Random acts of violence with Shipmaker

[M123]

I can't get the proportions any closer without a good top down shot.

Top down screenshot from the StarCraft 2 Editor, with background terrain edited out. Hope it helps

EDIT: This one doesn't have the Yamato Gun upgrade, but eh.

[Droid]

Eh, if you're talking about Lego Starcraft Battlecruisers, I much prefer this one:



A lot more accurate to the cutscene model I feel.
Then again, it doesn't have a good top-down shot to work off of.

[jwa8402]

Lol you guys are amazing! Thanks alot, i will be using all of these resources. I'm going to be spending the next few days finishing up my BP entries, but heres two ships I cooked up this evening.

[jwa8402]

Woot, finished my BP fanship entry, just making sure everythings packed right...
So you wanna play with tanks huh?

[Rugdumph]

Ooh those horsemonster heat sinks do make good tracks. Good work on all these recent fanships, look pretty nice. Loving the peace keeper command carrier, didn't think anyone remembered farscape.

[jwa8402]

Heck ya I remember it...just wish I had the skill to properly do Moya.
Anyway, anyone play star trek online? Found this shot: http://to.boldlyplay.com/graphics/ships/windrunner.jpg but no idea what class it is(I know it says windrunner but the article questions that) and haven't found it on any of the charts. Took liberties since I could only find the one shot, but I kinda like it. The only questionable part in my mind is the use of the Kae_gnr64 on both the front and the back but it honestly seemed to fit the best in both places...What do you think?

[Lizzie]

Yours looks better I think, except for that shield, blegh at it.

[jwa8402]

Ya if you know of any better shield sprites let me know, or if its just a matter that I should set the alpha lower or something...The invisible aegis shields looked sooo much cooler but there is no real way to balance them to the sizes and numbers of ships I'll be releasing...Possibly will use the GSB shields on the larger ships so I don't have to stretch it so much.

Anyone know if that ship is actually from STO or just a fanship?

I'm *hopefully* on the home stretch as far as balancing. Problems been that what worked for a few ships was totally wrong for some others and balancing the beams to projectiles is rather hard as well for me. Right now I'm mostly down to balancing the number of weapons per ship. Example when I started the battlestar had a bunch of small guns that still overwhelmed a starfleet's 2 or 3 phasers no matter how much more powerful they were. In any case I'm getting there; most 1 on 1 matches between similar sizes have been fairly even. Pretty much throwing individual power accuracy out the window in favor of class(size) balancing to allow massive fleet battles because yes, probably 80% of this fleet can be loaded and played at once

Next step will be to throw in frivolous things, like jump drives, tractor beams, phaser strips, and cloaks. Actually got a cloak to work on the defiant by adding tiny peripheral sprites parented to the cloak sprite that throw off enemy targeting about two out of three shots. The decoy sprites can't really be destroyed easily because of their size but the cloak itself does get hit and once its destroyed, normal targeting ability is regained.

last thing I swear. I was really unhappy with the galaxy class, especially the poorly ripped nacelles. I rebuilt from scratch and hopefully it fits in better with the game, even at the cost of some accuracy. What do you think?

[Son Tzu]

Looks pretty good, though I don't remember the notches in the saucer section...
Still, overall it's a lot better than any of the 1701-Ds that I've built so far. How about adding in the odd booster or nanomatrix to simulate the efforts of the engineering crew to repair or improve the power of the ship? LaForge always seems to find something to help Picard et al beat the bad guys

Don't forget the photon torpedoes!
Frankly, I'd rather have a galaxy class than a battlestar any day, unless you're talking about the remade series which I haven't seen so can't judge. I remember the original ones had no shields, just armour plates that deployed over viewports during battle. Still, I expect several waves of colonial vipers might cause some problems for most opposition...

[Doogie12]

You don't know how to make a good shield? You could simulate STARSTRUCK's invisible shields, but thats a little tricky (at least to me)...or you could simply save a screenshot of the same ship as one sprite, open it back up in shipmaker, aegis it, then save that as a screenshot, then put it into the ship and voila! you have a shield fitted to the ship. I did this with my guardian mechs in the BP.

