Creating Ship Designs Expansion?

Hell yeahhhh!!! :smiley:

my elmo is screaming of excitement!

another expansion would be very welcomme :smiley:

it would be great to have ship builder on steam so i can build stuff too.

On the subject of custom ship designing, Cliff. Maybe you should think about having the ability to pick the general class of the ship IE fighter frigate, cruiser then three different frames or inner works AKA the guts of the ship. Then Pick from three separate sections for the ship itself. The ship sections will ALL be self shaded and will all fit together in such a manner that it would be seamless. Yes yes this IS a TON of work and would need a Core code rewrite. Maybe something for GSB II. But I can see that working in some manner that would give more flexibility that just getting stuck with xyz ship with x hardpoints and y standard slots.

It’s a good idea, being able to make your own ships etc, but would it be possible to take images from outside the game and use them as templates?

Well, since Cliff has made this very clear statement in the same thread–

–then no, it would not be possible to do as you folks suggested. Sorry. :frowning:

Very sad face ):

As a suggestion, you could try the Battleships Forever - Ship Maker Sub Program.
While I have not used it - I have seen some of the results and they look quite good.

The whole idea of a ship-editor for GSB is something that I mull over from time to time, especially after working on Gratuitous Tank Battles. GTB had a sort of editor for units in that each unit had many variants, essentially it had options for each layer, and each individual layer could be color tinted so you could have some visual ‘branding’ for your tanks in a way that GSB does not.

Adding this to GSB retrospectively would be a huge, game-breaking big deal.I’m not sure the creaky old GSB code-base could really cope with it, without undertaking a pretty serious re-writing of it all.
However, that doesn’t mean I’m not strongly attracted to the idea of making customizable ship designs a big part of the feature set if I was to make GSB 2.0

The more I think about it, the more it is actually possible (using some techniques I’ve perfected in GTB) to have a huge amount of unit customization whilst at the same time still having that ‘photo-realistic’ shadowed rendering stuff that the ships in GSB do. It wouldn’t allow for anything like the flexibility you have in photoshop where you can drag anything anywhere, but if you imagine a ship like the federation puma, but broken apart into half a dozen layers, with color tints for each layer, and options, and maybe the ability to blend in a texture of your choice to them… it’s all theoretically possible.

This would all be a long way off, as I am now commited to doing another game (not announced yet) which will likely swallow up at the very least the first half of 2013. That doesn’t mean 2013 won’t see me return to GSB though, I’d very much like to do that. And there will be a new race of GSB 1.0 ships coming anyway :smiley:

Not to revive an ancient thread, but an old one. It occurs to me that a color customization system would be a nice addition to GSB2, but in thinking about how it would work I also thought of two other possibilities.

  1. the “drag official parts around to create new official ships” editor could certainly work by using neutrally light-sourced rendered pieces, but realistic shading would still be possible using a similar technique to a Photoshop layer’s screen drop shadow FX. Ship parts could me sorted by layers in the same way elements are in PowerPoint or any other number of programs, thus ensuring the shadows fall where they should. The user then “flattens” the ship when satisfied. Besides, many people do this with Star Trek hulls anyway… might as well make a way for the less artistically/Photoshopily inclined have some fun.

  2. it would also be cool if players could add decals to their ships; official and unofficial. Players could upload alpha-channel flags, logos, even stripes and camouflage patterns. These would be dropped onto a higher layer and could be resized or scooted around the hull until it looks nice, then it could be applied to the existing ship as a color/multiply layer, masked by the ship’s alpha channel. This way two fleets could meet but one ship might be stock and the other might have Punisher skulls on the bow.

(I don’t try to do a moderator job, but… Why don’t you post in the GSB 2.0 tread instead of try to be a necromancer? XD)

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