ships anyone

I'm checking them out right now.

The link for the ST Heavy Cruisers appears to be dead, however.

~SDC~

link for the heavy cruiser fixed

~SDC~

Overall I think they are really good. You asked for feedback though, so there are a couple of issues with them.

Dune Dreadnought:
- No model when it is in orbit.
- No picture when you click on the "?" button when perusing a planet's build queue.
- The angle of the ship when travelling pointing in the "1" direction (lower left) is a little off. It looks like it is side-slipping.

Star Trek Heavy Cruisers:
- No picture when you click on the "?" button when perusing a planet's build queue.
- Images look a little blurry. I'm no graphic artist so I don't know what the proper term is, but they look a little blurry, like the resolution isn't right.

I really like the way the ST CAs rotate in 3D when you move them around, though.

Keep up the great work! I hope to see more of your efforts.

~SDC~

Being in the middle of a ship project myself I can attest at how difficult it is to make ships (and make them work right)!

Here's a couple of things for future ship designers to be aware of:

Blurry ships - the ship rotater sucks. Sorry, but it's true. Beleieve me it is MUCH better than rotating and filmstripping by hand, but becuase it only works with 8bit .bmps it completely SLAUGHTERS the ship image and makes it looks very blurry.

I spent a great deal of time using photoshop to rotate ships for me in each of teh cardinal directions and pasted them over the blurry ship images on my filmstrips... frustrating, but the only way I could find to make the ships look semi-decent.

I feel for the original artists... they obviously had a lot of work on thier hands to create 125+ unique ships...

Missing images - if you want to have an image for the planet build list AND the ship info panel (when you click on the ? butoon) you need to make a 120x120 32 bit .tga file named shipname_Icon.tga where shipname is the very same name as what you calle dthe main ship sprite/filmstrip. If you want an orbital icon it has to be a 24x24 32 bit .tga file named shipname_Icon24Trans.tga (note that Icon and Trans are CaSe SensiTive)

But wait! It gets better!

If you name your ship an existing ship name like say 1Ship01 (which is the Drengin Colony Ship) then when you put your file in the Gfx folder GalCiv gets confused and will randomly toss out images (no icon) or use the wrong image (orbital icon in planet build... or worse big icon in orbit slot!)

It creates all kinds of havoc...

Still when you get to see your hard work putting around the galaxy in the game it's all worth it

Good job turgotZ! Hope to see more ships by you! How about a whole line of Star Trek ships... muwahaha

thanx for the interest and comments.when i get time i'm going to go back and tackle the icon and blurry issues. aleast now i now why half the time i would get non functional icons. Case sensitive, hadn't considered that. thanx

~SDC~

Hi all

Just redid my Enterprise class cruiser model v1.1 which can be dowloaded at http://www.geocities.com/guildshand/
Fixed the blurry issue, but still can not figure out how to get the '?' image to work.all the other icons and images work fine.
included in the zip is one sample .ship file,mld, and readme.

soon i will have the Miranda Class light cruiser ready to go

comments and suggestion appreciated

~SDC~

I sure would love to see the entire Star Trek ship list or Federation done, and all the aliens as well. I really am into doing a Star Trek/Deep Space Nine conversion for Galciv. What others have you done?
~SDC~ I could not help but notice you are hosted with Geocities.com if you are not paying you will experience bandwidth issues real soon. Especially if these ships and/or mod you seem heading toward becomes a hit. If you need space we can help you out just like we have for MadMaz and Devil Thrull. Just let me know.
[Message Edited]

Hey Thrull, if the ship rotator sucks so much, it should be fairly trivial for me to do a better one. I'll cobble together something tonight.

just a note
added CL+ Miranda Class for download

~SDC~

added CA+ Romulan Winged Defender

~SDC~

I just checked out your ships and they look nice. The changing perspective was a bit strange at first (north and south being overhead while everything else being side perspective) but after moving them around for a while, I think it works. It will certainly allow you to build ships that are more easily differentiated, since a lot of trek ships seem to look similar from an overhead view.

One thing that struck me is that something seems off when the ship is moving at 45'. At first, I thought perhaps the nacelles looked shorter, but since you used 3d models, the proportions are probably all consistent. Maybe it's just the camera angle that is different. I think I'm referring to the same thing that HawaiiFive-0 mentioned.

