My first ship

[paperjack]

Hello!
This is my first ship. I have made it with inspiration from Warhammer 40k.
I'm still quite the newbie, so please tell me some tips or if I did any major error or it looks bad.

It's huge compared to the default ships and it's meant for very long range battles (5000+ distance).
I tried to make it balanced for its size; there are no invulnerable parts or instakill guns.

The Lances (bright yellow teslas with twin railgun sprite) and the two torpedo tubes however are powerful and deal (relatively) big damage, enought to instakill the basic pirates.




http://www.wyrdysm.com/battleshipsforev ... Iratus.shp



Oh yeah, a few questions for you pros:
is there a way to clone customized weapons easily?
is there a way to change the parent of a cloned object? Like, "clone this and then parent it to that".

[Droid]

Lets see... Things that went wrong (IMO):

1) Repetition - along the front of the ship.
2) Section Stretching. NOOOOoooo.
3) White Aegis. Recolor it!
4) Lack of Color. Color the ship!

Instead try:
1) Hitting "z" then "~", and using the "1" "2" "3" and "4" on the top of your keypad to scroll between section groups. You can also download section packs in the Custom Content forum. This gives you a lot more sections, and you can cut down on repetition easy!

2) See above point. You get larger sections to work with too.

3) White Aegis looks BAD. It should go with whatever color your ship is, which brings me to my next point:

4) Stock green looks like you didn't put any effort into colorization. You should. It emphasizes shading and whatnot.

---

You can customize one weapon, and just clone it like you would do anything else (right click -> clone). Its clones will have it same attributes as it when you clone it.

You can also right click on a section with another section or weapon selected, and go "Set Parent" to reparent it.

[paperjack]

What's wrong with section stretching? I don't want to use fifty sections when I can use a stretched up one, I think it's less laggy.
How do I install section packs ?
Are there any "essential" section packs I should get?

[jwa8402]

I like what your trying to achieve but theres a long way to go till this is worthy of the design. Not too hard to fix though. Theres probably hundreds of custom sprites, you can get most of the section packs in the custom sprites section of the forum. You install them by dropping the folders in your custom sprites directory, which is in your battleships forever folder, where ever you installed it. As for essential, look for Squishy's .ini file, which will replace the default sprites in your shipmaker menu with several of the newer sprite packs.

Stretching is bad because it distorts the image, really looks bad to us. More sections also means more detail. Weapon mounts, engine ports, ablative armor, power cores, bridges, etc. You can also depth your weapons by pressing w while selecting one. That will lower it to the depth of the section its parented on which means you can cover up parts. Look around for examples.

The average stock sized ship is usually at least a dozen sections, whereas a ship your size might be several dozen. Most of my ships hover between 100 and 175. Long as their not more than 250 or so it doesn't substantially lag the game for me.

[paperjack]

last questions: where can I download some good ships to fight mine or analyze?
Now that I have got a ton of parts, how do I browse them faster ?

[Droid]

You can find modified smsprites.ini with custom sprites so you can access them though the 1/2/3/4 panels.

For good ships, look at the Holy Ship thread.

Also, on the topic of reducing lag on larger ships, you can combine sections using a program such as paint.net/Photoshop/GIMP. This allows you to make much larger ships with lots of detail, yet have good performance (do note that it does make it hard to edit, so this should only be done after completing the hull).

[paperjack]

For good ships, look at the Holy Ship thread.

but I can't download those :\

[Droid]

There's also this subforum but I can't seem to find downloads there either...

I guess the best you can find downloads for are in the Metagame then. (Notably here) They are built to stricter standards than generally needed though.

[jwa8402]

As an update on your ship, I sent 10 Hestia mk IIs, later reinforced by 5 more, against your Apocaliptus Iratus. They only won through suppressive missile fire and railgun bombardment. At least three were destroyed by the wreckage from yours exploding, and while 4 survived the engagement, only 2 are assessed as combat worthy. Good job. You might set your ship to broadside AI so it can take advantage of those cannons, as all mine had to do was flank it.