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jwa8402 · Post by **jwa8402** » Thu Apr 16, 2009 12:43 pm

Have you ever wished one of your ships could jump in and crack hulls in a famous space battle? Did you miss out on the Battle of Cortese? Well heres your chance to send your ship to the stars!*queue corny flash Gordan music*

As part of a larger project, I've constructed a working solar system, and by working I mean the final version is relatively to scale in so far as shipmaker and the content allows, and all planets properly orbit the sun. Thats the backdrop. Oh there will be plenty of my own details like space stations orbiting the planets and some special treats, but the theme of this project is space opera, and you my friends are the B-list cameo guest appearances!

All I require are two things. One is ships, or rather permission to use them. I'm going to create epic space battles within this system, and while plenty of my creations will be in there, I would like submissions with implied permission to include your best ships in my creation. This is an extension of the ultimate crossover.I'll need a quality screenshot at default(or whatever captures the whole ship) zoom, on a black or in game star background. No grid please. While I can't guarentee I'll use your ships, it will be a large battle so I'll do my best.

The second is ideas. What can I cram into this solar system? Moira creating a wormhole? Ringworld? Battlestar Galactica leading it's lonely fleet of humanity right past earth because they have no windows in their bridge? Although I want ideas from pop culture for street cred, the end result would ideally sum up battleships forever so start thinking what it means to you. It will all be shaped by your imaginations(with a few rough kicks from me) but it will unquestionably be unlike anything created with shipmaker!

Just for clarification, this is all in one .shp file. I will add screenshots of the detail as appropriate, and hopefully a gif of the overall rotation too. Right now I'm waiting on permission to use a few things so I can't show the newest screens.

Post by **Arcalane** » Thu Apr 16, 2009 8:07 pm

Sounds like someone's jealous they didn't come up with the metagame first.

jwa8402 · Post by **jwa8402** » Thu Apr 16, 2009 10:39 pm

Sounds like someone didn't read...

How is this anything like the metagame? Its not an encounter, its not a tournament, its simply a montage of events. If you actually thought about what I said, its one ship file so the only 'fighting' is done by illusion within that. I'm more than capable of doing the whole thing by myself, but I realized that many of the things I wanted required permission from their creators. Thats the only purpose of this post so I'm sorry you misunderstood.

I'll put up images later today so it makes sense.

Slayer0019 · Post by **Slayer0019** » Thu Apr 16, 2009 11:16 pm

jwa8402 wrote:I'll put up images later today so it makes sense.

I hope you do, because it doesn't make a lot of sense at all.

Nutcase · Post by **Nutcase** » Thu Apr 16, 2009 11:28 pm

I think he's trying to make a ship that looks like a battle.

VNilla · Post by **VNilla** » Fri Apr 17, 2009 3:48 am

That's what I thought, too. But, a ship that looks like a whole solar system with battles and events and stuff inside it? Whoa. (He's nothing if not ambitious.)

Slayer0019 · Post by **Slayer0019** » Fri Apr 17, 2009 4:35 am

If that's his plan, I'd like to see how he's going to get it to shoot at itself.

VNilla · Post by **VNilla** » Fri Apr 17, 2009 4:42 am

Good point. Unless he uses a crapload of custom animated gifs as sections (which could be pretty cool if done right).

jwa8402 · Post by **jwa8402** » Fri Apr 17, 2009 11:39 pm

No gifs yet although thats a good idea and there likely will be. Haven't had as much time to really work on this as I thought, but here are a few rough examples I have worked on that I can show since they don't have other people's ships in them.

Most are incomplete, like the stock station by earth which will be fending off a alien attack. I mainly wanted to show the rough idea of how combat would look, and the movement overall. Most stuff, like the planets, isn't to scale yet as I'm just trying to see how everything fits. So far the whole thing runs without lag despite taking up almost all of shipmaker.

I still need to clean up the planet sprites, but they orbit the sun faster the closer they are to it, with moons orbiting the planets. The battles and events are mostly fixed in place, although the Colonial fleet will be moving slowly across the map.

For the hestia battle, picture two fleets of player ships with alot of different weapons flying back and forth, and plenty of good explosions, like the wolf 359 shots. Mind, those were done in five minutes to prove the concept to you guys since I wasn't planning to add combat effects yet, so the end result will look better.

Yes, there is weapons fire being exchanged. I need to brighten up the bullets.

Its obviously not meant to be an active battle. The end result will look like a gif, with a bunch of different events going on.

The original thought was to enter this in the beauty pagent under fan ships, with God as the original author

I imagined the process being more like the chainship, with everyone contributing to it, than any sort of metagame. I should probably just put this back in the closet since people don't seem to get it but it seemed like an interesting use of shipmaker to me.

BizzarreCoyote · Post by **BizzarreCoyote** » Sat Apr 18, 2009 12:14 am

Sounds awesome.

Question is, will it even be able to load in game? Or is this a strictly "in-SM" thing?

jwa8402 · Post by **jwa8402** » Sat Apr 18, 2009 12:22 am

It absolutely loads in game, though it takes a larger than 2000x2000 map to do it. I doubt the end product will have more than 500 sections. Glad you like it!

Post by **Arcalane** » Sat Apr 18, 2009 1:11 am

jwa8402 wrote:It absolutely loads in game, though it takes a larger than 2000x2000 map to do it. I doubt the end product will have more than 500 sections. Glad you like it!

Word of warning: GM can only run ~3000 lines of code per object, IIRC. An unarmed ship with ~200 sections has used just over half of that already. You'll be lucky to get it to load unless you combine it into a few very large custom sections.

VNilla · Post by **VNilla** » Sat Apr 18, 2009 3:43 am

Arca: I would guess that if he actually finishes the project, he would compress it all into one huge mondo-normous GIF, or at least I would. But depending on the size/length of the animation, that could very well kill some computers.

jwa: LOL at Enterprise (-D?) and Borg fighting. +10 Trekkie Points for you. (Also, nice Battlestation near Earth; looks like Fleet HQ from the campaign missions. You could have a Peitho Deflector milling around Earth for added effect.)

Suggestions:
*a small white dot entering the system and crashing to earth (Mork's egg from Mork and Mindy)
*occasional shooting stars (maybe?) or Halley's Comet (must swing around sun to fling out of the system)
*The Apophis meteor getting really close to Earth, then getting nuked to bits by the planetary defense systems and/or the Battletation
*Pirates and Nanz from campaign mode
*solar flares (maybe?)

Exethalion · Post by **Exethalion** » Sat Apr 18, 2009 5:45 am

This looks very interesting. Certainly something which hasn't been done before. I'm crap on innovative ideas and shipmaking so I'm afraid I can't contribute but I shall be keeping an eye on it.

Deltaflyer · Post by **Deltaflyer** » Sat Apr 18, 2009 6:04 am

Yes, Vnilla, that would be the Enterprise-D. Although, seeing as it appears to be alone, I cannot foresee it winning. EVER.

On-topic: Jwa8, if this actually works, I will be in absoulute awe.