Tutorial Create your own ships - Photoshop template & modding guide

By the way, i used some of your post to update the topic. Added a link to your full explanation too.

 

Oh FYI, spoke with kyren last night (tonight? I haven't slept in a few days at this point) and they mentioned a few things:

1) Pre-painting a material is not possible in the .structure setup.

2) The .structure may (and probably will, though that's just my opinion) end up being overhauled to be the same (or at least similar) to the .dungeon system. Quite frankly, the .structure is needlessly different from .dungeon, much more limited (or at least more annoying when trying to accomplish the same thing, like object placement.. UGH, talk about tedius), and I would be VERY surprised if they didn't completely change it in the near future. Redoing our mods shouldn't be too hard though, and somebody will probably make a convertor. Plus once Kel^'s tool gets a few more updates this whole thing will be trivial anyways.

3) There is currently an issue with placing an object upon another object (in that the object on top won't load). Right now the object 'renderer' is working from the top down while reading the png (the order of .structure doesn't appear to make any difference), but needs to go from the bottom up (so objects below others load first, and thus can hold the object on top). The dev said they fixed it while we were chatting, so the next game version should work beautifully with it.

 

Seems like the ship functionality is unfinished. Big surprise

 

From what I understand, it's the previous system and may end up being redone to be the same as dungeons (no real need for them to be different).

 

Hello everyone, I think this might be the right thread for my question, many of you seem to have gathered a lot of knowlege in custom ship business already. I rebooted my idea for a "slightly" bigger ship after i found out about the modding possibilities.
The Idea - the ship is your base. And enough space for a long life traveling the stars...

But to my question.

• The size for the shipship.png with my project is 10kx10k
• It was broken up into 25 2k textures. (2k is the maximum the game allows to load)
• The dropshipblocks.png is 1252x1252 and it all fits nice and precise when i walk around on my ship

Problem:
The game is slow
I know what you gonna say, 10k maaby a little too much. But keep in mind that there is actually nothing there big enough to bring down performance that much.
The background texture is not complete, naturally, so i concentrated on 3 tiles 2kx2k. Thats 1,5MB of texture so far. My workstation might not be the best in the world, but i usually do more "advanced" stuff with it.
The first thing i tried was to go from 1250x1250 to 1252x1252 with the dropshipblocks, that improved performance significantly. Yet i do get some lags and freezing in the game and even on planets.
When I save the character the game/computer works quite hard and the shipworld file is about 70MB afterwards. So I guess there is something very inefficiant going on under the hood. Any ideas?
By the way, there is nothing placed via the .structure file apart from the default ship setup.

You might not be thrilled by numbers, or by problem in general. But to give you an idea why i need 10k of space, this is the illustrator layout:

For reference, the hangar on the right side is about twice the size shown in the official spacestation layout.
If it works someday without performance issues I gonna make it an official mod. My hopes are high since Tiy announced "Spaceship Dungeons: Very large, size of a planet." - there is gonna be a way to make this work for sure.

 

What are the advantages of using this pixel color method to define where objects live instead of just defining coordinates? I guess it might be easier to place things initially. But, it seems like you lose the ability to easily move things around or reuse things for slightly different purposes.

 

So I have a ship file thats 441 x 263, what size would be good so I can scale down to the dropship file? I can't go too much smaller as I am getting close to the edges of the ship.

 

AFAIK the png with the actual graphics of the ship can be any size. Your dropshipblocks.png should be around 55 x 33.

 

I read somewhere that it has to be divisible by 8, since the ration 1:8 or something.

 

It doesn't have to be, some of the default ones aren't even divisible by 8. 8 pixels is 1 block though, so you have to keep that in mind when making it. The image itself can be any size, you just need to make sure the parts that you can walk in are divisible by 8.

 

So if i just use like the hylotl dropship and put my blocks on there, it should be fine.

 

The blocks.png has to be divisible by 8 if you're using my PSD. This is because i scaled it up to make it easier to edit with. Id advise making the ship.png divisible by 8 and setting the position to [0, 0]. None of this is necessary though, it just makes things easier to maintain and export from Photoshop.

 

I've done my first attempt in about an hour. Can you tell what you think? ty

 

Could someone please test this out?

 

the codding part of this seems pretty hard :/

 

yeah i don't even under stand the mitmap part. would i be posible to ask for some one to help me or something ^^;

 

Reviving this ...
I want to add items to a ship's starting inventory directly. At the moment I'm editing default.treasurepools to add the items I want, but I'd like to make a mod which doesn't alter this file. Has anyone found a way to code this?

Here's what I tried:

Code:

"objectParameters" : {
        "treasurePools" : [ "humanStarterTreasure" ],
        "level" : 1,
        "fill" :[
               [ "keenhead", 1],
               [ "keenraygun", 1]
        ],
        "unbreakable" : true
      }

The game doesn't mind the code, but it just seems to get ignored and only StarterTreasure is added.

 

Ok, yes, that works. But that still requires editing the treasure files (Through merge). Iwas hoping to just say: "addtoinventory" = "stuff" in the ship file.

 

So I finally get the ship to show up in game, even though its only half done, and everytime the character shows up, the game acts like there is no ship there and the character drops. What could be the problem here? In the dropship file, I used the same rgb that's in the structure file for red, even used Starstructor to make the blocks file.

 

Definitely sounds like blocks.png is broken. Is your blocks.png named correctly in "dropship.structure"?

Also, if Starstructor changed the reference for the red-color, then it could represent something else (like empty space). Have you opened the "dropship.structure" and checked that it's value's are correct? If you need more details, let me know.