WIP Simurgh (Archaeopteryx-dog... somethings!)

Here are the tiny, tiny beginnings of a giant race project I've been poking at for awhile. I've finally been able to set aside some time to pick it up again. I'm not releasing anything until there is enough to be interesting, or at least convey you really are playing another species and not a new sprite on a borrowed ship.

(P.S. I hope I did this right.)

Meanwhile, this is a Simurgh:


And so are these:




They're also animated!




Here is some rough concept art (some of it embarrassing):
Headgear Concepts
A locked and loaded... uh, "chick" (Don't call her that, ever)
A dude that found a friend!
Playing with attire. There is lore behind this. I can bore you with it on request!
Power armor thing
One lying down in a healthy manner. Also feets.
A feral in a bad mood

In other words (or just words): A quad-winged, gryphonoid dog-bird that traded in all their pinkies and bothersome little toes for more thumbs. They're also a bit like hyenas: the females are bigger, more aggressive, and have all the charm of a wolverine. Males tend to be more pleasant conversationalists. They can't fly, either; they glide.

Being brutish, animal scrappers trying to get on by, I was thinking a post-apocalyptic, Fallout theme mushed with a little of Larry Niven's Kzinti, with an emphasis of taking tech from others and incorporating it into their own. Rather than (just?) mine ores, more... interesting gear and other items can be crafted via stuff beyond plant fiber, wood, etc. You could still play "vanilla," but you're not going to really get many fun things that way. You're a scavenging kleptomaniac. Or supposed to be.

Mind, this is lofty and far down the line. I'm not even sure if you can use decorative objects in recipes; I've been working on "basics" first and that will be what I do until it's functional. Woo.

The animation problems have been fixed, so the usual SB customization system options are possible now. I'll update the top gifs with the final versions, as those are still being tweaked up.

Look! Lore!

The Simurgh are a barely uplifted race where a segment had won their freedom from the species that had created them, a diminutive bird people known as the Chol. Being hardly generations away from their feral ancestors and heavily genetically altered, they are left to fend for themselves in the depths of space with only the Chol technology they have learned and had taken with them, and the social culture the Chol had crafted and engineered for them. They're yet another species on the brink, cut from the tethers of a superior race and struggling to cope with their identity, courtesy of artificial evolution.

They are the outcome of a cobbling of species within a larger clade of quad-winged avian-mammaloids that thrive in an oxygen-rich world with other octopedal megafauna. While social habits across simurghoid species vary, the genetic "base" originated from forest dwellers that lived among thick trees hundreds of feet in height.

Due to the demands of the different environments of their formerly solitary lifestyle, they exhibit fairly high sexual dimorphism: similar to Earth hyenas, females are, on average, larger, stronger, and more aggressive than males. Neither sex can fly, but the gracile males, due to their lighter build, are significantly better gliders than their robust female counterparts.

Female feral simurgh live on the forest floor among megafauna many times their size, defending their large territories against other females. They exclusively raise their whelps with no involvement from the sire. In contrast, feral males do not maintain territories, and tend to exhibit more pro-social behaviors. They wander wherever their quest for food and breeding takes them. Coming down from the trees to the forest floor to court a moody, yet receptive, female is a dangerous affair. It's not uncommon for them to kill unrelated whelps, not unlike lions.

The "sentient" variety has been massively edited from these original behaviors, genetically blended with a smaller, pro-social "wandering" specie that spends most of its life airborne. However, the hardy female simurgh of the dangerous forest floor and her ferocity against impossible giants is sacred to the Chol; female Simurgh retain their aggressiveness, although controlled in a fashion that is sustainable for a collaborative society. Males are typically more suited for diplomacy work and other affairs where being a wall of claws and teeth would not yield a desirable outcome.

Among other consequences of their accelerated evolution, the naturally quadrupedal Simurgh suffer from spinal issues to a point where it's necessary that they receive a spinal augment at the human equivalent of their 40s or risk paralysis. Nearly all need to wear some kind of back brace, with a sizable number neglecting to do so due to the discomfort of most common braces used.

Shakey-bakey list of stuff to do:
- Female sprite sheet (In progress)
- Male sprite sheet
- "Vanity" integration (since that affects how the sprite/animations work)
- Ship
- Armor
- Weapons
- Codex
- ... otherwise, an overhaul of race-exclusive material is in order first

 

Do. Want. So. Badly. I'm loving the lore behind this as well, and the whole identity crisis of being a non-naturally occurring sub-species.

 

So what is their Tech level?

 

Hi! I am totally back -- I conked out for awhile since I was having technical issues with the game, and it was a bit disheartening. I felt like picking these guys up again, even if the game still isn't 1.0, and I've been cleaning up animations and tweaking them before I dig into anything else. I was still intending to have the male sprites be more demure, which I'll mess with when I feel these are satisfactory enough. There is still a bit of refining work, at the bare minimum.

I figured out how to get the current hair/helmet system to do what I want, and figured out a workaround for the wings and fixed uneven animations. The usual SB-type customization options are possible now.