[Bad Boy]

You don't know how to make a good shield? You could simulate STARSTRUCK's invisible shields, but thats a little tricky (at least to me)...or you could simply save a screenshot of the same ship as one sprite, open it back up in shipmaker, aegis it, then save that as a screenshot, then put it into the ship and voila! you have a shield fitted to the ship. I did this with my guardian mechs in the BP.

Dude:

The invisible aegis shields looked sooo much cooler but there is no real way to balance them to the sizes and numbers of ships I'll be releasing...

That being said, a directional shield (I assume that's what you mean by starstruck's invisible shields) might work well, although I don't know if it's the effect jwa wants (it's really not hard - shield section, aegis, driver pd or other gun)

Anyway jwa, I'm just posting to let you know that if you need any balance testing done before you release em (the usual, me knowing nothing about star trek applies), I'd be up for it; I should be able to make time for it. Needless to say I'm rather excited about it, it's been ages since something like this (ie. of this scale and actually well balanced) has been done.

[jwa8402]

Oh ya sorry for the confusion. I can do all the invisible shield or rotating shield stuff, and I can make an imprint of a ship which is how I did the cloak. I just doubt anything I can do would look better than TBE's shield, sans the stretching for big ships. If you think a plain bubble would look better I could do that but without the aegis reaction its rather blah. I may switch to the TBE shield thats just a ring...

@Badboy: Thanks, glad to know people are interested. I think I will take you up on that; I'm going to finish adding what I had planned to today then I'll shoot you a variety of ships. I've gotten 1on1 within the same class balanced, even between beams and projectiles to a lesser degree. I'm not sure how well smaller ships will do against larger ones though. I was aiming for a two or three to one ratio but still gotta test it...Doesn't help I usually work on this at like two in the morning One thing my results are pointing me toward is removing the pd on the ships with beam weapons since they always hit the other ship but much of the other ship's fire is intercepted...

@Son Tzu: Ya the notches are just part of the sprites I used, though I suppose I could fix that. Hadn't thought of a booster but if I haven't mentioned it, some ships will have special abilities. For example some ships will heal, others will have stun abilities. Andromeda will have a nova bomb(beam deviation 180 anyone?) the x304 can transport nukes onto other ships, the Prometheus has redundant shielding, you get the idea. I thought Galactica TOS had shields though...

[Bad Boy]

Send me a pm when you've got it finished. I'm kind busy, so don't expect a reply too soon (other than to tell you that I've got it or I'm testing it). But I will have something for you within 24 hours by the latest, almost certainly way sooner, and I'll try to make it good

[Son Tzu]

It's been that long since I've seen it I'm not sure anymore...
Believe it or not, I saw the original film when it first came out at the cinema. It got a bit overshadowed by star wars, most people ignored it, but I quite liked it. Just looked in the book (orig. film tie in, w/artwork), no help there. I have an image in my head of Adama ordering the shields to be raised, then armoured shutters sliding over the bridge windows. Maybe the TV series did have some kind of energy shield and I just blanked it out. I tend to do that when people massacre continuity with their re-writes.

[jwa8402]

@Son Tzu: Ya I think your right. They seem to have some energy fields like for holding in atmosphere but no bubble shields for sure. Awesome that you got to see the original, I grew up watching the marathons.

@Bad Boy: *tried to send in pm but having trouble uploading them.
Sorry for the delay its been a heck of a week! I appreciate you taking the time to look at these. Besides the main balancing needing some work, alot of them are in various states of completion as it takes awhile to add a new feature or stat to the whole fleet once I think of it. For instance the shields will probably look more like whats on the sovereign but I haven't gone through and done that yet so their still ugly stretched and weird colors. Also ignore the speed settings and such, haven't touched those because I figured thats easiest to balance. In quite a few cases, I've modified the weapon damage/clip size but not its base characteristics like speed or bullet sprite to match the ship using it.

I included a variety of ships; tried to get some I haven't posted as well. I certainly don't expect you to do anything to all of them though. I don't have my balance sheet on this computer but some of the ships weapons are labeled(another refit I need to complete). Basically theres small cannons, large cannons, phasers, and super beams. Again not sure if all of them are up to this because I'm dealing with alot right now but they seemed to be somewhat even in small scale battles. May need to be drastically changed though and I'd be fine with that. Anyway, end of rant, have fun and let me know if there are any serious problems like missing sprites.

Got midterms this next week so may not get back to this much till after that.