File Format type of ship models

[Captainspire]

Just trying to see if I can help in any other way.
Is there a graphic file type used in rendering/saving the spaceship images?
Any program used to create the blinking lights or save them into a particular file format?

[sven]

Just trying to see if I can help in any other way.
Is there a graphic file type used in rendering/saving the spaceship images?
Any program used to create the blinking lights or save them into a particular file format?

The ships are all hand-draw by arioch in Photoshop. I export the photoshop layers to a combination of .png files and Lua tables using Adobe Extendscript, and then configure any special effect (like the blinking light patterns and engine glows) by hand in Lua. Procedural effects (like the engine glows), are coded using a mixture of Lua and the venerable NVIDIA Cg shader language. The exported resources can be found in Stars in Shadow\Lua state\Drawers\Ships. The ship asset directories are named using a combination of hull classification codes and visual theme names taken one of Arioch's early thumbnail design sets. (Thus, the Human heavy cruiser asset is in a directory called 'HammerCA'.)

The guts of the game are mostly all custom Lua scripts of one sort or another, and if you have any modding projects in mind, there's some info on the official website here about how to get oriented and setup with appropriate dev-tools.