Regarding tech: I'm still taking the post-apocalyptic/Fallout angle. I had a system planned that involved cobbling together items through decorations found in the game. For example, I was going to have an armor that could be created using this: http://starbounder.org/Glitch_Display_Armour -- Where it stands in tiers, I'm not sure. I've been out long enough that I'm going to be going through Vanilla a bit to work out balancing. Lore-wise, they start out using a cobbled together version of their creator race's tech, so it's... not going to be terribly fancy. Serviceable, but not going to do much more than keep an angry race of not!Avian bird people wanting to round up their stray slaves off their heels. If it weren't for their overlords, they'd probably be stabbing each other with sticks and clawing at each other in a tribal fashion. They're forcibly, genetically and culturally, engineered to be social. Think something like a cat; you can dump one in the wild and they'll survive just fine.

Hope that wasn't me saying the same stuff as the original post. : O! I'll be seeing what I can do to make the item gathering system different enough to freshen gameplay a bit.

Here is one of their early outfits/armor (not sure which to designate), which is something of a bare leather straps, scarf, and pants deal . The cheeks fluff, ears, eye marking/stripe, and mane (back of head/"hair") all have customization options, so showing a tiny bit of that too:

 

So are you going to add an unplayable bird-thing race in addition? Also sky villages welcome back and good luck!

 

The creator bird race? That's... way far down the line.

I did scratch out one before for fun awhile back. They're called the Chol. This... is something of a rough idea of what they look like:



Same eight-limb deal going on. They're also supposed to be on the short end compared to, say, humans (3 - 4 feet in height), so I don't know how small I can go due to sprites being teeny enough, not to mention fixed arm positions. I guess these guys would be interesting as a more bird and less humanoid-looking avian critter.

I don't know how much has changed since I last played, but the flying pirate ship was one of my favorite things to find. They just... didn't last long on a level 5 fire planet.

Thanks!

 

Update dump. A lot of work has been done, and most of it has been overhaul. Stuff has been cleaned up and made prettier. The wings now move a bit when you run and walk. It means there will be no vanity back items ever, but maybe I could tack other stuff back there. The swimming animation needs to be rehauled completely, especially since they're borrowed elsewhere now -- this was started before that. Trying to get a handle on the game changes as well, because the scrapper mechanic won't work like I had originally intended.

The stances have been rehauled as well. The digitigrade feet show up a little better:



Rehauled animations -- expect some more tweaks but they're about there:




I have a budding placeholder that is a bare minimum functional race, but only females work -- I'm not going to release a placeholder. There are up to 1000 face variations courtesy of permutations. They're subtle variations (different mane style, the black "eyeliner" markings, and a light patch, if there is) so hitting "randomize" and seeing what rolls out is highly recommended. Colors variants need a little tweaking since some light color pallets have shadows that show up way too light, but there are a bit to choose from as well:



Also playing around with costumes + armor. They won't be worked on until both sexes are fully playable with finished animations, but here are the first armor (concept?) sets. Leather to Iron to Steel, which their appearance are initially limited to stuff being added to to keep with the post-apocalyptic theme:



This will change drastically later at higher tiers. The arms aren't finished either -- again, more concepts right now.

There are other outfits I'm playing around with. The last two were done for fun, due to an inability for armors to mask bodies. They'll probably exist as morbid decor unless that changes:



(The *cough* "ship worker" has a rebreather -- their homeworld atmosphere has a higher oxygen content and Earth's atmosphere is actually too thin for them. The ribs look busy because they have lattice-looking ribcages that can be pulled to help lock the body straight when gliding.)


Humanoids can get a stupid suit thing. In an ideal world, when there are settlements, you can wear it to piss Simurgh NPCS off:


Also, a better looking Chol. They will probably exist as NPCs only. If there is enough demand to make them playable, maybe, but it's extremely low on the list of what needs to be done here:


In short, yay work!

 

Definitely getting a wonderful vibe from this project. The sprites look wonderful and the lore is pretty substantial to hold itself up pretty well!

 

Just writing in that the mod is not dead at all -- been doing vanity-type things since 1.0 is on the horizon and messing with the actual gameplay is going to be a waste of effort on my end. Everything at this point in time will be converting armors and stuff over, since I'm pretty certain those will carryover just fine. I'll probably put up a "proof-of-concept"-type release for the sake of interest and that this actually exists and is functional somewhere out there. It's fully playable as a race for the sake of exploring and doing plotless, build-y things. I also was doing an experiment with Starcheat.

When you roll a Simurgh, this is what you'll see:





Now, the trick? There are many hidden blotches and areas that allows for stripes, wing tips, and a few other things. Roll out starcheat and apply colors to these hidden areas...





Deep customization!

(This is Vermin-Catcher. You'll probably see her a lot.)

Time consuming as hell to setup? Yeah, but I'm really happy with what this opened up in terms of character customization. I was able to scrap the permutations. You'll only be able to select mane style in "vanilla," but it should be enough for casual. In lore, Simurgh dye their manes, tails, etc., and have things such as colored feather tips and color variation in their wings, so hey, a bit of a roundabout way, but it should be server-friendly. I'll include a palette guide to make tweaking easier -- just use Starcheat's color screen capture feature with the guide out, play around with some of the sample palettes with it, or make up your own.

I also converted some of the vanity headgear over, so you can look doofy all the same. And reanimated the Avian Raven armor set, since it's my favorite of the vanilla armors and fits my current character pretty well. I'll be doing more, if to get a feel for Starbound's style before I dig in and do their racial armor. I did try my hand at some headgear. The bottom four all can be colored with the standard dyes, although it's limited to one part, such as the hood or leathers:







Annnnnnd that's everything noteworthy, for now.

 

Very fitting for starbound. Love the lore and sprites.

 

Is this still being worked on?