The only other suggestion I'd make is that you may want to consider future ship sizes now. Fortunately, with trek, most ships seem to be about the same size. But I'm hardly a trek expert, so that could be wrong. But if you plan to build Borg cubes or Romulan ships (those are bigger the feds, right?) you may want to get a consistent scale down now.

btw, all of the static icon images worked fine for me, and I only tried the fca and heavy model. Overall, nice work though. I'm glad to see some ship building going on

oh yeah, I agree with what Desert says. You should take him up on his offer and get away from geocities. No matter how good the web page is, once it goes through their crapifier, [shudder]
[Message Edited]

Man would that be great Dark Rain! I find rotating the ships and then trying to touch them up the most time consuming and boring part of ship design!

So, Thrull, what kind of ships are you working on?

thanx for the comments and interest

as of this evening i have finished something far more important then a few ships. i have now a working photoshop action script that will take 32 tga images and manipulate them to one flimstrip tga.so the tedious rotating mentioned by Thrull need not affect my carpal tunnel anylonger. now the entire process takes 1 minute.

Dark Rain making a improved ship rotating tool is a greast idea. the one thing i would like to suggest is, if possible, make the app capable of using a single image file or multiple image files.

Desert i do appreciated your offer of an alternative to geocites.what did you have in mind?

~SDC~

added Kca+ Klingon K't'inga http://www.geocities.com/guildshand/galciv.htm

~SDC~

What do you mean multiple images files? You mean for animated ships?

Well that would be really great, but unfortunately I don't have a way to output to 32 files so I'm really looking for an improved ship rotater program (like Dark Rain suggested)

Not to say that your photoshop action wouldn't be much appreciated by others!:D Just that I personally don't have a 3D app or anything that can output to 32 seperate images... maybe I could write a photoshop action of my own to rotate an image in 32 directiosn and then save each .tga then use YOUR photoshop action to stitch them all together into a filmstrip. Now that would definately have helped me!

Hey MadMaz, welp right now I'm not... my time is all eaten up. I'm revisiting a complete mod project (Galactic UNCIVIL-izations) and trying to get that to the point where I can get some beta testers to try it out for me.

I would like to do more ships, but a lack of time and a good 3D application prevent me from doing anything creative. Plus making a full 27 ship set from scratch is pretty intensive!

Seeing as Star Wars and Star Trek are being done (I'm sure somebody must be doing B5 as well) I'm not sure what I would do... maybe the Moo 2 ships???

Can't think of a good sci-fi source that has lots of ships to plunder right now heh

Since his animations aren't all from the same perspective, i.e. they can't be rotated in 2d, I think he was saying that he'd like an option that would allow one to leave out the rotating part and just take 32 image files and stitch them together into a filmstip. But I don't think that's too important (even to him since he's already found his own way to do it quickly.)

To be honest, I think both tasks are very easy to do using photoshop actions. A rotator might be a time-saver for a few people, but I think the library editor would have a much more interesting impact. People could then do cool things like brand new firing animations (trek phaser, sw blasters anyone?), new starbase graphics (death stars, ds9-like) or re-skinned interfaces. just my opinion though...

I wouldn't be so optimisitic about all those things being checked off the list. I highly doubt that anybody is working on B5. Even though there was a whole thread on it, nobody in there seems interested in actually implementing it. As for trek, one thing you can say about that "universe" is that there are more than enough ships to share. I'm sure there are at least 10 races each of which has enough unique ships to make their own model set. That's enough ships for 2 total conversions

as for what i meant by multiple file, MadMaz is quite right.sorry for being vague.if it where possible it would give those with out high end graphics app more options.but as it stand any replacement for the existing ship rotating tool is greatly needed and appreciated.

as for ships added
Babylon5 White Star
Tng CL Intrepid
TNG Fdn Galaxy
http://www.geocities.com/guildshand/galciv

Well I finished it right now. There's one little problem : the server where my website is seems to be having technical difficulties. Lots of hosted sites arent working etc. I'm going to look for somewhere else to post it if the issue isnt resolved soon.

Could you clarify? Which utility did you finish, the ship rotator or the library editor?

Ship rotator. It's has a couple of nice features :

Accept JPEG, PNG, TGA, PCX and BMP files as input.
Output the result to PNG, TGA, PCX and BMP.

Background color auto detection for filling the spaces left by the rotation. Of course you can still set a color of your choice.

Like the SF util, you can also set the number of frames for your animations.

etc

Website is still down ;(.