[REQ]Stars in Shadow - Shipset

[Seraph86]

there seems to be a new MoO2 indie-clone in developement which looks kinda nice and all but i am more interested in the ship graphics which look REALLY good. sadly i have no experience in modding whatsoever. is anybody able to make a shipset out of the ship graphics? they are all 2D and on the bottom of the following page under "finished artwork" are the ship arts already nicely sorted out and all:

http://stars-in-shadow.com/media_gallery.html#screenshots

...if nobody is able / willing to help a fellow DW:U-gamer then can i have some recommendations to how to do it myself?

thx in advance!

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Edit: my main intention is to get the human shipset (see attachment).

[ardonquen]

Oh wow, those are pretty neat.

It should actually be quite easy to do. You'd just need to carefully cut them out in an image manipulator (GIMP is free, but Photoshop is better) and then make a few minor changes to make them suitable for Distant Worlds.
All of Distant Worlds' assets are PNG files, so it would be easy to get them working with the game. I mean, in theory.

The only problem I see is that there's some jpeg compression fuzziness around their outlines, but that shouldn't be too difficult to deal with.

You'd prolly end up with something like this:
http://i.imgur.com/GdeggY9.png

But you'd want to make it less messy than my quick attempt. I've also noticed that not all of the weapon hardpoints have... weapons in them, so you might want to fix that up as well. Also stretching those images into a full set might be difficult without more extensive editing, but you could cut corners by having all bases use the same graphic, having all sizes of freighter use the same graphic... that kind of thing.

Check pages 16 and 17 of the modding guide for more info!

[Seraph86]

i said over an hour on one ship and only got this result:
http://www.pic-upload.de/view-27868838/human_freighter.png.html

am bad with graphic programs, your "messy quick attempt" is miles ahead of me^^.

tried it with the sorcerer wand or how its called in gimp or paint.net, but i have 0 experience with those programs and am bad at drawing general so i am really gonna grind my teeth out here.

but the ship graphics look so nice^^.

[ardonquen]

Yes, the wand tool can be a pain to set up correctly. You can usually get it to work successfully by playing around with the tolerance, but sometimes you have to just cut them out manually with a polygonal lasso tool. Fortunately you don't have to be perfect at cutting them out, since you'll be downscaling the images once you're finished with them. The maximum I've seen is 500x500, but the guide recommends a maximum of 300x300.

Hm, I might see if I can do a of these when I get the time!

[Seraph86]

trying my best right now, it just takes ages for me cause i am working with such a tool the first time and my personal capabilities and quite slim^^. i am even struggling with the eraser tool T.T.

Edit: my interest lies mostly in the human ones. regarding a starbase / station, there is one in the outpost file (s. attachment). currently i am trying to do some stuff myself. currently i am struggling with the resizing & centering of the graphic files. with the wand i already got most of the background gone.

[Japhet]

Orthin ship set:

[Seraph86]

ORIGINAL: Japhet

Orthin ship set:

wow thx, in my attempt to do it i completely f*cked up and some ship textures got deleted -.-.

[Sirian]

There is an easier way to do it.

Buy the game (actually preorder the beta) and play it. (Yes, really, it doesn't work else) Then go to the Stars in Shadow\ArtCache\Ships directory and all the images are there, already cropped, in different resolutions, even in different colors. Since its a *cache* you need the game to create these images first by playing it.

Regards, Sirian

[Seraph86]

ORIGINAL: Sirian

There is an easier way to do it.

Buy the game (actually preorder the beta) and play it. (Yes, really, it doesn't work else) Then go to the Stars in Shadow\ArtCache\Ships directory and all the images are there, already cropped, in different resolutions, even in different colors. Since its a *cache* you need the game to create these images first by playing it.

Regards, Sirian

DW:U kinda spoiled me with 4x spacegames, i know that i would play it for 1-2 hours or so and then drop it for DW:U. so no real reason to buy it just for some 2D art which can be cut out of some high res screenshots which i saved on my HDD from their website.