Race Specific Stations

[Supermint]

I personally am not sure what programme you use for creating the images for the ships/stations etc. But if I'm given a little background information on what you used and how you guys went about the tasks in creating the images for the prior mentioned assets. I am willing to give you guys a hand in creating them To be honest I think the community is willing to help creating the new stations as I believe it does bug a large number of us that we can only build Ashdar style stations.
Wouldn't all the races have their own styles and also maybe have their own weapon loadouts.
A handful of examples could be.
Yoral station have a missile block instead of one of the hangers as their race is missile heavy.
The Gremak station would have a heavy weapon turret as per their style on ships.
Human could have more medium turrets.

I feel that only the Ashdar should have strike craft heavy stations as that is the thing about their race.

I do feel that the construction stations should also be different per race put as they play a less important role in the taste of any of the empires we should focus on the military stations first.

Many thanks.
Minty

[Arioch]

Creating the image assets is relatively straightforward, but importing them into the game is not.

The art assets are created in Photoshop. Any image editing program that can save .PSD files should work.
Here is a sample file: http://well-of-souls.com/temp/svenfleet ... small1.psd

[Supermint]

Once I find a program that can open the .PSD file without taking out a mortgage I don't think it will be too difficult to come up with some ideas and creations for the new stations. I will need help getting them implemented into the game. That's a little bit beyond my abilities. My programming days are long gone. I used to program using Visual Basic, C (The original ancient C) and direct machine code hexadecimal. All ancient programming languages. I guess I'm showing my age a little bit

EDIT 1: Converted the layers into JPEGS and WOW!!! 31 layers. Now just need to work out what each bit does

EDIT 2: Downloaded GIMP and all works OK. I think I will scribble some down some ideas first before I start playing round with a new program. Also you know that moment you realise you may have realised there is quite a bit more to something than what you thought. This is one of those moments I thought the station would be a .bmp or similar with overlays for the lights etc... How wrong was I.

[akkamaddi]

I've used GIMP for well over a decade. It works well. I have not gone to 2.9 yet, as it was a massive user interface overhaul, and I'm not sure some of my plugins and scripts will carry over.

I suggest saving the .psd file as the native .xcf. Work in XCF, and then re-export to PSD when you're done.

For the flat images, work with PNG files (Portable Network Graphics). There are a host of reasons. A big one is that the format is lossless. Instead of doing pixel smoothing to compress the image, is uses a compression algorithm something sort-of like ZIP files (but obviously optimized for a raster image, I think it's based on 7Z). It is, very broadly speaking, a BMP file that has been ZIP'ed. This means that each pixel is restored to the original, and so it is lossless, but it also usually makes larger files. Because JPG images smooth the colors to reduce file size, you shave a bit of color depth and quality off each time you save the file (unless you set the quality to 100%).

Further, PNG allows for a transparent "alpha channel", which lets you have transparent backgrounds. This is really important for games.

Lastly, the formats for JPG and GIF are intellectual property, while PNG was based on previous open source formats and was designed as a public domain, open source format. You may remember from the beginning of the Patent Troll Wars, Compuserve threatened to demand royalties paid by any program that could save a GIF image. Most games use PNG files to avoid this ever happening again (and it's lossless), though some still use Targa images.

[akkamaddi]

I used to program using Visual Basic, C (The original ancient C) and direct machine code hexadecimal. All ancient programming languages. I guess I'm showing my age a little bit

If it's any consolation, I remember thinking what a revolution it was that a game could be randomized to give you a different game every time...

Playing mode 3 of "Adventure"...

On the Atari 2600.

Perhaps some day we could have a nice chat about Kids These Days and how they need to get off our lawn.

And don't fear Lua. I have some background scripting on DOS/Windows and UNIX, but actual "programming" would be within error margin of zero if you don't count Minecraft modding. It's my understanding that Lua started as a project to each scripting to older children and young adults, but it quickly became a scripting language of its own. It's designed to be straightforward and understandable. I actually have a stronger background in linguistics, and between that, math, and basic scripting, I'm usually able to follow the code. The graphic rendering parts are where I get thrown, which I think would be an issue with ship design.

Just to give you an idea, I started poking around the code last week, and I've already turned the Viscids into a useful, moveable minor race.