On a lighter note...

[Dire Badger]

I have been designing some new ships based on star frontiers/traveller miniatures from the 80's. They have a distinctively chunky, busier exterior

Also I wished to showcase Kupu's new texture pack.

The first design is the Yankee Trader design

stats:

3 twin Armadillo Armaments turbolasers (each one has two 180 block antimatter cannons)

2 small shuttle bays (currently empty) no obstructions

2 1000 MJ Combined Arms forward-mounted lasers (antimatter cannons)

14 checkerboard mounted heavy mining lasers (50 blocks each) refitted Capellan mining ltd from it's RVA-121 class.

length: 100 meters

height: 18 meters (Without turrets)

width : 64 meters (Without turrets)

mass: 3000 metric tons displacement (30k blocks) fully coated in between 1 and 3 meters of hardened isotope armor and 1 to 2 meters of standard steel decking. Frame designed by Ectos Unlimited, assembled at Capellan testing yards.

Power systems: 4x GE Harbor 65 threaded fusion reactor strands, linked to GE Mogpower power storage, power storage: 23044 MJ, Recharge:832274 MJ

Engines: twin-mounted outboard Collapsium4(TM) Ion engines, 8300 kilotons thrust

Shields: RAV-18 kinetic/electric defractors, with superfiber superconducting coating, capable of dispersing 141000 MJ of kinetic/energy force. 4000 MJ regeneration, 2.0 recovery

The Yankee Trader is designed as a family workship, with spacious cargo/shuttlebays, advanced mining and refining onboard systems, and a fairly decent suite of ECM and lethal countermeasures to discourage most casual pirates. Due to it's design for heavy-yield asteroid fields, it has relatively thick armor for it's class, and the ha-6 self-repair seals are guaranteed to keep your family breathing in even the heaviest sub-c asteroid shower.

It is designed for expansion, possessing engine and power systems far in excess of it's actual needs. While the default ship is not designed for cloaking or jamming, the spacious subdecks have plenty of room and power couplings for installing emergency getaways.

vane-26 side-mounted heat dispursors mounted along it's throat will keep you and your colony cool and comfortable in even the most aggressive production environments, and ETR-667 afterburners, a standard feature of Collapsium-4 engines, will help you leave even snub fighters in your wake... a particularly dangerous wake, since each of the armadillo Turbolasers have full 360 degree firing arcs.

Get yours today, Now on sale at Crazy Truglublat's Ship Emporium and fine secondary ship retailers across the galaxy!

 

[Trollerbobman]

Looks Awesome!

 

[Dire Badger]

Thanks, I was getting a little tired of everyone posting nothing but enormous titans and billion-credit motherships. I figure a set of themed \'general purpose\' ships might be helpful. Working on the next one now.

The texturpack is a combination of my special textures and Kupu\'s texturepack, specifically designed for more industrial-themed ships. I hope people like it.

 

[kupu]

Those industrial \"scaffold\" blocks look really cool Badger. Are they additional blocks or an altered hull texture?

I would love to add a similar block to my pack, but unfortunately i don\'t think i could change the material of another block and keep everyone happy and as we discussed previously, it is difficult to add blocks for all servers etc.

I too love more industrial / functional ships, i\'m currently making a mining vessel.

Nice ship, nice additional textures. (thanks for the shoutout ha!)

 

[Dire Badger]

I actually was replacing hull textures, but then switched over to just making addon blocks after a bit, since, like you said, some people don\'t want you messing with the defaults

Probably going to modify the ship to just use normal blocks, add a couple more turrets, and put it in the ship catalog.

And then, of course, release the extra blocks and block config as a seperate file, along with the \'buy mode reorganization\' patch. My biggest thing right now is trying to make the extra blocks more closely match your particular graphic style, and balancing out the weight/cost/armor of the \'extreme\' armor blocks and extra detail blocks.



I just wish schema were able to answer my questions about using shaders... could you imagine how cool the \'armor\' blocks in your texture pack would look if the octagons in the middle looked \'raised\'?



I also really really hate the lighting engine. I mean, the default ambient occlusion looks great, but it really screws up on sloped surfaces.

 

[kupu]

It\'s always hard trying to match up to another graphic style. I could quickly send you a PM on how i was making my textures, quick list of techniques and stuff, or i could even texture them for you.

It seems like you enjoy the texturing (and can do it well) so i imagine the latter option is the less favourable.

The addon pack sounds great. I\'ve been talking with Charlie_ about stuff like this. He has a thread called Custom Block Suite i think. Adding decorative blocks for ship bridges. Computer screens and tactical displays. I\'m not sure he has a solution to a rotation \'bug\' he is having yet. Maybe you could help on that? You seem to know the block editor quite well.



I couldn\'t say much about shaders, i don\'t know enough about how they work. I\'ve never had much of a problem wih them... but then again i don\'t know enough about them to spot problems! haha.

