WYRDYSM GAMES

Hello all!

Inspired by the Metagame going on at this forum, i am getting some friends together to play a by email game of the same idea.

However, i have one problem. I am relatively new to shipbuilding and I cannot seem to make fighters that I find appropriatley sized. The smallest fighter ship i have made was around 30 in size, simply because of the core.

Is there any way to make custom cores, or to make cores smaller?

My fighter right now uses the civilian core. Is there anyway i could get it smaller without significantly sacrificing looks?

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Sorry, no custom cores, though you can shrink cores the same way you would shrink a section.

You can also make a fighter from a single section, by making it in Paint or a similar program. Shrink the core, and place your fighter section over top. That lets you have a small core and keep it hidden, so it doesn't detract from the look.

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You can't shrink a core, can you?

In the edit tab, you can just change the coords.

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It's not my fault I can't take your post seriously.

Yeah, as far as I can tell, you cannot shrink a core.

*sigh*

You CAN resize a core.



Enlarged Core




Default size

My ass you can't change the size of a core.

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First off, I recommend using the civilian core because it doesn't have the giant blue dot that doesn't shrink(I/K). Second, its very simple to turn a ship into a single section fighter. Just create a bitmap that is completely black and set it as the background, then zoom in on what you have built till its as large as you want, and make a screenshot. You can then save this as a .png(must manually make it lowercase unless your using something like photoshop) and place it in your custom sections folder.

Once you've dragged it into shipmaker, you can add weapons, though if you want them to appear depthed you will have to add a placeholder section under the fighter sprite. I acutally recommend leaving some pieces(armor, weapon hardpoints, thrusters) off when you take the screenshot so its easier to add things later and it can be damaged. Since the sprite will be fairly large, I usually shrink it down to .05 since any smaller and you can't even see it ingame. Also want to change the thrusters to 25% thrust length and width.

Thus you get something like this:
Keep the original ship you took the screenshot of though so you can easily edit it if you made mistakes like I did on this one. Its actually 11 sections by the time you add on individual thrusters, armor, and weapon mounts. Good luck with yours!

*edit* In response to what wicky said, ya don't shrink it more than 9 times in either dimension, otherwise its not only invisible, but sometimes I can't get it to appear again!

In my experience the defence platform core is slightly better since it's a square, but either is fine since they both lack the blue core dot.



This is also a very, very good idea, otherwise you have to set fighter HP low lest they become very very tough for their size.

Another option is to do custom sprites for your fighters, similar to Blackhart's;



Either route works well, but I personally prefer fully custom-made sprites when it comes to fighters.

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Now, that is simply awesome!

Thanks very much for the tip, i never thought to use the hotkeys, I assumed that because you could not edit the size in the thing on the left, they could not be edited at all!

one other point is don't make the core too small, lest it become next to impossible to destroy the fighter once you've blown the sections off. Adding a thruster that sets the core's speed to 0 when the hull is destroyed is a simple way to stop the battlefield getting filled with minuscule highly-evasive but harmless specs.

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Terran Republic

HW2 Hiigaran Navy

Hmmm, have enough and you get pretty good chaff.

Can it be novel weapons time now?

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Actually an interesting idea. I haven't used flares, but they attack the attention of point defense, right? So if you made a bunch of 1section ships using a ship deployer, that would probably distract the enemy weapons without producing too much lag. The min/max targeting still doesn't work, right? Hmm, I'm gonna have to play with this... though im sure someone already has tried it.

You do realize that only missiles would be affect by chaff, right? Because no targeting computer of a kinetic/energy cannon would be fooled by mere chaff. And no gunner would allow his guns to shoot at chaff for more than negative 5 seconds. Chaff works best on the tiny compressed brains of missiles.

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Yeah, but it's tough chaff.

Unlike the flare, it absorbs some damage before being vaporized. It would be nearly unaffected by low powered lasers.

It would be like sending out patches of small asteroids. Probably a gif of the chaff would surround a central magnet.

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