked perfectly fine, and they didn't have any amount of shading at the bottom either, so......... alright, I guess I don't need it.

And there's a new weapon, a slime whip.


Now all I need to do is figure out how to determine the effect it causes at the tip. Right now, it inflicts Poison, and that's fine, but it'd be nice to learn if it's based on more than just the "elementalType".

Also part of me wants to figure out if I can include something reminiscent of how ooze monsters in games like D&D can cause acid damage, or more specifically, how they can wear down equipment. In this game's case, it'd probably be a damage resistance debuff.

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Adjusted the whip to add transparency like all the other slimy things I'm doing right now.

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OKAY!! All 64 vanilla female hairstyles are recolored.

I've... decided to recolor the hair accessories with the lightest shades that I'm using for hair, and they'll be linked to hair color selection (as though it's all actually just part of their body, shaped to look like whatever accessory it is) until the day I figure out how to set another option to select their color. Yes, I know, default, humans can change the color of hair accessories with the underwear selection, but I'm gonna use that setting for eye color selection for the time being. 'Course the alternative is having the accessories linked to eye color, but what if someone wants green eyes and a black ribbon for example?

It'll get done someday, but I figure people can tolerate this for the time being. Also, someone needs to make a stylist NPC... though we can probably tweak our character files a little, but it's not as convenient.

 

Now I haven't made my own races, but... wouldn't the simple way to add transparency be to use an image program that supports transparency? You just reduce the opacity of the image itself. GIMP, paint.net, etc. I like paint.net myself. And partially transparent images work fine in starbound. I use them. The devs use them.

I'd make a copy of the image as a PDN, clone the layer to have a backup(and unselect the backup), then change the transparency of the layer itself. You could try out different ways. Save. Then save as PNG - it will warn you about "flattening" the image and that's fine because the .PDN won't be over-written and unselected layers won't be incorporated.

Now as for color replacements... consider using Colorbound series of mods to get these colors. I believe permission to use them for mod characters has already been granted, and that'll save time for you while providing tons of color options.

 

Actually you wouldn't believe how simple the hex code bit is, and Antyrus gave me that transparency code list, which is just two extra characters tacked onto the end, but yeah, I reduced the opacity on the slime grappling hook and whips I made, even the spike sphere I did up.

Regarding palettes, well... I don't know if setting opacity of the body sprites to 75% and then targeting the original color with "BF" tacked on the end would work out well or not. Either way, adding "BF" onto the end of each color code is doing the trick flawlessly. Less work than going back through everything.

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I'm gonna have to recolor those hair accessories. It doesn't look as good as I thought. Maybe the eyes and accessories can just share colors after all.

 

In terms of palettes, you really shouldn't use transparency in the base image unless you aren't recoloring that color(AND still want it to be transparent). All that would do is change the base hex value that is chosen to recolor from. Transparency isn't inherited. If you DO include transparency in the base image, in order to recolor it you'd have to add those extra hex values onto the base color values in addition to the recolor values.
TL;DR transparency isn't inherited, ff0000 =/= ff0000CC

Insta-edit: For everything that doesn't use a palette making the base image transparent is literally the only way to go

 

I like how this turned out.




Slowly but surely working on the other palettes.

 

Adorable species. I love the idea.

Dang. I've fixed the issue with the ship sprites, sorry for the inconvenience.

 

Ah, greetings. Thank you for making that template, it made things a lot easier to figure out.

I just remembered, right now, when I'm at the end of the tutorial area, I see a vine-covered ship instead of what a human would see. I need to fix that.

I'll save making some sort of slime ship for another day, I think, though personally, I prefer a workspace to do as I please with. Thoughts vary, and a friend hosts our games, so the ship is all I can really take with me.

A customizable ship does sort of fit the slime theme though, doesn't it? Changing shape...

 

I believe it's in the projectile. Under "primaryAbility" there's a field "projectileType" that calls the projectile file used for the whip. That projectile file has a field "statusEffects" that determines any status effect you wish to inflict(in this case, "weakpoison"). You can find projectiles in assets/projectiles and status effects in assets/stats/effects

base files are found in assets/objects/protectorate/objects/protectorateship<race>.png

As far as I know, the only way you can do ship customization is through those empty shipworld mods that let you build your own ship with blocks. Although now that I think about it I somebody(I think it was The_Suit?) did a proof of concept awhile back that allowed you to change to a different ship via ship upgrade manipulation, and I bet you could build on that to allow room placement, but that'd take a hellaton of work.

also that magma palette looks freakin' sweet

 

All the palettes are matched to their related liquids as best I can now... and I might consider just primarily aiming for liquid colors, but NOW, I've gotta get the others I haven't done.

So far, I've matched
liquid slime,
poison,
water,
healing water,
swamp water,
liquid erchius,
lava,
oil, and
coconut milk (did the best I could there, lots of white),

as well as Frackin' Universe's
aether,
alien juice,
black tar,
blood,
bio-ooze,
contaminated water,
dark water,
elder fluid,
gravity fluid,
honey,
liquid irradium,
liquid protocite,
liquified crystal,
mercury,
organic soup,
...pus... (ew),
red honey,
sulphuric acid, and
BEER! (there's a .liquid file for it, it seems)

Now I need to organize the palettes and see which colors aren't well covered by the in-game liquids.

 

All done the vanilla and Frackin' Universe liquid-based palettes.


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Guh... another 36 five-shade lines of hex code typed out. Dark, normal, and light shades of more common colors. That should be 64 palette options, and I've yet to fix the eye/accessory color selection. That's gonna be fun... I want it so that people can cycle through groups of things. Blood-red eyes with blood-red accessory, blood-red eyes with red honey-colored accessory, blood-red eyes with lava-colored accessory... which is going to mean........ well.... I guess 64x64 color combinations? Waitaminute...

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64 x 64 = 4096

I am not doing that to people, screw it. What should I do? I want to let people pick their eye color...

Maybe have the eyes and hair accessories be the same color?

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Yeah, I'd better do that... at least until I figure out how to replace a clothing color setting with one for the eyes or hair accessory alone. I'm using invisible items instead, so there's no coloring to be done.

 

I probably wouldn't hug these people. I give bear hugs, and I'd be afraid of breaking them in half.

Interesting, but not huggable.