need help making player ship graphics.

[steelwing]

2003 I went to edit pictures, colour ,then I put the saturation and hue down until it was as white as possible then I pressed the enhance colour button and it said click on the picture were it must have white so I clicked on the coloured ship and they all turned white (it may take a bit of fiddling to get it right) I did it with png and bmp sprit sheets rendered with wolfys sprit sheet generator.

Nice.

[andrewpen]

Cool! Reminds me of the graphics style of Oolite.

you are right, i didn't realise untill you mentioned it.

[andrewpen]

I actually took a cone and flatted it, pulled its sides out to make wings and put 2 cylinders in the back for engines. the simplst shapes can make fairly good ships (for a first timer). here take a look at the current work done on the ship.

[steelwing]

Cool! As you progress more, you'll want to render 40 facings, rather than 20. 40 is the standard for playerships.

[andrewpen]

I do have the 40 facings but I don't know how to code the ship so that it works with them.

[steelwing]

I do have the 40 facings but I don't know how to code the ship so that it works with them.

As far as I know there's no difference in code. This is the line of XML in my playership that tells Trans how to use my spritesheet:

Code: Select all

<Image imageID="&rsStarPhoenix;" imageX="0" imageY="0" imageWidth="70" imageHeight="70" imageFrameCount="0" imageTicksPerFrame="0"/>

imageWidth and imageHeight tell Trans how wide and tall each sprite is. ImageX/Y tell Trans where to start counting sprites from. The only thing you have to do different is to render twice as many facings and then stitch them together just as you did the original 20. With the appropriate mask, of course.

[andrewpen]

The only problem with that is that my ship is being turns all wrong and doesn't fly forward when I open the thrusters

[Star Weaver]

You also need to add rotationCount to the ship's setting block; here's what it looks like in one of George's playerships for example:

Code: Select all

<ShipClass UNID="&scSapphirePlayer;"
    manufacturer=   "Zubrin Systems"
    class=        "Sapphire"
    type=       "yacht"
    score=        "95"

    mass=       "30"
    reactorPower=   "150"
    fuelCapacity=   "37500"
    cargoSpace=     "50"
    thrust=       "150"
    rotationCount=    "40" <!-- This line here! -Weaver -->
    maneuver=     "2"
    maxSpeed=     "20"

    maxArmor=     "6000"
    maxCargoSpace=    "150"
    maxDevices=     "8"

    leavesWreck=    "30"
    
    attributes=     ""
    >

  <Armor>
    <ArmorSection start="315" span="90" armorID="&itReactiveArmor;" areaSet="0,2" />
  .
  .
  .
</ShipClass>

(The order of lines within <ShipClass ... > dosen't matter, just to be clear)

If not set rotationCount defaults to 20 and thus only uses the first half of your image and does stuff like make you look like you're pointing right when the game thinks you're pointing down ...

[andrewpen]

Thanks starweaver I notice that after I sent my last post with snooping around in that code trying to work out how to get custom hud graphics