 

[Dire Badger]

heh, shader coding is a bit outside my experience too, I know starmade has them, but it\'s too coder-y for me to mess with.... but it\'s very obvious that they are there, and I would love to be able to access them.



as far as the rotation bug, it\'s not really so much a bug as an incomplete feature. slopes are really only coded to have one \'side\'. ie they are just a weird visual way of representing a \'block\' and take advantage of UV mesh oddities to show a texture on the \'sloping\' surface. basically, no matter which way they are rotated, they always show the same 6 textures in the same orientation. I mean, I am sure that this will be changed eventually (it\'s not a hard fix) but it would be a time-consuming fix, since he would have to modify the way orientation works. I suspect he will do that eventually (since apparently he doubled up the \'sideways\' orientations) but it\'s another future feature. Not something you can affect with the block editor, though.

There are ways to get around the rotation bug, though... like using the same texture for all 6 faces, and then concealing that via building tricks. Also you can use 4-sided blocks to sort of, at least, CONTROL the way the rotation bug displays.



One thing I really like about your texture pack, though, is the way you have taken advantage of the fact that each block face on stuff like computers has an entirely different texture. Not completely, of course (a unique texture for each side of each block is a monumental undertaking) but you clearly were not content with just \'5 sides are the same on every block, only the front is important\' like the default sets. I appreciate the craftsmanship inherent in actually doing the work to make the different sides... DIFFERENT.

I plan on modifying some of the textures in your pack to make... umm... \'surface detail blocks\' for more interesting and varied hull areas. Is this alright with you? Let me show you an example: (Reduced to 64x64 for ease of use)

Let\'s take your basic hull texture, and then add some trenches with simple drop shadows



Then, we create a NEW block in the block editor, and assign a block with these textures, 25% armor (like a hull) and voila! we have a new decorative block that we can subsitute for a normal hull... rotating the block makes different textures \'show up\', and we can create a square on the hull with \'corners\' that do not match the corners of actual blocks.



add some grates, a few little airlock textures, maybe some more horizontal and vertical \'trenches\', a few gemlike lights, t-shaped trench intersections, and all of a sudden, for a cost of 2 or 3 additional decorative hull blocks, you can make your new ship have an ENORMOUSLY interesting hull. Interesting like star wars type detail levels.



I am thinking maybe I should just... try to help you learn the block editor, and confine my efforts right now to the default texture pack. Just so I don\'t wind up taking credit for the delightful work you have already accomplished.





edit- oh damn. when i updated apparently it deleted my ships.

edit2- I would love a PM (or you could post it, I bet a lot of people would be interested in the details!) of your techniques and how you made the textures.

edit3- If you would rather make the textures yourself, I would be fine with \'blocking\' them for you, rearranging the directory structure, and working out some of the placement bugs. Wasn\'t sure if you were up for that level of work, after having made a completely new set of textures for the game The real trick with working with \'large\' textures and the block editor, is that the block editor is kinda stupid about texture placement. the easiest way to redo stuff is to make a \'small\' (64x) texture sheet, align your textures, fix all your block editor stuff, and then replace the small texture sheet with the original \'large\' (256x?) texture sheet.... all the alignment from the block editor should still work fine with the new sheet. (otherwise it starts trying to read just like the corners of your blocks and stuff)

 

[kupu]

That makes sense, having a top face texture despite its orientation. I imagine we will just have to create several seperate blocks for decorative slopes of varying orientations.

I\'m glad you noticed the little extras. I think the default textures work well despite repeating tiles because it\'s pixel art. I just wanted to create a pack that wasn\'t pixel art, so i realised i had to add quite a bit more information.

Nah, don\'t worry about altering my textures for all your experiements and threads. Its absolutely fine, and quite frankly exciting to see.

If you wanted to release a pack of new textures to build on top of mine with new blocks, then just credit the original work with a link to the original. I\'m perfectly happy with that. If you want to work together? I\'d love that too.

Your ideas of adding hull trenches or indents, airlocks, lights or vents etc is really cool. Just like i was saying with Charlie_, adding all these new blocks is a great idea to add more depth to ships and stations. If the players pick up the mods and enjoy them, i would end up wanting to retexture some things to fit in with my pack anyway. So yea, i\'ll try and see if i have a .psd file showing all the layers and effects for you. From there, it\'s all up to you.

If you want me to stop spamming your thread i can PM :D

 

[Dire Badger]

naww, I love cruising threads where other people are discussing this sort of stuff. Some people come up with GREAT ideas like that.



Besides, the original point of the thread is kinda lost now, since the update destroyed my ship.

 

[kupu]

Perhaps the thread could continue down the road of our additional blocks and future ships.

I\'ve PM\'ed you a texture file with all the layers still in place so you can reverse engineer the process. More in the PM.

Do keep me posted on new blocks your making or that i could help with, having a community made additional content pack is pretty exciting.



Ps. sorry about your ship.

 

[Charlie_]

Yeah, as you said, there\'s only workarounds you can do to deal with the wedge rotation thing.

Though I think it\'ll eventually be more manageable, since when I was also trying to pull off a \"one face\" animation and brought it up with Beet for a possible trick, he told me he thought about working on an actual block propriety or feature to allow specifically that. After all it\'s not that complicated on paper.

I too really loved the catwalk-grid block. It\'s my favourite texture of the bunch. Really good idea on that!

Keep up the amazing work, Badger !



PS: Smileyface for good measure :D